Goodbye My Darling

I woke up Monday morning knowing something was wrong. I didn't know what. I couldn't put my finger on it... but I could feel it. I went to the restroom, then I saw it.... blood. Old blood... so we assumed it was from the resolving hemorrhage. Then the cramping began. I got to work where I decided to look for a heartbeat on our little butterbean... and I couldn't see it. I called the doctor and went in on my lunch break for stat labs to be drawn... I never asked the results. On my way home that day I went by our other office where our good ultrasound machine is... Mike met me there and we scanned. There on the screen was our perfectly shaped baby... with it's perfect little head and body and arms and legs... but it wasn't moving. I could see it's perfect little heart... I could see that that perfect little heart was no longer beating for us.

When the nurse called with our blood results I told her what I had seen... then the labs no longer mattered. Our baby had gone to heaven.

We went to the doctor yesterday morning to confirm my findings... I have never wanted to be so wrong in my entire life. But the nightmare continued to unravel before our eyes. Our beautiful perfect third little angel.

I don't have any answers for you as to why this happened, our doctor was just as surprised as us. The ultrasound tech that did my scan cried... the doctor cried... no one can tell us why this has happened.

We were quickly scheduled for a D&C that afternoon. It would just be too traumatic to miscarry twin sacs with a  10 week fetus naturally. So we opted to have this procedure done.

I was, thankfully, knocked out for the procedure... it was at the same surgery center where we had our retrieval and our implantation. It did not take long... for those of you wanted to know more about this procedure please google it... the short story is they dilate your cervix and remove the contents of your uterus. Mike has been with me the entire time... minus the 30 minutes I was in the surgery room.

We are doing... okay. I say that carefully because while I am not deep in the depths of depression where I cannot face anyone... I am completely and utterly broken. I want my child. I want all of my children... and it just feels so wrong. I cannot even put into words the pain I feel in my heart right now. I can barely wrap my mind around what has happened. One minute I was deliriously happy and pregnant... and the next I am drowning in my worst nightmare. I just cannot believe we are here... again.

Please pray for us my friends.

I am on pelvic rest for a few days... no real activity, just a lot of sleeping and crying... and walking around the house some.

________________________________________________________________

My dear child,
Mommy and daddy don't understand why you had to leave us... maybe the desire to be with your siblings was just too much to pass up. We are so heartbroken without you here. They removed your little body yesterday and I've felt so empty since then. Mommy will be okay one day... I know we will be together again in Heaven. I hope you are having fun with your siblings... but I miss you so incredibly much... more than you could ever imagine. I will never stop loving you my child. I desperately do not want to have to tell you goodbye... but you are already gone. So I will just say, see you soon my love. I know you are safer with our Heavenly Father than you would ever be with us, but we wanted you SO BAD! I cry whenever I think of you... I just don't understand what happened, I tried my very best to take care of you and give you everything you needed, I am so sorry if I fell short of what you needed. There was never one second that I wasn't happy when you were with me. I will cherish that time together for the rest of my life. I miss you... I miss you so incredibly much.

God... please take care of my babies...

forever loving all three of you, our dear children...

mommy and daddy

This is What it Means to be Held

Held- Natalie Grant 

Two months is too little, they let him go
They had no sudden healing
To think that providence
Would take a child from his mother
While she prays, is appalling

Who told us we'd be rescued
What has changed and
Why should we be saved from nightmares
We're asking why this happens to us
Who have died to live, it's unfair

This is what it means to be held
How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was that when everything fell
We'd be held

This hand is bitterness
We want to taste it and
Let the hatred numb our sorrows
The wise hand opens slowly
To lilies of the valley and tomorrow

This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was that when everything fell
We'd be held

If hope if born of suffering
If this is only the beginning
Can we not wait for one hour
Watching for our Savior

This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was that when everything fell
We'd be held

 

When Mike and I were engaged I was asked to sing a "special" at church... You know the good ole' traditional southern baptist "special" where one person gets up and performs for the church before the message? I was asked by the music minister what I wanted to sing... I told him he should choose! (Translation... um I don't really listen to christian music so you just pick something and I'll learn it) So I did.

 

Fast Forward... it took me months to be able to listen to this song without breaking down into tears. The truth of it resonated with me... and I knew every word... "To think that providence would take a child from his mother while she prays is appalling" true story. Yes... we are asking why this happens... but what is the answer?

 

Do I believe it was God's will to take our child from us? No. (although I can name some "devout" people who would disagree with that)... BUT -- I DO believe that God used this situation in my life to bring good and glory to Him.

 

I was broken... I needed to be put back together. The question was how?

 

It happened one night before bed... I felt the call. God had been working on my heart... come to me... come to me and find peace... I was finally ready. I was ready to listen. I was ready to learn. I had become fascinated with Heaven. I knew that my child was there. I read every book I could find about people's experiences with heaven. (For example: Heaven is for Real, 90 Minutes in Heaven... etc) Mike, wanting to help and knowing the avid reader that I am, bought me several books on healing after a loss like we had suffered, but at that point the wounds were too tender. I would get 5 pages in and then break down, close the book and put it back on the shelf. But Heaven... yeah, that was something I could wrap my mind around. It was so comforting. MY child... born to heaven. In the arms of the great caretaker... if I died tomorrow would I join him? I wasn't so sure of the answer.

 

Prior to all this I would've said yeah, I'm going to heaven... but then I began to realize how lost I was. I was so uncertain. I had been saved and baptized at 13... I was 26 at the time of our loss, with my 27th birthday only a week after, but I was still an infant in my christian life... it was time to do something about that. First things first... I needed to verbalize the commitment.

 

So back to that night... I got down on my knees. I cried, I didn't have many words but somehow I knew God knew what was in my heart. I was being held... this IS what it is to be held, how it feels when the sacred is torn from your life... and you survive .... YOU SURVIVE ... if hope is born of suffering ... if the is only the beginning ... can we not wait? for one hour?! watching for our Savior? ... I was watching for our Savior. I needed a Savior. I needed him now...  not only now but every day. "God... please help me... please save me... I make this (re)commitment to you now, help me learn, help me grow... help me survive." And the promise was... when everything fell... we'd be held. Held by The Savior. Never leaving us. Never forsaking us. That is His promise. That is His promise to me and to you and to everyone you know. Whether you accept it or not. He is there, watching... waiting... and loving you every second of every day.

 

"I have said these things to you, that in Me you may have peace. In this world you will have tribulation; but take heart... for I have overcome the world." John 16:33

 

I was committed to following God. To trusting God. I had been through so much... and yet, I was about to really be tested on this recommitment... and my faith (though it was small at this point...) lucky for me, God didn't care how small my faith was, he was just happy I had some... "And He said to them, 'Because of your little faith, for truly I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you would say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you." Matthew 17:20. Have you ever seen a mustard seed?! It is TINY!! And that was the size of my faith at this time... I did not tell anyone about this recommitment for a while, it was even a while before I told my husband. It was personal. There were only two people that needed to know at that time, myself and God.

 

There's Beauty in the Breakdown... Isn't There?!?

Disclaimer: I'm going to begin this post by asking you to read with an open mind. For the people who have known me for a long time, you know how much I have changed and the kind of person I used to be, much of this will  not surprise you. For the people who only know the "new" me... well... I feel the need to be honest about who I was and what I went through in order to for you to understand how I learned to be the REAL me.

Let's take a step back for a moment...

... to the 21 days after our loss.
BUT FIRST: Here is a little background info about me:
Being 5'2" and spending most of my life 100 lbs soaking wet... most people say that I look sweet and innocent. BUT- I am not what you would call a naive person. I am not oblivious to the evil nature of this world we live in. Part of that comes from being the daughter of an officer. I was taught at an early age how to fend off an attacker, when activity looks suspicious, when to call for help, when to run and NOT TO TRUST ANYONE... unless you really know them. The other part of that comes from the things I have witnessed in this world. I know physical pain... in many different forms. I have witnessed violence. I have witnessed death, on more than one occasion. I have had my heart broken... again and again. I have caused broken hearts. I told people I was a Christian because I was "saved" at the age of 13, but I was not living the life. I thought I was living a "good enough" life. I did NOT do drugs. I drank, sometimes in excess. I cursed... a lot. I thought... "overall, I'm a good person... so that's enough right?" Ha. It hurts me to think about how oblivious I was to the life I was living. The only person who ever pushed me on this issue was Mike. He challenged me on my beliefs... and I hated it. He was right... and I would find out in time just how right he was about so much... but I'm jumping ahead of myself...

The Physical Breakdown

I knew what was happening. I was losing the baby. I knew the technical parts of it. I would bleed, I would pass the sac, I would bleed some more and then it would be over. That's it right? That's what happens? I was only 8 1/2 weeks pregnant. No one had prepared me for the torture my body would go through.
In the beginning it was just cramps slightly more severe than a period. Then I was given drugs to help "move things along". Never was I told by the doctor that I would experience contractions. Contractions?! Seriously? Isn't it bad enough that I have lost my child so early... but now I have to go through labor-like contractions!? Holy cow - the pain. It felt like I was being stabbed in the stomach. Over and over and over again. I would throw up over and over and over again. Seriously?! I've been throwing up for 8 weeks now and I still had to experience the pregnancy symptoms while I was losing our baby?! Yep. In the years prior, I had passed several kidney stones... that pain didn't compare to this. Those 12 days were pure hell. Relief finally came on that 12th day. When I passed the sac... in a bathroom... at work.
So this is the burial my baby gets huh? The same as when a kid's goldfish dies? Wow. This just gets better and better.

The Depression

After the initial shock of the miscarriage wore off... after we returned from Nashville. The depression set in. The realization that I would actually have to face everyone again... my friends... my family. It was torture. During a time like this you really learn who cares about you. I mean TRULY cares about you. Their response to a situation where there is no good response really gives you get insight to a person's true character. I got what I expected from my immediate family. They were so worried about me. They admitted they didn't know what to say, which was good because frankly neither did I. I only knew one person who had ever lost a child, my mammaw (she lost 2 actually, still births before my mom was born). I never heard from most of my extended family. No one else could put themselves in my position. I felt guilty that I was causing these people that I loved so much pain. I felt so much shame that I had lost my husband's child. I felt worthless. I felt lost. My friends reached out to me, they brought us food and flowers and offered support the best they knew how. The people at the church we had only visited maybe twice reached out to us through my friends. I couldn't understand how or why these people cared what happened to us when they did not even know us. (Those "people" would one day become our family. That part of the story is for another time.) My best friend even said the greatest thing anyone said to me at that time... "Maybe God decided that you and Mike made a pretty awesome angel that He wanted to keep for Himself. I like to think that's what happens". I still have a screenshot of that text message on my phone. I read it still... although at the time, I didn't fully believe it. If God loved me... why would he do that to me? What am I being punished for? Is this what I get for how I lived out my teenage years and early 20s? I hated myself. I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out again. I didn't want to make that post on facebook... telling the world that our child (and all our dreams for that child) were gone. But I had to... we had told so many people.
Let me tell you this... when a tragedy happens... EVERYONE has something to say about it. Even though most people mean well (most not all), people will always say things that will make you feel worse. Here are a few of those things:

• This is God's will. (REALLY? God's will was for my child to die? Thanks for that, you could have at least added an I'm sorry for your loss with that, but no)
• There was probably something wrong with the baby. (So... even if there was, my child deserved to die because they weren't perfect?!)
• Oh, you're young, it will happen. (Just because I'm "young" in your eyes, that makes my pain and my loss less significant?)
• I mean, it's not even a real baby until a certain point anyway. (Now this one came a few months after our loss but I think it is still worth mentioning here... I have no words for this one. Just a sharp stabbing pain in my heart that people actually believe this.)
• God wouldn't give you this if you couldn't handle it. (I will probably ruffle a few feathers with this one... but I have an explanation for this... and we will get into that more towards the end of this post)

Sad doesn't begin to cover what I was feeling. I was crushed. I cried repeatedly. I cried myself to sleep. I had nightmares. I would wake up crying. Then one night I broke down to my husband. Crying harder than I ever had in my entire life. I wanted to die. I told him that. I meant it. If this was the kind of world I was going to live in, I wanted no part of it. I was upset that he wasn't more upset. (Yes we had cried over our loss together, but he wasn't feeling it like I was... how could he? It was my fault right?) But seeing this part of me broke him. He held me. I sobbed. He shed tears. I sobbed harder. He WAS feeling it too, he just processed things differently than me. He was trying to be strong for me. I couldn't breathe. I didn't want to. He wanted to fix it... he wanted to take the pain away from me, but he couldn't. I wanted it to be over. I wanted it ALL to be over. If Kim was right and my baby was in Heaven, that's where I wanted to be too. Immediately.

The ANGER.

Anyone who knew me then, knows that anger was never something that was difficult for me. I was good at it. I could argue about anything. I was a fighter, and I would almost always win because I would fight until I was done and didn't care whether the other person was done or not. Part of me kind of enjoyed it, getting that kind of emotion out all at once. I would scream... I would yell... I would throw things. I would do anything I had to do to get MY point across...
Also... I was always the "fixer" of the group. If anyone had a problem (no matter how mild or serious) they would call me, I would think it over and devise a plan. I could fix any situation... whether it was to get them out of the situation, make the situation better/easier or anything... I could fix it. I would get things in action immediately whether it benefited me or not, I loved them so I would fix their problem. I was GREAT in a crisis. I could put emotion aside to see a problem for what it really was, looking at everything rationally, and fix it.
but I digress...

After a release of the tears, I felt better, for about 5 minutes. Then I got mad. I got madder. Then Mike went to spend some time with a friend. I was home alone and I was LIVID. I lashed out. I FREAKED out. I screamed at the top of my lungs... I think I might have even spit fire a few times. To whom? God. I was pissed. In that moment, I hated God. And, boy, did I let him know. I screamed until my throat was raw. Things like "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?" and "DON'T YOU KNOW ALL THE S**T I'VE GONE THROUGH IN MY LIFE ALREADY?" and "HOW CAN YOU GIVE BABIES TO PEOPLE ON DRUGS AND TEENAGERS AND ADULTERERS BUT YOU RIP MY BABY RIGHT OUT OF MY BODY" and more horrible things that I would never like to admit to myself... much less an audience. At the time I meant these things. I was BROKEN through and through. I was broken in a way that I never thought I could be broken.

I could not fix this situation. There was literally NOTHING I could do. I was LIVID over this fact. I let God know exactly how I felt. It was NOT pretty. This went on for hours. My best friend and my mother literally had to come pick me up out of the floor because I used all of my energy and had nothing left. Then I felt ashamed. Did I really just curse out loud to GOD?! For HOURS?!? Now what have I done. I was honestly surprised that lightening hadn't struck me down right then and there.

The Awakening

I slept that night, after the release of anger. Most of those nights had consisted of nightmares and tears and pain. But this particular night... it ended in peace. God spoke to me that night. (**GASP, maybe she really is crazy**... at least that is what I thought at the time.) His message was clear, though the words are hazy now, the message is STILL clear. "Child, you needed to get that out. Don't be ashamed... don't you know I can handle ANYTHING? It is okay to be angry, it is okay to be sad... I know you think I have abandoned you, but I'm here. I can take anything you need to give me." I woke up the next morning thinking I MUST have lost my mind if I thought God spoke to me... but there was no denying the peace I felt after that.

When I say I felt peace, I don't mean that everything after that was easy or perfect. It still hurt like hell. I still juggled depression with my daily life, and would for months. But, it was bearable. A girl I went to high school with reached out to me about her losses. She told me it was okay to feel what I was feeling. I had someone to share the burden with. I cherished this gift of friendship and sisterhood she had given me. That made it easier. Even more bearable. After my breakdowns, Mike opened up more often about his pain too. Even MORE bearable. Maybe I could survive this after all.

I began reading the book Heaven is for Real. If you've never read this... do it. Unexpectedly, I came to a chapter where the main character met his sister. A sister that he didn't know had existed. She was in heaven. She had been born to Heaven. His mother had lost this child when she was only 6 weeks pregnant. That was a concept that I desperately wanted to believe but was so unsure of. I felt like this was another sign from God. "I am The Great Caretaker, your child is in My arms." Maybe it was true... my child... born to heaven. A painfully beautiful thought. I was comforted so much by this idea. An idea that I would eventually come to realize as truth.

I was healing, but I had a long long way to go.

Ruffling some feathers...

"God will never give you more than you can handle." A beautiful thought. There is even a Christian pop song that says this "He said, I won't give you more, more than you can take and I might let you bend, but I won't let you break... and no oooooo I'll never ever let you go ooooo... don't you forget what he said" A beautiful song, but He never says that. It isn't true. Don't believe me? Show me the verse in the bible. It isn't there. (Don't get me wrong, I know this is said to bring comfort and peace to someone that is hurting, I don't think anyone ever says this with an ill will. People say this when they have no words but they want to help.) YES there are countless verses that are encouraging through hard times. There are countless verses about overcoming hard times. Let's be honest here... the Bible is not a fairy tale. It's honest. It's brutal. Above all... it's beautiful. He DOES say that he will never abandon you. He DOES say that He will work all things for HIS glory and our good. The saying should be, "God will never give you anything that HE can't handle." He is the creator of all things... He made man out of dust. He can handle your problem. And mine. I was broken. I was broken BEYOND what I thought could be broken. I NEEDED to be broken. I needed it so God could put me back together... properly. And that was a hard lesson to learn. Sometimes things need to be broken down, taken apart completely... so they can be put together the right way.

That's precisely what He is using our situation to do.



Stay tuned... this portion of the story is still just the beginning. I was not prepared for what would come next, but I was learning to trust God. I was skeptical. I was cautious. But I had taken the first step. The first step is always the hardest.