"When You Lose Something You Cannot Replace"

“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”

Voltaire

I am pregnant.

That may be news to you, or you may have already known.

I have been pregnant before.

That will be news to the vast majority of people.

I have been pregnant twice before. This is my third time.

Life is not always straightforward. And not always wonderful. But I expect that will not be news to anyone. I expect you have all been there before, in one way or another.

Miscarriage is a silent grief. My pregnancies were still a secret between my husband and I when they came to abrupt ends. The first was over a year ago now. The pregnancy was unexpected, although not unwanted. And its end brought me disappointment I had not seen coming. It opened a hole in a place inside me I hadn’t known existed. It brought an ache and an emptiness. 

The second pregnancy was planned and infused with excitement from before its beginning. It was Christmas: a season of gathered family, gifts kept secret until their major unveiling, and Jesus born as a baby. Everything around me heightened my excitement at the secret we had inside me. I exchanged glances with my husband and the enjoyment of our shared secret was doubled.

In mid-January when the pregnancy ended it felt like it destroyed me. So much hope and joy and planning and dreaming… extinguished.

When the physical pain passed, I tried to return to my work. But I sat unmoving before my computer screen or notebook and my brain couldn’t form sentences, couldn’t find any words. I sat staring blankly at words on the pages of books trying to force myself to read them, understanding nothing. My brain could process only shock and pain and emptiness and grief. 

A month passed.

And then another.

And with that month came the knowledge that I was pregnant again. Intellectually, I was pleased. We had continued to try and so this was success. Emotionally though, I was extremely distanced. We humans are created with an almost supernatural resiliency within us. But with that comes a certain amount of instinctual safeguarding. I could not be excited again. I was excited before and the backlash of it ending had tried to kill me. My psyche would not allow a repeat experience. And I was grateful. I am grateful.

My growing child is loved and wanted and planned for and highly anticipated. Nothing about my experience detracts from any of those things. If anything, this child is more cherished because of what has passed before. The difficulties I have faced in trying to give this child life.

But the joy will come when my labour is complete, and not before.

Pregnancy is a different experience entirely when you know firsthand and intimately that it does not always result in a living child. 

The experience of losing children is life changing no matter how old the child. And my pain has shaped me.

Most profoundly though, I have been impacted by the silent nature of miscarriage and the grief that follows. It has changed the way I see people and their arrogance or vagueness, their rudeness or conceit. How many of them bear silent griefs? How many are vague because specific words will bring them to tears and they are tired of crying? How many appear rude because I have just unknowingly asked them a question that knifes down into an unhealable wound in their hearts?

I will now be very careful with my words in certain circumstances. I will never ask a pregnant women if she is excited. I will never tease a couple, young or old, about having children. I will never expect a woman to hold my baby and be glad. I understand that she may be happy for me, but have her heart too filled with pain to have her arms filled with someone else’s joy. I will never tell someone the loss of their child is part of a greater plan.

These are things I understand.

But how many kinds of pain are there in this world? I imagine an unknowable and uncountable number. How many careless words on some other topic will I speak and cause silent wounds to ache again? How many people will I and have I accidentally grieved? 

An unknowable and uncountable number, I imagine.

So just as I must learn to extend grace to those who have insensitive questions or expectations for me bringing pain to wounds they cannot see or understand, I have learned through this the importance of finding grace for the people I encounter who are rude or dismissive or don’t seem friendly. Because I know that when my hidden wounds have been struck by someone’s accidental or inappropriate prodding, I am rude, dismissive or come across as unfriendly. 

Now I understand that you can never know the reasons, the pain and experiences, behind someone’s eyes.

We judge reactions when we are ignorant of motives. We can never know what silent grief lies behind those unfriendly expressions, what unhealed wound we have driven our thoughtless words into, what kind of pain haunts that person’s life. Even if they explained it to us, we wouldn’t understand.

So please, all you aching hearts, find grace for us who wound you unthinkingly. We mean well, we just don’t understand.

And please, all you unthinking speakers, don’t judge our unfriendliness toward your jovial or irreverent remarks. There is a pain in our lives you cannot know, just as we can never fully know yours.

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”

– Wendy Mass, The Candymakers

Further Reading:

1. The Story I Will Keep On Telling: Why Talk About Miscarriage?
2. A Father's Perspective
3. What is Miscarriage? And what is Normal?