God Deserves a Knuckle Sandwich

We lost our baby.

Those words still seem so foreign to me. Still so new, so hard to pronounce I find myself writing them rather than speaking them. Instead of calling my dearest friends and family I wrote a mass email, similar to one that you get with a funny forward attached. Only this mass email contained only sadness, only my tears strewn across the keyboard as I wrote.

There’s no easy way to say it. Miscarriage. The word in itself pisses me off. As if I did something wrong, I carried it wrong, I MIScarried. If anything, I tried my hardest to protect this 10 week old fetus. I ate better, I avoided any movement that would affect my belly. I wouldn’t let my 100 lb dog on the couch with me anymore, I thought twice before wrestling with my 2 year old, I was a cautious carrier of my baby and yet, I miscarried.

I knew it would happen when I got so sick. As bad as I was feeling it tears me apart inside to think of my baby feeling that or even worse but flying to heaven on the wings of an unmistakable angel, there could be worse ways to go.

My husband asked how I was doing. I was surprised to hear myself say, “better than I expected”. In what world would I have expected this? How can you be better than expected when you weren’t expecting it in the first place? I found myself lying to him, and to others who asked. “How are you doing?” “Oh good,” I would answer as if there was a good way to answer that. I could feel how uncomfortable even the people who loved me most were about the subject. “I’m not okay!!!” I wanted to yell. How could I be okay with losing something I loved so much?

I’m not exactly sure when the miscarriage from hell will stop. I trust God will show me one day why I had to endure all this, perhaps He already has and I’ve just been to pissed off to see it. I asked my mom, who in a heinous twist of fate had a miscarriage her second pregnancy too, when the emotional pain stops. “Not until you get pregnant again, TL”. Only now do those words feel like some sort of sucker punch to the stomach since who knows if I’ll ever be able to get pregnant again.

What words do I have for other women who might have miscarried? Absolutely none. Again, my disdain for unwanted “advice” takes over and the only thing I could offer a woman who went through this truly miserable experience is a big hug and a few shared tears over babies only we truly felt. And you know what, maybe that’s enough. Maybe miscarriage is one cut that heals with hugs and tears. It couldn’t hurt to try.