Motherhood After Miscarriage
BY : RACHEL LAWRENCE
“Is he your first?”
A common, innocuous question, but one that comes with a little pang of sadness every time I answer it. It’s the first thing well-meaning strangers wanted to know when I was pregnant, and again now that I have my son in my arms. “Yes,” I always answer, but it’s not the truth.
My husband and I were pretty much the last of our friends to get pregnant. We’d been married for almost 6 years before we felt ready to step into that season of life. When we found out I was pregnant in December 2021, we were so thrilled. It would have been the first grandchild on both sides, and Christmas that year was extra special as we got to share the news with our family, who were ecstatic of course!
When I was almost 12 weeks along, I started bleeding and cramping. An ultrasound in the emergency room confirmed that our baby had never made it past 6 weeks; my body just hadn’t realized until now. The weeks that followed were physically traumatic as my body struggled to pass our baby naturally, and I ended up needing a D&C five weeks later.
Once my body had finally healed, we began to try to move forward. Time does make things easier, but then there were so many random gut punches that would hit me out of nowhere. Every pregnancy announcement hurt. Seeing babies out and about hurt. Well-meaning people made comments that hurt.
“At least it was early.”
“Something was probably wrong with them.”
“It’s for the best, because you want a healthy baby.”
I struggled with not wanting our baby to be forgotten as others made pregnancy announcements with due dates around ours. I struggled with feeling forgotten as a mother. I had a baby, but I had nothing to show for it. We never even got to see him or her in an ultrasound. Never heard their heartbeat. They were real, but it almost felt like they weren’t. Nothing in our lives had changed…from the outside. It felt so hard and weird to grieve something that was never fully here.
We believed he was a boy, and we named him Robin as the robins were just arriving that February. We saw the first one of the season the day we got back from the emergency room.
I grieved the fact that none of my future pregnancies would be happy and carefree. Pregnancy after miscarriage can be terrifying, and when I saw that positive test four months later, it was hard to feel anything but fear. A healthy 8 week scan gave us hope, but unfortunately, this baby also left us too soon. We said goodbye to them in August, our second loss in 6 months.
As we waded through that grief again in the months that followed, we also searched for answers as to why my body was failing me in this way. I’ll skip ahead to tell you we eventually discovered that for some reason my progesterone doesn’t rise as it should when I’m pregnant. A simple daily supplement gave us our healthy baby boy who was born this past August.
Miscarriage is tragically common. When I chose to share my story, dozens of women told me about the babies they never got to hold either. It’s a club that no one wants to be in, but we’re the only ones who fully understand each other. The way that we always know in the back of our mind that family photos aren’t quite complete. The common questions about our families that are no longer simple to answer. The tension of knowing if we hadn’t lost their siblings, we wouldn’t have our earthside babies.
Tragedy has a way of stripping back what you actually believe about God. Our church was studying 1 Peter at the time we were going through this, and I remember crying with our small group trying to process through it all..the grappling many of us go through to understand that a good God allows bad things to happen.
I’ve heard some believers try to reconcile this and sum up the passage simply by saying things like, “yes we go through trials, BUT God uses it for good.” To me that feels like another way of tying a bow on suffering, because it’s an uncomfortable thing to sit in with someone. It’s almost this idea that it’s some kind of trade — yes this bad thing happened, but it’s okay because God will bring some good from it. Yes you lost your job, but you ended up getting a better one — see, that proves God is good! But if you’ve gone through loss you know that doesn’t add up, because there’s no “good” that could possibly make you say “oh yes, I’m glad that happened after all.”
I believe that His goodness has nothing to do with our ever changing circumstances in this short life, but I do think tragedy allows us to see God’s kindness and love in a different way. It’s not a “but”, it’s an “and.” Terrible things happen, and God shines light in the midst of it. He drew my husband and I closer. He allowed me to connect with and provide comfort to other women who have gone through this. He would still be a good God even if we were never able to have children — and in his love and kindness, he gave us our son, Marcus.
I am not the same person I was before my three babies. I am intimate with grief, and I have a longing for heaven that I never had before. That hope has brought me peace through the heartbreak, and the joy of raising my rainbow baby has healed parts of me I thought would be broken forever.
If you’re still waiting for your rainbow, I’m sending you so much love. I know how hard it is and how unfair it feels. I know Mother’s Day is going to be tough. Your baby made you a mother, and I’m sorry they aren’t here with you. It shouldn’t be this way.
When we were going through our losses, our friends and family surrounded us with so much love and care. They brought us meals, sent flowers and notes, made us gifts to commemorate our babies. They sat on facetime with me while I was dizzy from blood loss on the bathroom floor and just let me talk. Our long distance best friends even traveled in for my birthday two weeks after our second loss to love on me and mourn with us in person.
If you’re wondering how to support someone going through a miscarriage, don’t stress about finding the right thing to say or do, because there’s nothing that can fix it or tie it up in a neat little bow (just forget any sentence that starts with the phrase, “at least”). Just show up and be there for them. Many women find out they’re having a miscarriage before the physical process begins, and when it does, it is painful, drags on for days, and can sometimes end up with a trip to the hospital. Bring nourishing meals. Clean their house. Take care of their other kids. Postpartum is hard enough when you have a newborn to snuggle. When your arms are empty, it can feel unbearable.
Even once the worst is over, don’t be afraid to bring it up because you “don’t want to remind them” — trust me, they already think about their baby all the time. Check in with them on Mother’s Day. Ask when their due date was and set a reminder in your phone to send them flowers or a note on that day. Let them talk about their baby if they want to. Ask if they think of them as a boy or girl, if they chose a name, or have some symbol to represent them.
I wouldn’t have written this part of our story, and I’d never wish my babies away. I’m grateful for the months I got to carry them and celebrate them. I think of them with an achy smile when I see the robins and the hummingbirds come back every spring and summer. I’ll tell their baby brother about them as I wonder if they would have surprised us with blonde hair like he did. I’ll hold their memory in my heart until I get to hold them in my arms.
