Last month I had a miscarriage. I was eleven and a half weeks pregnant with (according to the ultrasound technician) a six and a half week sized pregnancy. At nine and a half weeks my baby still looked like a tiny blob on screen. I don't know whether that blob had a face or a spine or a body or a heartbeat, or ever would have. For some reason at the time I felt there was never a heartbeat. It was just a little shape in a large black hole.
I later concluded that at some point my baby went from life
to death before there was even much sign of life. Yet god named her Charlotte
Hannah and showed my husband her wavy blonde toddler hair, and my friend her
'graceful, strong' womanhood. How does that even work?
Miscarriage is a heart-changing, heart-breaking, deep
reaching, intense thing. I never understood that before but now I really get
it. And I want to share my story. I want to give a voice to early miscarriage
because it is a silent suffering that society says we shouldn't share or
discuss, probably partly because it is uncomfortable. It is so often full of unknowns,
deep hurt, and the deeper questions. I also want to share a story of grappling
with faith. God has been teaching me a lot about faith.
* * *
I knew I was pregnant before I took a test. I had plenty of
signs and symptoms and at four weeks and two days I just knew. I felt total
peace about it, despite my physical health issues. God had brought us on a
journey of working through fears, letting go of control and trusting him with
the timing of a baby; that it would not happen too soon. Earlier this year someone
had shared a prophetic word with me that "pregnancy would bring me
healing". God had taken me on a hard journey for weeks of laying down my
expectation of being healed before having a baby, a baby I had been promised by
God years earlier. I had finally put it down about a week before our baby was
conceived. God's timing.
I remember that within the previous few days I had been in
tears longing for the little boy God had prepared my heart for and given me a
name for, months earlier. I had always wanted a baby girl first but late last
year I felt my heart shifting and I knew God was changing my heart for a boy. I
wasn't actually ready to be pregnant. I didn't want to get pregnant yet. But I
desperately wanted a baby. Now I woke up with a longing heart and I again said
"God I want my baby boy." God answered, "He is with you
already." I wondered if he meant that I was pregnant but I felt that he
said my little boy was in my heart. I loved him and he held a place with me.
I remember lying in the bath later that day and knowing that this baby was
a girl. But I was expecting a boy.
"This is the wrong baby," I thought.
The next morning I told my husband I thought the baby was a
girl. He said "I had a picture a few days ago that I didn't tell you
about." He’d had a vision randomly drop into his head of a toddler
playing. She had wavy blonde hair. Now we knew he had seen our child.
When I saw the positive pregnancy test that night, I felt
total peace. We both did. Peace that I hadn't expected us to feel. It felt
right, safe, joyful. God wrapped us in a warm fuzziness. We excitedly shared
the news with close friends. Yet I said straight away, "I think its fifty
percent likely to be a miscarriage." I didn't know the purpose of this
pregnancy. I knew God had created a baby, but it didn't seem like the right
timing and it wasn't a boy.
The next day I felt so fulfilled to finally be a mum that I thought,
“I don’t mind if I never get to hold this baby.” I just needed to be a mother.
I needed to have felt pregnant and carried life. Finally I was a mother.
Pretty soon people started to encourage me that I should
consider this a baby to keep and I started to believe them. I thought God was
encouraging me to have faith. I said "God tell me about my baby." I
saw a vision of rows of text and I knew they were death notices in the
newspaper. I thought God was promising a death notice - that when my baby died
it would have a real death notice. It would not be a miscarriage. I threw my
faith into that little vision. But that faith - faith in a positive end result
where I was holding a live baby- took my heart and mind into turmoil over God's
promises.
I didn’t feel very attached to my baby until much later on.
I was scared to let my heart return to wanting a little girl in case I lost
her. For a while I hated her because she wasn't my baby boy. It grieves me to
say that because now I love her so much that I would give anything.. my job, my
cat, my house, my friends.. I would give anything up to get her back. I hated
God too. I was mad. How could he take my heart from wanting a girl, to wanting
a boy, only to force me to go back to wanting a girl?! I mean, seriously! I was
so frustrated and confused and desperately trying to understand how all the
circumstances I was seeing could fit into the puzzle I had been constructing for
years based on the promises God had given me. But they just. Didn't. Fit. Not
if this baby was to be born.
I spent an afternoon sharing this with a friend and I realised
that God was calling me to trust him because He is God, not trust him based on
what he had promised. He was calling me to a new level of faith after years of
walking in faith of his promised healing and a promised baby. I repented and we
prayed. I felt the weight lift of trying to figure everything out and I found
peace in God's love. Then I had my first ultrasound.
Five days after praying with my friend, with my heart racing
and my stomach sinking, I stared at the screen. It wasn't meant to look like
that, I knew, I had seen YouTube videos.
"It's wrong. Something's wrong. He says it looks like 6
and half weeks but it can't be!" I texted my best friends and my mum while
walking back to the car.
I knew I was seven and a half weeks pregnant. I knew my
dates were correct. No one was worried though. Not the ultrasound guy, not my
friends, not my husband. Everyone had so much faith. I wanted to believe them
so I did. I stretched my faith muscles. But it didn't fit.
I spent so many minutes over the next week sitting on the
couch dragging little boxes around on google calendar trying to make a way for
the dates to be possible. "It doesn't matter, you don't need to know your
exact dates," said my husband. But I did need to know. I couldn't rest
until it made sense. Maybe God had made the dates really bizarre just to mess with
my control freak tendencies and teach me to trust Him. He could technically
make a baby when he wanted to, and have it implant when he wanted it to right? God is
God, right? I asked and asked God for a date, and grappling at straws I
eventually moved the "seven weeks pregnant" date about four days
later than it had been and settled with that.
I didn’t feel an urge to take vitamins and that lack of
urgency surprised me. I was expecting to feel a tug from God about their
importance but I didn't at all. I thought "Oh another sign that this might
be a miscarriage." I took the vitamins anyway.
I kept asking God what he wanted me to do about my job. A
late February/early March childbirth was the worst timing possible for my work.
And I needed a solution but God wasn't giving me one.
"Should I work
through the holidays?"
"No."
"But that's the only way around this!! What else can I
do?! Oh maybe the baby is going to be born in March and I can work in
February."
Problem tentatively solved in my mind. But it still didn't seem
quite right.
I had a baby items list. I started reorganising the house. I
contacted the midwives. I was fully preparing for a baby girl to be born into
our family. But I was tired and struggling. Tired of trying to trust. Tired of
trying to figure out. Tired of trying to let go. My controlling tendencies went
into full swing in every area of my life that wasn't to do with pregnancy,
because I couldn't control pregnancy. Suddenly I was pregnant and suddenly
everything I had expected and hoped for in God was topsy turvy. I felt so out
of control.
I was supposed to go to the doctor at 10am Friday morning at
nine and a half weeks pregnant, which the doctors were calling eight and a half
weeks pregnant and I had decided was exactly nine. (I'm laughing.) The appointment
had been booked four weeks earlier. I read the calendar time as 11am. Twice. At
10:30am my husband realised and we called to check the time. We were astounded
that my doctor, with a reputation for being way off schedule, had been running
on time and I had missed the appointment. We rescheduled for 12:40pm. Half an
hour after rescheduling, I saw blood and then the cramps came. If I had already
been to the doctor that morning I doubt I would have gone back.
By the time I saw the doctor I knew deep down that something
was wrong. I was scared, but I turned on my super faith again. I got a form for
an ultrasound and within an hour, still with no more bleeding, I had convinced
myself that this would be okay. God had
promised me a death notice in the paper for my baby, right? It wasn't going to
be a miscarriage. I had total peace and calm, a God given calm, on the way to
the ultrasound, expecting to finally see my baby with a heartbeat for the first
time. The picture came up and there was nothing but a small white shape, so
tiny that it was blurred and hard to understand. There was no baby.
I felt gutted but also okay, I felt shocked, but not
shocked, and I felt relieved. I think it sounded harsh and wrong when I told my
friend that I was relieved straight after the scan, but that was what I felt.
God's promises were true. Everything
finally made sense.
We went to a meeting that night. I soaked in the worship
playing from a CD, in sombre silence in the now much more comforting and
trustworthy arms of God. We went home. I was somewhat in shock - the stage of
grief where you reason and rationalise and you don't feel much. I knew that the
hard feelings were still to come.
I waited two weeks for the miscarriage. I am thankful for
the wait – the mental processing time – but I was scared (terrified) of ending
up in the hospital with an operation that my doctor said would not mix well with
my sensitivities to drugs.
I worked the first week of waiting because I needed to be
around the kids. I didn't work the second week because I had stopped feeling
pregnant and I needed to rest and give my body space to let go of the
pregnancy. I tried to push it along but nothing changed.
On Thursday evening I was completely freaking out about the
possibility of having to go to hospital. I know there was a group of people praying for me that evening, far away. Meanwhile, as I talked and prayed, I came
to a point where I suddenly had amazing peace.
It was peace that even if I went to hospital and had an operation or
drugs, I would be okay. I could trust God no matter what. I wasn’t afraid of
hospital anymore. I remember that being the most beautiful feeling; a rare
peace I have had glimpses of in the past years of difficult circumstances and
turmoil but that never stays around for long.
Within a couple of hours of finding that peace, the cramps I
had felt for two weeks got stronger. I didn’t know if I could sleep through
them, but I did. I am so thankful to have slept and to have had the miscarriage
in a dopey half asleep state. At 2am I woke up and knew that I wouldn’t be
going back to sleep. I love childbirth videos and I have watched many peaceful
labours. I have looked forward to and mentally prepared for my own labour long
before I was pregnant. I kneeled in bed, completely relaxing into the cramps
with my husband by my side and worship music playing. The pain was achy but so
gentle. I was so peaceful. I didn’t want to get away from the miscarriage, I
embraced it. I wanted it; the birthing process. I had said goodbye to my baby a
couple of days earlier and only then was I ready to let go.
We buried our baby in the garden in front of a bird of
paradise plant that randomly appeared last year. I never opened the gestational
sac. I felt it was right to have had an unseen baby, formed in the secret
place. I always believed that God had made the birds of paradise plant grow
there but I didn’t know why. It was a perfect little grave spot, in the corner
with a garden bed edged in stones.
A friend sent me flowers. She asked what type and I said “God will know.” They were beautiful white lilies just like in our wedding. She didn’t know about our wedding flowers. The flowers gave me so much peace. They reinforced to me that our baby was part of our love for each other.
Everything worked out so beautifully in the end. God held us through the whole process.
I didn’t know what the point of this writing would be but I
can see a theme running through of God’s faithfulness and our own faith in Him.
I grappled with promises versus circumstances but God proved faithful to his original
word. I grappled with my own fear versus trust and tried to put my trust in
flimsy signs or my own interpretation of God’s word. Sometimes we want so badly
for something to be true, but God has been calling me to higher truth; that He
is God and I am to trust him because He is God. Not because he said he will do
something in my life or on this date or in this way. He is calling me to let go
of reasoning, rationalisation and trying to work out what He is saying about
circumstances. He is calling me to just let go and have peace that he holds our
world in His hands. I am thankful for my baby and for this journey. I don’t
fully understand it but I am thankful.
