The story of a miscarriage: Charlotte

I wrote this post to share on a friend's pregnancy loss themed blog, but since writing it I feel God calling me to start writing again, on my own blog, and to post this here. This is a bit scary! I still hold this close to my heart but in faith I am taking a step out of the box/boat and putting this story out there for some of you to read. May God speak to and touch your heart.

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.

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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.