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national pregnancy and infant loss remembrance day

miscarriage, national pregnancy and infant remembrance day

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Today is national pregnancy and infant loss remembrance day. I knew that I wanted to write about it but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. This morning, I heard the song that played as we drove to the hospital for my D & E ( A Thousand Years by Christina Perri). This week my professor assigned this video for my storytelling marketing class and suddenly, it all came flooding back like it was yesterday.

My miscarriage happened on May 1, 2012 but to me it feels like yesterday. I’m sure it’s like that for all moms. It’s a day that we never forget and a child that we think of daily, even when no one else remembers. Just because our children are not in our arms does not mean that they do not live on in our hearts forever. They do.

I would love to say that the pain of missing a lost baby or child gets easier but it doesn’t. It dissipates to a tolerable level of grief but it never goes away. There is always a void because something is missing; a huge part of ourselves, our child. I loved my baby from the first day I knew I was pregnant with him. I loved him as much and as deeply as I love Bella and Gabs, every bit as much.

It didn’t matter if I got to hold him or meet him, he was part of me. He grew inside of me for an entire trimester. He was endless possibilities and promises and then he was gone. Gone.

There was no medical explanation. He wasn’t sick. Everything was normal. He was perfect but his heart stopped beating and on that same day, in many ways, so did my own. I am not the same woman I was on April 30, 2012, and I will never be that woman again. When he died, so did a part of me. If you’re a mom who has experienced a pregnancy or child loss, you know exactly what I mean.

The news was so unexpected that we were completely blind-sighted. There was nothing I could do but cry. I have never felt so helpless, angry and sad in my entire life. There is no other pain like it and I can’t imagine a worse pain for a mother than losing a pregnancy or child. It felt like a betrayal, like the universe and my body cheated me and didn’t keep their end of the bargain. It felt like I was watching the whole thing from outside of my own body.

First, I was so overwhelmed with sadness and despair that I sobbed the most primal howling animalistic cry that I’d ever cried. The sound that emitted from my broken body and heart was pure grief. It was a loss greater than my own death because it was the loss of my baby. It completely broke me. I sobbed in bed for weeks trying to understand how to go on without my child.

Then, I went numb. Numb and quiet like the green sky before a tornado destroys everything in its sight. I had cried so much that I felt weak to my very soul. I became too tired and weary to fight my pain.

I looked into the face of my grief and gave myself over to my fate. I sank so far down into my despair that I thought I would never come out of it nor did I want to. Somehow, moving past it felt like disloyalty to the baby I lost but staying in it felt like a disservice to my daughters. 

So despite the hole in my heart, I lived each day looking for the light in my daughters’ faces. I forced myself to be there for them, even when I had to push myself back together and function in pain. Finally, one day, the pain became tolerable enough to live with.

There is nothing I can do to change what happened. I am not alone and there are so many women who observe national pregnancy and infant loss remembrance day because it is a day to honor the babies we loved and lost. I am writing about my pregnancy loss because it helps me process and it reminds others that my baby was here, he mattered and he is missed. It’s not a dirty secret and I didn’t do anything wrong. We need to remove the taboo of remembering the babies we lost and let moms speak freely about their experiences instead of holding all of that pain and grief inside alone.

Over the years, I’ve written many posts on my experience with my miscarriage. I will list them below:

The Truth about Life after Miscarriage

Surviving the Aftermath of Miscarriage

When a Tattoo Heals Your Heart

Some Things Change You Forever

Lost Baby

Chrissy Tiegen is Every Mother Who Suffered a Miscarriage

Why it’s so Important to Reflect on Loss and Grieve

A Thousand Years

The End of the World as We Know it

Lingering in Loss

An Unexpected Pregnancy at 40

Mommy, I want another Baby

The Worst Day of My Life

How to Survive the Loss of a Pregnancy

The Kindness of Strangers

A Sky Full of Paper Lanterns

I shouldn’t have Looked

For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn

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los, grief, national pregnancy and infant loss remembrance day

It’s been a crazy emotionally draining few weeks. The kind  that makes you take stock in who you are, where you are and what your life has become. Weeks that makes you stop and catch your breath and reassess what is important to you.

On Tuesday evening in casual conversation, I asked a my daughter’s ballet teacher when she was due. She said Thanksgiving and just like that, I was punched in the gut. Thanksgiving last year was my due date, this year I should have a one-year-old sitting on my lap. I don’t. It’s not fucking fair! I just want to collapse into a pool of snot and tears and cry until I can’t cry anymore.

It all started last week when the Big Guy and I were having a conversation about the big things in life, already happening. He feels like all the big things have already happened for us. He specifically mentioned our children and though he never said it, I felt that it was unspoken that maybe our loss was on his mind, even if he didn’t realize it. This made me sad because, I already blame myself and on some days the loss is too much to bear.

Then I had to take Bella to the hospital for passing out cold in my arms and for those split seconds I thought she was dead. I really did and my whole world exploded like a nuclear bomb went off and wiped me off the face of the earth. As I sat there in the emergency room waiting to hear the results, my mind went back to that moment on May 1st, 2012 when I sat on a stretcher waiting for them to wheel me back for my D & E. I remember seeing a mother holding her 18-month-old daughter on her lap as they awaited surgery for the child and I said to the Big Guy then, “At least I am not here with my sick child!”

I was thankful not to be sitting there with a sick Bella or Gabi waiting for them to be wheeled back to get surgery when in fact I was sitting there with my baby in my belly with no heartbeat. I had completely separated myself from the situation and that is how I’ve survived the loss. The Big Guy looked at me like I was crazy. I probably was but when I sat there with Bella on that Thursday morning, I felt more helpless and useless than I’ve ever felt before.

The baby that we lost has been on my mind a lot lately; practically daily. Maybe its because its fall and I know that the due date is right around the corner. Maybe it has something to do with seeing beautiful pregnant women everywhere I go. Maybe it has been triggered by the losses of my friends in the past few weeks. Or maybe I have still not yet let it go.

When I first lost our baby, I was terrified of ever feeling that pain again. I still am but every once in awhile I see a glimpse of what if? I allow myself to wonder. But I’m older now  and so are the girls and it feels like the gap is unsurmountable. That part of our life has been forcefully surrendered and I know I could not survive another loss. That I know for sure. It put me in a very dark place that I never want to revisit. But still it hurts, I don’t know if it will ever stop hurting; the loss of our unexpected blessing.

When will I stop marking time by events of loss? I feel like I am coping well and not dwelling on the sadness and then just as suddenly, my heart is in my throat and BOOM! emotional time bomb.

Maybe we should have tried for another baby. Maybe it would have helped take up some of the room in this hole in my heart and then I realize, no, you can’t fill that void. I just have to learn to live in my loss and not being able to give my daughter a little brother or sister. When will I stop feeling like I need to be still and hide on these annual occasions of conception, miscarriage and due date?

It’s all I have. I never got to hold my baby in my arms. I cling to these tiny milestones like they are my last breaths. When will I be able to exhale?

Our babies who have gone on to heaven may not be here in our arms but they are always in our hearts. During National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, please remember what we can never forget.

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