Goodbye, Babe.

I have journaled my entire literate life.

I recently found one of my earliest journals amidst other childhood memorabilia and most entries consisted of one sentence describing what I did that day. I went to school. Jenna made me laugh. My dog died. You know, that type of thing. Most of it is hard to decrypt unless you typically read kindergarten phonetics.

But as I grew older and my stack of journals grew higher, the content greatly changed. High-school crushes and rebellion, heart break and friendships,  jetting half way across the world for Bible-school and meeting the love of my life, the dips and hills of finding yourself in this entirely broken world.

The thing about journals is that they’re typically private. Even the thought of someone opening the cover to your innermost thoughts and feelings makes you want to curl up and die. That’s where journals and blogs differ, at least for me. My journal is the free-run hopes and dreams, challenges and struggles, prayers and pleas that I can use to learn from, grieve in, laugh at. My blog is the cumulative learnings, ideas and passions that were beaten, trod over and pondered for years within those cherished journal pages.

Today, I am making an exception.

Today, I am not pre-thinking, pre-learning, pre-conceiving. Today I am raw. Today I hurt. Today my private thoughts are yours and I hope you’ll treat them with care.

A week ago I lost my baby. 

How do you describe such horrible loss? The feelings inside are bigger than any I’ve felt before, the thoughts too big, the fears too fierce.

How do you explain this deep set grief for someone you never met, something you only knew about for 10 days? How does something the size of a sesame seed latch itself to your heart and feel like it took half of it with them when they slipped away?

You can’t.

Because to me, this was a baby we had hoped and prayed for. This was a brother or sister to our little man, this was a pregnancy we were excited to share with our friends, another step to building our family. To me, that baby was months of trying, years of hoping, a lifetime of dreaming.

And yet I feel so stupid. Because to the “world” this was hardly a pregnancy. It was a statistic. A motion. 5 weeks and 4 days is nothing. But to me, it was everything. It was one step closer to being 5 weeks 5 days, 5 weeks 6 days, 6 weeks. I feel dumb for hoping even when I knew there was no way this little life could be retained. I feel ridiculous for crying over something my doctor told me was a risk right from the start. I knew it was a risk. Every single day of every single woman’s pregnancy that risk is feared. It can hang over your head like a deep, dark cloud . 15-20% off all pregnancies end in miscarriage, so they say. If you do the math, 80-85% don’t. I desperately wanted to be in that 80-85%. But I wasn’t. And it hurts. I feel horrible for responding so cheerfully when my doctor asked me how I was taking the news. “I’m okay!” Okay? This was my worst fear being confirmed and I said okay with a smile?

What hurts even more is feeling so isolated. Not because I don’t have caring family and friends; I am so incredibly blessed by my people. But it hurts so much when you feel like you can’t reach out to them not because they’d fail to be compassionate, but because you are so numb. So confused. So afraid. Because I so fiercely hoped that despite what was going on, that I’d still get to call them and tell them I was pregnant.Because I feel so desperately scared of what comes next. Because there’s this wretched part of me that feels like I’m throwing myself a pity party. Because I feel like such a terrible person because of what I’ve become this last week. The pain is so great and my toddler’s whining so endless that I made him cry by yelling at him. I snapped. At a two year old. I feel like a dark cloud in our house and I desperately want the dam to break loose so that the sun can shine again.

The damn dam won’t break.

Maybe it will never be quite as bright. I hope it will.

And there’s this part of me that is so incredibly sorry. So sorry for all the women in my life who have gone through this before me. So sorry for my lack of care. My lack of compassion. My lack of understanding. I didn’t know how this punched you in the gut. How it left you on the curb, bleeding and in physical pain, but that the emotional pain was what hurt the most. You could feel it; your heart breaking.  I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like mentally, emotionally OR physically. I didn’t want to imagine.

I wish that people would more openly talk about miscarriage. It seems so hush, hush and that, in part, is what is so scary. Because you don’t know what to expect. You have no one to prepare the way. You don’t know what’s coming next, or if what you are experiencing is normal. You don’t typically post on Facebook like you do when your most beloved family member passes on. You just. Are…. Alone. Wishing that someone would tell you that despite losing this precious little life that everything else that you’re experiencing is to be expected. That it’s okay to grieve. That it’s okay to love something as tiny as a sesame seed with your whole heart and it’s okay that even if you only knew for one day or ten days that this pregnancy mattered. This life mattered. That it actually happened. That even though you have nothing to show for it; No tummy, no pictures, no announcements, that it did happen.

It’s okay to hurt.

Because that little life was a part of you, the moment it was conceived.

So goodbye, babe.

You mattered. You were hoped for. You were loved so fiercely. I’m so incredibly blessed to have had you for 5 weeks and 4 days.