Babies & Other Miscarried Hopes
This week it has been eight years since my first miscarriage. I found this out because of the strange relationship I have with my Facebook and its "On This Day" feature. On any given day, it will remind me of a mess of beautiful, mundane, and tragic events in my life's public history and then dictate them to me in a jarring contrast that makes me feel much older than my 36 years. It's like having the world's most insensitive and unaware friend who know you much too well and just won't stop talking.
For instance, this week, in an array of years past, I: went to an opera, got a new haircut, became Facebook friends with someone I still don't really know, posted a video of my then-toddler getting stuck on a chair, and had my first miscarriage.
I don't feel like I'm the best person to talk about miscarriage, mainly because I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about my own. I often forget about them. I envy those women who can speak beautifully and precisely and tragically about motherhood and their bodies. Many have courageously brought to light this commonplace and historically silent pain; when I come across their work, I suddenly recall my shared experience. But unlike their articulate accounts of grief or distress, my memory is accompanied by a strange feeling of dumbfoundedness and blank confusion. Not that I haven't grieved the loss of knowing those children or that they weren't entirely real, but that with each miscarriage, the weightiest losses have seemed to be the intangible ones.
By the time our daughter was four-years-old, she was dreaming about her future role as sister/mama bear/teacher/boss to this new family member we were expecting. She was ready and willing, and overqualified. My husband was excited, and I was just starting to come around to the face that parenthood was a thing we were actually REALLY doing now. (Our daughter was an unfairly easy first child, and we were able to just kind of fake parenthood for a few years.) And then we miscarried very early on in that pregnancy. Soon after, though, we become pregnant with our son and welcomed him, happy and healthy, just 11 months after this initial loss - - so the miscarriage just felt like some sort of strange blip on our timelines. But, I do remember it being the first time I ever had to reckon with my body really failing me. I come from a long line of hardy Scandinavian stock with bones that are seemingly unbreakable and relatives commonly living into their 90s. At 27, full of hope and youthful naivety about the future, I hadn't even considered the possibility of a pregnancy not coming to term. So, with this loss came a pause. An uncertainty about the fullness of life here. A brief brush with this veiled and quiet, shadow form of death.
Four years later and one month before we found out that my husband had stage 3 melanoma, we miscarried again. This pregnancy was further along. The experience was awful and traumatic, and very real. We had wanted a third for some time and were excited and ready. (The oldest, having completed her on-the-job training with her little brother, had agreed to take on another subject.) This miscarriage was invasive, disruptive, and shocking. I am grateful for friends who stepped in and very literally helped walk us through that night. Physically, it was one of the most vulnerable moments I've ever experienced. Emotionally and spiritually, it carried the weight of the significant loss. But even more viscerally, it felt like the start of a fight. A ruthless struggle to push back an enemy who had come out of the shadows and now met us nose to nose, face to face - - an unfair and fixed fight with death.
For the next three months, we made our way through my husband's diagnosis, treatments, surgeries. And after receiving fleeting news that - - hallelujah! - - all of his scans were clean, we decided to try again for baby #3. Why waste time when you had just cheated death? All we wanted was to shove back death far enough down the road to realize the future we had been able to picture so clearly; one more bouncing baby, a little more chaos, a little more laughter. But, life is a vapor. Ultimately, grief over that second miscarriage and any hopeful baby-making plans became quickly overshadowed by the loss of someone already present on earth, someone already alive and known and embraced. And in time, this miscarriage would become additionally confusing because there was relief tied to it. Had it been viable, I would have attended my husband's funeral with not only two small children, but a newborn. And what was lost in that short time was not only two lives, but any lingering hopeful notion that death was a far off and distant threat, or that if it came to visit, there was anything I could do about it.
And then about 18 months later - - after a funeral, after navigating single-parenting, after abandoning full-time homemaking for the working mom life, after falling in love again, after unexpected heart surgery, remarriage, and a newly-blending family - - there was the third miscarriage. This child had represented in so many different and literal ways, new life. Or more accurately, a new season of the same messy life, and with it, all the anticipated joy a most-likely chubby, blonde, 10 lb, Viking baby could bring. We had hoped.
For the uninitiated, grief is just a dressed-down version of sanctification, inviting you to sit down and lay it all on the table. So, once again, I took a seat. Consider mortality? Piece of cake. Long for the light on the other side? Constantly. Remember that we are but dust? Sure, tell me something I don't know. On the meta, "giving up" is my jam. Let me throw my hands up in the air, laugh at what small shreds of control exist in this life. I've been tempted to make my home in Lent, skip to All Saints Day, and make Advent last all year-round. I know these Job-like reckonings well.
If I hope for the grave to be my home,
if I spread out my bed in darkness,if I cry out to corruption, 'You are my father,'
and to the worm, 'My mother,' or 'My sister,'Where then is my hope?
And my hope, who sees it?Will it go down to the barred gates of death?
Will we descend together into the dust?"
Oh, Job! Did you ever think He would do exactly what you so plainly claimed as preposterous? That he would descend to the grave, ravage the gates of hell, and in doing so, defeat your every legitimate complaint of hopelessness? I wonder if God laughed when you said this - - the smile of a compassionate, but knowing Father. There was so much more to come that you couldn't see. There is still so much more yet to come.
If you haven't already, you will, at some point in your life, come to know these groans and pains -- this very real waiting for the brokenness of our bodies and world to be made whole in a way that makes Scriptures like this one, personal. For you, it might be a baby, a family, a future, a lighthearted perspective on life, ambition, or simple dreams. When our beautiful mortal hopes are miscarried and fail to attain their expected or intended outcomes -- when they go awry, become distorted, backfire, or turn cold and grey -- that is precisely when a child of God might find themselves, against all earthly odds and efforts, hopeful.
