Working Through Emotions

What do you do when you have something you really want to share with people, but can't share it for one reason or another? I have been doing a lot of thinking since the pregnancy announcements of last week, and if I were to get pregnant, I don't think I would be able to share the news right away. Sure, I would want to. I know I would want to! But with the experience of the miscarriage, I don't think I would be able to. I still remember the raw emotion as we had to tell person after person how we lost the baby. For that reason, we waited to share the news with E with family until 12 weeks, and with the world until 14 weeks after we heard the heartbeat for the first time. But I don't know if I will be able to wait that long whenever God chooses to bless us again. What would I say to everyone who continues to ask me how "trying" is going? (Which, off topic, is one of the weirdest questions you can ask someone. I mean, really, you are asking how my sex life is! AWKWARD.)

All of my friends who have recently told me they are pregnant have shared the news right away. Part of me wants to scream at them, "What are you thinking? Don't you know how common miscarriage is? Don't count your chickens before they hatch!" (Okay, I don't want to say the last thing, but you get my point.) But truthfully, I can't blame them for wanting to share the news right away.  They are excited, and they haven't been touched by a pregnancy loss. With the miscarriage, we told our family within days of finding out, and then slowly told our friends in the following weeks. We were excited! And we wanted to share our excitement. With E, we were also excited, but we had been made painfully aware of the realities of pregnancy and what can happen. So we were also cautious. When I found out I was miscarrying, I couldn't stand the thought of a single person thinking I was pregnant when I was not. I made mrblueberry call or email everyone we had told to tell them what was happening. But how do you do that? How do you pick up the phone and say, "Oh, by the way, your future grandchild/niece/etc isn't going to be joining us next February"? Through a lot of tears, that's how. Mrblueberry still says that calling my dad to tell him we lost the baby was one of the hardest things he has ever done. To hear my father weep over the phone was hard for me, and I wasn't even the one holding the phone. Dads aren't supposed to cry!

Miscarriage is hard. Very hard. Anyone who has had a pregnancy loss will tell you that. It's hard at 8 weeks, it's hard at 12 weeks, it's hard at 20 weeks, and it is hard at 40 weeks. When your baby dies in pregnancy, you not only lose your baby (whom you will never get to know), but you lose all your hopes and dreams for that child. It doesn't matter how long you have known about the pregnancy, and it doesn't matter if you get to hold that precious baby. "There is no foot so small that it cannot leave an imprint on this world." Time doesn't "heal all wounds" like they would have you believe. I still cry almost every time I talk about it or think about "what might have been." And I think this is part of why every pregnancy announcement hurts so much. So how will I deal with it when it is finally my turn? I don't know. I do know that I will be excited, nervous, and will need the support of good friends in case something goes wrong. And luckily, I have momstown for that.

For now, I will remind myself of a couple of quotes that I heard a long time ago:

"Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain."

"And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down.  Without the rain there would be no rainbow."          ~G. K. Chesterton