4.15.17
“I’m looking forward to the day we hold our baby, and hoping that day will be in September. I know God can do miracles – it feels like it’s going to take one to get to that day.”
Since the 11th, I’d only lost minimal amounts of blood. Back in March, this was enough to completely freak me out, but after seeing the amount of blood my body could lose time and time again while pregnant, it was hard to find this spotting significant. So as for the days where I simply spotted, I didn’t even count them as “days of blood” anymore. They felt, relatively speaking, easy.
Could my pregnancy return to “normal” like my doctor had said? I refused to believe it would, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the disappointment if it didn’t. On the 13th, already, I’d written, “While I want to believe this is the home stretch, I’m also very hesitant to trust my body these days. It still feels like I could gush blood at any moment, because when it’s happened, it’s come without warning.”
I think in the back of my mind there was room for a glimmer of hope things would return to normal. I knew it was a possibility, but it wasn’t one I could speak out loud. Each time I bled, my body let me down. Had I shared my tiny bit of hope out loud, I feared I’d be letting everyone else down too. It was as if, in word, it was easier to commit to hopelessness – to plan on more blood. I was verbally convincing everyone, including myself, this was not the end of the bleeding, but in spirit, I wanted so badly to be able to believe it could be the end.
Regardless, in the one week things had been sour, our village began to rise up and rally. As I’ve mentioned, I am not a bedrest kind of person, so when I couldn’t get out into the world, the world came to me, one visitor at a time. I had been on bedrest for one week, and I’d already had lunches brought to me, dinners, smoothies, orange juice, coffee, snacks, books… I was beginning to taste the support I’d noticed just a couple of weeks ago we would have.
I was also beginning to taste the hard part of being the invalid in those interactions. Throughout the rest of our pregnancy, people would, with their best intentions, say or do things that probably seemed right to them, but felt hard and hurtful to me. It was this first week of chaos that I not only saw how truly great our people were, but I was most hurt by those people. I hadn’t yet had the time to think about the spot they were in. What do you say to the person in my shoes?
I went on to receive the awkwardness with grace, but in this first week when someone told me if I miscarried “it must have been God’s plan for this pregnancy”, I honestly wanted to ask that person not to pray for me. I do believe God has a plan and that it was being carried out in my pregnancy, and 99% of my life I’ve prayed for His will to be done. But on that day, if His plan was miscarriage, I needed prayer against it. I needed people rooting for me and my baby, not dismissing the chaos, encouraging me to be fine with the worst of outcomes, by attributing it to God’s plan.
I prayed against miscarriage, but yes, I already knew God’s plan would prevail regardless of what I wanted. I just didn’t need to be told that.
I would go on to be immensely blown away by the village that formed around us, and eventually I’d learn to let the awkward words and deeds roll off my back. But that first week was the greatest concoction of encouragement and discouragement from other people I’ve ever experienced.
Looking back on that week, I’d categorize it as one of two weeks in our journey to parenthood that still make me want to throw up. Between the detriment of our pregnancy, the lack of sleep, the loss of blood and the navigation of interactions, I hope this was one of the hardest weeks I ever have to live.
In the stats:
Gestational Age: 17 weeks
Days of blood: 9
Days of bedrest: 10
Doctor’s Appointments: 5
Ultrasounds: 2
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P.S. This post’s picture is of me and my best friend from college. She came and spent the weekend with me. It gave my husband a chance to not have to babysit/entertain me, and it gave me a chance to practice styling her hair for her wedding in May, of which I would be the Matron of Honor.
I love the title you chose – but I hope I didn’t ever contribute to the hurtful or awkward words…. Most of us have never experienced what you were living through. During times like that it feels like we should say something, and we hope it brings peace to the one suffering.
I’ve been on the other end too and I understand how it’s hard to find the words to say. We don’t think of anyone differently for what they chose to say to us, but we did have to learn to understand the spot they were coming from too, fumbling for words to say to someone in our situation.