Our second pregnancy was over. It took me a few days to even tell my mom. After I couldn’t take it anymore, I broke down on the phone sobbing to her. It was silly of me not to say anything…obviously she was going to figure out eventually that she wasn’t having a grandchild come May. But really, when it came down to it, that wasn’t her main concern at all. My mom was worried about us more than anything. She wanted us to be OK. That’s all she cared about.
You have to understand, when you actually speak the words to some one of the loss that just happened, it makes it so much more real. Telling someone you are no longer expecting is one of the hardest things to do. Why? Lots of reasons. Above all, you don’t want them to feel the pain you are. You also feel inadequate that your body can’t do what it was designed to do. There is embarrassment, mixed in with anger. You really don’t want to hear what they will say to you after you tell them. You hold your breath hoping it’s not a stupid comment that will make you never look at them the same. Here’s a few: “well, at least it was early on when you miscarried,” or “at least you can get pregnant.” I will say this, miscarriage changes your life and the way you view the people who are in it.
I took off about 4 days of work in September to grieve at home alone in my bed. I bled heavily for about 2 weeks, so there was no need for a d & c this go around. My beta, after weekly blood tests, finally reached 0 by October. I tried my best to suck it up & teach my students through it as I did the first loss. The difficult part is that teaching is 100% all day everyday; there are no breaks when the kids are around (at least in my classroom there aren’t). I couldn’t hide behind my desk if I didn’t feel like talking, or go to the bathroom anytime I needed. I had to set the mood in my class each day and put a smile on my face. It didn’t seem fair.
During my planning periods, I would sit and wonder how I was going to get through the next 9 months of the year with them, knowing our baby wasn’t coming anymore. I cried and cried. But no one, except the very few closest to us, really knew what we were going through. It wasn’t their fault they didn’t know; we hid it. I guess this is why miscarriage is sometimes referred to as silent grief. There is no funeral, there is no celebration of life, it’s just OVER.
Another thing about losing your future child is no one really knows what to say. If you, the ones who endured the loss don’t even know what to say, how could they possibly know what to say to you? I guess in the end, you just want to know that people are there for you. And those who knew were always there for us.
I began to pray hard everyday that God would help us get through this. We starting spending more and more time in his word, and we started to find little pieces of hope in it. I started to look for the good things around me that I may have never noticed before. I started to understand that there had to be a reason this happened-although no one better tell us that.
See, when we lost the first baby, and then our dog a month later, we realized that things could always be worse than they are at the moment. This loss opened my eyes up to something different. I started to feel empathy for people and things around me in a way I never had before. We started giving in a way we hadn’t thought possible. I started to be more grateful for everything I had.
We decided to sponsor a child through World Vision who was starving and barely getting an education. We began writing him letters and donating every month to help him. If we hadn’t lost the pregnancy, he would have never came into our life. We were blessing him through our silent suffering.
We are animal lovers, and soon after the miscarriage, we adopted a dog who was in need. We always knew we wanted to get another dog after Nacho went to heaven, we just didn’t know when. Now was that time. We ended up adopting a beagle through a rescue group and named him Jax. And even though he is a naughty boy, he has brought a lot of laughter and love into our home. Our other dog, Rocket had always been scared of my hubs since the day we got him 4 years earlier. That’s a long time. We figured he would always be this way. My hubs had never done a thing to cause the fear; we believe he was most likely abused by a man at some point earlier in his life and he just couldn’t get past it. But when we got Jax, Rocket unexpectedly began to open up to him like we never thought possible. He began to kiss & love on him, and this in turn blessed us greatly.
At the time of our miscarriage, I had two friends in my life who were going through a similar situation as we were. One who had never been pregnant, and was undergoing fertility treatments, and the other who had a child, had been trying for another for over a year, finally got pregnant, and was now miscarrying. I began to reach out to them through my pain and grief. I understood how they both felt. I prayed for them everyday and used my knowledge to help them the best I could.
By October, God opened a new door for us. I was given an opportunity in my career. I was offered a position designing and reviewing online classes at the college level that would last until February. This offer was brought to me, I didn’t even have to look for it. Only God knew I wouldn’t have looked for it anyways feeling the way I did at the time. This job kept me busy at nights after teaching during the days. As a matter of fact, it filled the empty space of injection times, and all that pregnancy & baby planning stuff. 
Most importantly, my hubs & I were growing closer to each other and closer to God. Don’t get me wrong-infertility is tough on a marriage, and anyone who tells you differently is lying to you. So, dealing with years of infertility, and now 2 miscarriages was not in any way easy. But, we knew that not too many people had gone through what we had and made it. And we hadn’t just made it, we were closer than we had been before it. I was so blessed to have him in my life.
I began journaling and practicing yoga, both of which were outlets for me. I not only wrote, but also drew out my feelings. I wrote about the loss of my grandparents, Nacho, our babies. I wrote about our dreams for the future. When I practiced yoga, I always set an intention of healing. And, one day at a time, I was starting to heal. All of this came to pass because we experienced the loss we did.
Surviving INfertility 