Two years ago, a few months after we lost Evelyn, my husband and I went on a quick getaway. We felt an overwhelming desire to just pack up and leave, but since that’s impractical and we have responsibilities, we planned a short trip to Hocking Hills.
It was July of 2021 and we were both grieving hard. We needed time to get lost in nature and to ask Evelyn for signs that she was okay. We arrived there broken, but hopeful.
On our last day, we were finishing up our hike and crossed over a little bridge. I walked over it and realized that my husband had stopped and was calling my name. I walked back and he was staring at a wooden post at the entrance to the bridge. He held my hand and showed me what was written on the post. I gasped as I read the dates written:
4/19 4/20 4/21
My heart leapt from my body and I burst into tears. These dates, Evie’s dates, were written right here in the middle of the woods three hours from our home. I broke down sobbing there on the path and we knew then that she wanted us to know she was there.
She was everywhere we were.
April 19th was the anniversary of the worst day of my life and the last day I heard the sound of Evelyn’s heartbeat. April 20th was the day my doctor told us that she no longer had a heartbeat. April 21st was the day I gave birth to her.
The anniversaries of these dates hold such meaning for me. The days leading up to this have felt so heavy this year. It’s so painful to remember that two years ago, these were incredibly happy days where a completely different version of myself existed. I can look on a calendar and point to a date where not only my entire world changed, but I changed as a person.
Tomorrow is April 19th, the hardest anniversary. I can’t avoid it, and I have to carry on as usual. On Friday, we will celebrate Evelyn’s birthday. I will write in her birthday card. I will wonder what things she would like if she were here and what kind of party I would have planned for her. I will cry and be angry. I will also smile and be grateful that she’s mine.
This isn’t a story I ever could have imagined would be mine to tell. I’m fully aware that just because someone has already endured a traumatic experience does not mean they’re immune to experiencing any more trauma. Bad things happen to good people for no reason. People can lose more than one baby. This isn’t lost on me. Yet, when I stared at those two pink lines for the third time in my life in back early February, I never thought I would be here today with this story.
Nothing about having children has been easy for me. I don’t say this because I feel like I need sympathy or attention because it’s hard for a lot of people, but it’s unfair. Absolutely every step has been a mental and physical battle, but I desperately want another living child. My desire to have a healthy, living little sibling for Evelyn and Nora has outweighed my anxiety and fear of trying to have another baby. So when getting pregnant was finally easy, it felt like the universe was cutting me a much needed break. I needed an easy pregnancy after the devastation of losing Evelyn and the pure fear I experienced through my entire pregnancy with Nora.
I deserved this.
Things progressed normally. I didn’t feel how I felt when I was pregnant with both girls, so I was convinced this pregnancy was different because it was a boy. We saw the heartbeat on the ultrasound at 6 weeks. I heard it for the first time at 8. I wrote my due date on the calendar and started picking out baby names. I imagined Nora and this new baby together at the holidays this year. I told myself that this pregnancy would be fine and I would celebrate every minute of it and not be consumed with the knowledge that so many things have to go right in order for a baby to be born healthy.
At exactly 9 weeks pregnant, I woke up early to blood.
I checked for bleeding every single day I was pregnant with Nora, right up until the day before she was born. I let my guard down with this pregnancy, and there it was along with cramping. I knew right there I was losing this baby.
We went to the ER on Sunday afternoon. I had prepared myself for the doctor to tell me my baby had no heartbeat. I was already grieving. But my baby had a heartbeat— a strong heartbeat. They told me I had a subchorionic hematoma which was causing the bleeding. It could result in loss, but often it resolves itself and many people go on to have a healthy pregnancy.
I had hope.
I went home knowing I would just keep bleeding. It was scary but manageable. My baby was okay. I would deal with the bleeding. It would resolve itself. It wasn’t ideal, but I had information. I could get through this.
I went to work on Monday even though I didn’t feel great. I was exhausted from being in the ER all day, and I was bleeding and the cramping felt worse. I Googled a lot, all consistent with the diagnosis. I went about my workday.
In the middle of teaching a CPR class I felt a gush, and I just knew. I knew whatever I felt wasn’t something that could happen and everything would be fine. The world around me started to go blank. I grabbed my things and ran out to the bathroom.
I share this next part with lots of hesitation but with a great sense of obligation to tell others who have been there that no matter what you did with your baby, you made the choice that was best for you. Or maybe you didn’t have a choice, and I’m so sorry. Everything that happened to me in that bathroom that day was by far one of the most traumatic things I have ever experienced. I also want people to understand the reality and the horror of pregnancy loss. I’ve said it before and I will say it again here: babies do not just disappear.
Evelyn was much bigger and I had a full hospital labor with her. This little baby was passed in the bathroom while I was at work. I held my tiny dead baby in my hand, sitting in a stall at work while passing golf ball sized blood clots and tissue.
I don’t know how I got from that point to getting myself home, but I made it. I sat on my kitchen floor with my tiny baby who I wrapped in a paper towel and put into a container because I read about it somewhere before. I sobbed and screamed and apologized to my baby that this happened, that I couldn’t keep them safe.
My husband and mom came to take care of me. The nurse at my OB’s office told me I needed to go to the emergency room with the amount of bleeding I was experiencing. My husband drove me the half hour to the ER connected to the hospital where my OB practices so they could have access to my records from that day. I know I needed to be seen, but I absolutely regret going to the ER. I waited for a room to be available in excruciating pain in the waiting room. They finally put us in a room where I laid on a bed with no blankets and no one to check on me, offer pain relief, or even a new pad. The pain was worse than being in labor with Nora. Having to explain my reproductive history over and over again to anyone new who happened to occasionally pop into the room was like reliving the worst days of my life all over again. They didn’t have the right supplies, equipment, or space to do a pelvic exam in the room. Everything felt like a nightmare.
After ultrasounds, tests, and exams, I was given the option of having surgery or going home with medication to see if I would pass everything and the bleeding would eventually subside. I would have done anything to leave, so we opted to go home. I cramped and bled and went home for the second time in my life with no baby. We turned over our tiny baby to the doctors to do genetic testing. Having to make this choice again opened up a vault of emotions that I thought I dealt with already.
I didn’t know this baby. They weren’t with me for nearly as long as Evelyn and it still all felt so new. I just wrapped my mind around the fact that I was going to have a newborn by the time Nora would be 18 months old. I was preparing to move all the baby things into the guest room. I was making plans to reserve another daycare spot. Everything happened so fast. It’s not the same grief as when we lost Evie, but it’s a reminder that I feel like my body failed another child.
I don’t know how much more grief I can endure. I’m angry that I lost another baby. I’m exhausted from the physical and emotional toll that this loss is taking on me. I feel like I was just getting to know my new self in the world I live in after loss and after becoming a mom to a living child. Despite all this, when things have felt overwhelming these past few days, I have to stop and remind myself that I’ve already been through the worst days of my life and I’m still here. I looked back at a post I wrote called “An open letter to my grieving self” which I shared on 8/8/21. It’s a reminder from me to me that I’m going to make it. A week after I shared this post, I found out I was pregnant with Nora. I’m not trying to “silver lining” myself into feeling better, but it’s a reminder that the intense grief doesn’t stay intense forever.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. Writing is always therapeutic for me, but I also have a goal of painting a realistic picture of pregnancy loss and living with grief for those who need to know that they haven’t experienced these events in isolation. Having two different types of pregnancy loss and losing two different babies in very different ways has changed me in ways I could have never imagined. I’m not sure where I want or need to go from here. My worldview is constantly changing and evolving with the presence of loss and grief in my life.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve been able to even think about writing. I feel creatively blocked most of the time. The majority of my energy goes into the everyday tasks of being a working a mom to an infant. I have settled into a routine that mainly consists of just basic functions to keep our household and myself going, and I pour absolutely everything else I have into Nora.
I considered, for awhile, that maybe I simply had healed more than I realized from the trauma and pain of losing Evelyn. I don’t cry every day anymore. Most days, I don’t even feel capable of crying. Thinking of her feels less heavy and I can look at things that remind me of her without crying. I laugh a lot again. I have so many moments of pure joy in my life. Being a mom (to a living child) feels like I’m living out my dream come true.
I was reflecting last week in therapy about how I’m really doing, and honestly, I don’t know. I’m certainly happy but tired. I’m grateful but stressed. My brain right now is so focused on the running list of things I need to get done every day (and the things I know will never get done) that it’s really hard to create space for anything that slows me down, and the thing that will slow me down is my grief.
I inadvertently created a way of coping by what I’m realizing is just being “too busy” to grieve.
I think this is actually something that a lot of people do in early grief as a protective measure to avoid the intense and earth-shattering pain of those initial days. And while I definitely made sure I always had the company and distraction of a comfort show playing in the background at that time (how many rewatches of Brooklyn 99 is too many?), I really allowed myself to be fully immersed in my grief. I didn’t realize how much that would benefit me at the time in terms of helping myself to heal as much as possible. My motivation behind the grief-immersion was simply to feel as connected to Evelyn as I possibly could. She was no longer physically connected to me, and I wanted to do anything I possibly could to feel close to her.
It feels different now. My grief is, of course, different because time changes how it looks and what it feels like. But I’ve also fully numbed myself to my grief in order to protect myself. My brain simply cannot take on anything at this point that would cause more of a mental load. I don’t feel like I have the mental capacity to become completely undone right now, even momentarily. Between taking care of a baby and starting a new job this year, my plate feels really full. Numbing myself to the pain seems like the safest option, and I’m really afraid of what would happen if I allowed myself to feel the full impact of navigating a holiday season (or really, any time) with my living daughter who would not be here had her big sister lived.
I feel this low-level sadness creeping in the closer we get to Christmas. I already see ways in which Evie isn’t included. I miss her so much and feel like I’m always grasping at opportunities to keep her as close as possible. Part of me wants to fully let the grief to roll in so I can connect with her in a deeper way, but I’m afraid that once I let that happen that it won’t stop.
So I keep going.
My full spectrum of emotions is staying contained right now because I really feel so numb. In some way, I miss the intensity of the early grief days because I knew Evie was always close. I worry now that she’s somehow slipping further from me. The guilt creeps in and tells me that I’m not doing “enough” for her. It tells me that this numb feeling isn’t okay and that it would be better if I were sad all the time.
I also fully believe that Evelyn knows I love her and I don’t need to always have the capacity to fully process the reality of my life without her. Sometimes, it’s okay that the intense feelings just stay under the surface.
One day, a strong enough wave of grief will come and melt the numbness away, and when that happens, I’ll survive that day, too.
There really aren’t enough words or adequate words to describe what having a living baby is like after losing your first child in pregnancy.
To have a positive birthing experience.
To have my very much alive baby placed on my chest.
To feed her from my own body.
To carry her out of the hospital instead of leaving her body with a nurse.
To be exhausted because she’s waking us up at night instead of my own tears.
To take her to the pediatrician instead of picking up her ashes from the funeral home.
I could go on forever about how bringing Nora home has been both everything I’ve ever wanted and also a constant reminder of what we should have had with Evelyn. I’m both the happiest I’ve ever felt and still so freshly grieving the biggest loss of my life. It’s so far from how I pictured being a mom.
It would be naive of me to say that losing Evelyn has not affected the way I parent and will parent in the future. It affected my pregnancy and birth decisions in every way possible.
I chose to have a scheduled induction based on my pregnancy history and level of anxiety. Nora ended up coming earlier than my scheduled induction, but a decision was made with my doctors to have her at 37 weeks based on their concerns and my history. Had I not had a previous loss, I wouldn’t have even had a 37 week ultrasound to find this information out.
I constantly battle intrusive thoughts of terrible things happening to Nora and my family. I think, to some extent, that’s a normal part of being a mom, but for me, the feelings are amplified by loss. Unless you’ve had to sit at a funeral home and pick out a tiny urn for your baby, I don’t think anyone can truly understand the constant fear of knowing that the worst can happen at any time.
I’m an anxious person, and I’m an anxious mom.
There will always be things that I question or read into more because of Evelyn. I will probably always worry more about something happening to Nora than is healthy. But I’m also so grateful.
I’m certainly not saying that loss moms love their children more than those who haven’t had a loss. I’m also definitely not saying that I’m in any way thankful for our experience or that there’s a silver lining, because there absolutely is not. I didn’t lose my first born child to become a better person or to have some lesson taught to me. She died, it was the worst possible experience of my life, and it changed me deeply as a person in so many ways.
Sometimes, loss parents feel like they can only be grateful for their living child or children because we know the other side of the coin. This doesn’t leave room to feel frustrated with the normal struggles of parenting because having a screaming baby is a much better alternative to no baby at all. I’ve felt immensely guilty for not loving absolutely every minute of parenting. The endless hours of screaming with a colicky baby, the breastfeeding struggles, the multiple nighttime wake ups; it’s everything I’ve ever wanted and it’s still hard.
I’m finding these days as we settle in with Nora (and her hours of screaming has subsided) that I’m truly both the happiest I’ve ever been while also grieving so hard. I can be happily snuggling Nora one minute and burst into tears the next because I never got to do this with Evelyn. My grief has certainly changed, but it’s still ever-present.
As I write this, I’m sitting in the rocking chair that we bought last year as a faith purchase in the room that used to be just Evelyn’s but is now what we refer to as “the girls’ room”. I’m rocking Nora to sleep, and as I hold her close to me, I think about how completely broken I have been and how our lives were so vastly different last year.
This is a different parenthood than I clearly ever imagined, but it’s the one I’ve got. My heart is simultaneously so full and so broken every day. Some days look completely joy-filled and others are full of tears.
Parenting after loss is complex and challenging and beautiful. It’s the feeling of despair in getting to see what could have been play out in front of you but also knowing how lucky you are to watch your first child’s sibling grow up right before your eyes.
Being Evelyn and Nora’s mom is truly the greatest privilege of my life. I’ll continue to spend every day holding them each in different ways.
I have spent the past 10 months in a reality that I never asked for.
I went from being probably the happiest I have ever been in my whole life to completely gutted in a matter of seconds. That’s all it takes. Life is that fragile. Living with the reality that my life will never look like I imagined has been a tough pill to swallow. I know I’ve written before about primary and secondary loss, but the secondary loss of a life for myself, for my family, that will never be has been shattering.
Every day I wake up, I face the reality that my family will never be whole.
I now live in a world where my daughter doesn’t. We won’t watch her grow up and be a part of our family in the way we planned. It’s something that some days, I feel at peace with, and other days, I’m so destroyed by it that I can barely function. We have carefully and deliberately spent time incorporating Evelyn into our every day lives so that she will always be as visible a part of our family as she can possibly be.
Yet, it’s clearly not the same.
If we manage to have healthy, living children that get to stay with us, I will never be able to look at a family picture and see all of my babies. I will never live in a reality where all of my children can exist together with us. Of course, we believe that Evelyn is always spiritually here with us, but never again holding her physically in my arms is the reality I contend with. I feel so incredibly grateful for this current pregnancy with Evelyn’s baby sister, but I can’t ignore the fact that that I wouldn’t have this baby if Evelyn was here. The closer we get to having her here, the more I think of all the milestones we never made it to with Evelyn.
I read somewhere recently that it hurts to want things that can’t coexist in the same life. I would go a step further to say that it’s been devastating to try to accept this reality: If Evelyn had lived, had been born when she should have and been a healthy baby, I would not be pregnant right now. I was almost 7 weeks pregnant by Evelyn’s due date. The mental toll that this reality has taken on me has been exhausting. I could not have both of my girls.
As I get further along and the reality of hopefully bringing this baby home healthy becomes more of something I actually believe, I’m realizing that so many conflicting emotions are coexisting within me, and I can never just feel one thing anymore. Every moment I allow myself to feel excited or joyful about the thought of bringing this baby home, I also simultaneously feel overwhelmed with grief that Evelyn never physically made it home with us.
Joy and sadness just coexist in my life now.
For every happy moment, there’s a sad one. For every moment of excitement, there’s also fear. And for every time I feel grateful for what I’ve been given, I also feel rage for what’s been taken from me.
And I’m learning to let that all be as okay as it can be.
These past 10 months have changed me in ways I never asked for and never wanted. The toll that baby loss and pregnancy after loss has taken on me has been the most mentally and physically intense journey I have ever been on. Most days now, I can function and present myself in a way that society deems acceptable. I have days where I don’t cry at all. I take care of myself and go to work and talk to other people. I laugh and make jokes. When people ask how I am, I say I’m okay. And truthfully, sometimes I am okay. But the heaviness of my reality is always there. The conflicting emotions are always there.
If I dwell on the unfairness of it all, I would be absolutely swallowed up by it. So while I’m bitter when I see others having uncomplicated pregnancies, ignorant to the reality that so many of us face, I also try to allow for grace. Why am I bitter? Because I can never go back to a time where my baby didn’t die. I can never go back to a time where I thought getting and staying pregnant would be easy. And I can never go back to a time where I thought all my future children would grow up together. That reality no longer exists for me, so I have to find a way to function in my new reality.
As much as I try to reject what feels like a cruel hand that I’ve been dealt, I also know that the more I fight it, the more bitter I become. Rejecting my currently reality doesn’t bring Evelyn back to us. It doesn’t make my trauma go away. So I’m leaning into living with a reality that is conflicting. It’s hard to wrap my mind around.
On December 23, 2020, the end of an all-around terrible year, I woke up at about 6:30 am to take our dogs out. I walked into the bathroom first and grabbed a pregnancy test, already feeling the disappointment rise up before I took it. It was the last month of trying to conceive before we were deciding to take a break. The full year of drugs and shots and surgery with the pandemic hellscape as the backdrop to it all had me burnt out.
I knew it was probably too early to test, and the trigger shot I had done that month could cause a false positive. I took a test anyways because it was almost Christmas and honestly, I needed to know for sure that I could drink. I needed help to get through another holiday without a baby. I set the test down and took the dogs outside.
When I came back, I barely glanced at it. I didn’t want to confirm what I already knew which was that another year had gone by without getting pregnant. I almost threw it away, but something made me look closer: a very faint second line. I stared in disbelief.
That was the first moment I had with Evelyn; a shaky, tear-filled moment in the bathroom of our old house. A moment of disbelief but also a moment of hope, a hope that this was really happening for our family, that adding a child to our lives could possibly become a reality.
Since that moment exactly one year ago, our lives have been so vastly changed in every way possible that it’s hard to even fathom. As I sit here, two days before Christmas without our sweet Evelyn but with her sister kicking away in my belly, I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all, that we will never have both our girls here together. Of course, I’m overwhelmingly grateful to be pregnant again, but this baby doesn’t make the pain of Evelyn’s death any less.
It has been one year of loving our first born child. It’s nothing like I had ever imagined for our lives. Every day, I love Evelyn more and more. All we have are just moments of her, moments where we talk to her, feel her presence. It’s been one year of embracing every moment I can get with my firstborn daughter, moments while she was here and moments now that she’s gone.
I don’t really have anything profound to say other than it’s a particularly emotional day, though there are so many days that hold more weight than others. It’s been one year of knowing Evelyn would be in our lives forever, however that looks for us now.
Happy one year of knowing you and loving you, our Evie girl.
Something people say when you experience a loss is to look to the future. Time heals all wounds. The thought of this is potentially comforting in early grief when every second is flooded with intense pain. The thought that things could potentially feel less terrible in the future is something to hang onto. You can’t live in that intensity forever; we just aren’t built to withstand it.
I don’t want to downplay that the intensity of the grief has lessened. There are days that go by that I don’t cry. I can talk to Evelyn and smile. I can be in groups of people sometimes and not let it completely overwhelm me. I’m finding bits and pieces of whatever “normal” now looks like.
I was optimistic that after we made it past Evie’s due date that a weight would be lifted. In a way, it has. But a new heaviness has set in that I wasn’t prepared for. Getting through the month of September was important to me. It felt once like a far off goal, something unattainable. But it came and went and I was still standing.
But I don’t feel better. The problem with looking to the future is that your child isn’t there, either.
October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. It’s one of those things that you don’t have a full sense of until you become an unfortunate statistic.
1 in 4 pregnancies end in loss.
1 in 160 babies are stillborn.
Now we are these numbers, these statistics. Now we have days and months dedicated to loss related things. I’m truly grateful that we have things like Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. I think it’s important. Our children matter, our invisible children that people don’t see us carrying around. I love the idea of bringing awareness to our particular kind of loss.
But we live pregnancy loss every day.
For us, it’s laced into our whole lives. It’s looking for signs from our baby everyday. It’s holding her keepsakes in her room. It’s looking at our daughter’s ashes in a butterfly urn that sits in our room. It’s glancing down at my tattoo of her tiny footprints. It’s also the occasional panic attack when I’m flooded with memories of the day we found out she was dying. It’s the constant worry that Evie’s sibling growing in my belly also won’t be okay.
I am constantly aware of all we’ve lost. And sometimes, the extra reminders are hard.
Obviously, it’s incredibly important to me to share our story, to share Evelyn’s story. Doing so has also brought us connection and support from so many people, and I’m incredibly grateful. But I’ve felt almost paralyzed by the (self-imposed) expectation that I share this month, this very important month for pregnancy and infant loss. I’m watching my social media feed fill up with stories of loss and wonder why I’m struggling to engage. I had hoped, apparently naively, that September passing and turning to October would bring me some greater sense of peace and possibly strength. Instead, I’m finding myself more filled up with grief than I’ve been in awhile.
No matter what, she’s still not here.
Instead of counting down how many weeks pregnant with Evie I should have been, I’m reminded that I should I now have a one month old. With every changing leaf, I’m reminded that I should be out pushing her in her stroller, showing her my favorite season. I see pictures of families out at pumpkin patches and apple orchards, and I’m reminded that this was finally supposed to be our year to do those things. October has felt so unbearably heavy. My grief combined with anxiety over our current pregnancy has rendered me almost paralyzed. I’m burnt out.
I’m choosing to pass on needing to engage this month. There’s this guilt that loss parents have, guilt over feeling like we constantly need to show up for our children in the most visible way because we’re afraid they’ll be forgotten. We wonder if we’re doing enough, thinking about them enough, carrying on their memory enough. When I allow myself to let go of all that, I know that I’m the best possible mom for Evelyn. It’s okay to rest. I’m enough for her.
So while I’ve looked to time to lessen my pain, I’m constantly reminded of something others have told me and that I’ve had to tell myself: Grief is not linear. The pain of losing Evelyn doesn’t threaten to strangle me every day, but it’s there. I’ve learned to live with it. Just because one day seems okay doesn’t mean the following day needs to be even better. It’s been almost six months without her, and there isn’t one second of any day that I don’t miss her.
I’m doing enough. I’m loving her enough. October is just another month.
**Sensitive post–mention of PAL. If this is triggering to you, if you’re in the thick of all the infertility and/or loss of it all, please protect your heart and dip out. Hit mute on my posts. I’ve done this many times with many people. It’s about protecting your mental energy. I know and understand this well. **
When I was pregnant with Evie, Bill and I made a decision together to not announce our pregnancy publicly on social media for many reasons. The main reason was that I had spent many days regretting opening up my phone only to find a pregnancy announcement that would leave me devastated. I’m of course happy for people to have babies and grow their families and would never wish this pain on anyone, but those who have lived through infertility and loss will tell you that pregnancy announcements are especially triggering. When you’re in the trenches of it all, it’s really hard to look at other people who have what you’re so desperately trying to achieve. I didn’t want to make anyone else ever feel what I had felt, so we kept it to ourselves.
Society also tells you that you shouldn’t announce a pregnancy before you’re out of the first trimester “just in case”. What this reinforces is that, if you have a miscarriage, then people don’t want to hear about it. That it’s easier to just silently lose your baby and act like they never existed. Evelyn died well into my second trimester, and I’m here to attest that babies can die during any trimester of pregnancy. It’s not a guarantee. Waiting until you’re 12 or 13 weeks pregnant doesn’t make it “safe”. We thought we were safe at 20 weeks, and we weren’t. Saying the words “I’m pregnant” out loud doesn’t jinx you into a miscarriage, just the same as loving and wanting your baby with all your heart can’t keep them safe.
I understand for some people that they wouldn’t want to share if they had a miscarriage. I was honestly on the fence about publicly sharing our stillbirth experience when Evelyn died but I felt that not sharing was denying her existence. It’s up to everyone individually how they do or don’t share loss. It’s incredibly personal. I sometimes regret not sharing more in a sensitive way that I was pregnant, because all we had was a death announcement.
When I think of now how to announce a pregnancy, I consider a few questions: How would I share if it doesn’t end with a healthy baby? Who would we tell? At this point, I’ve decided to not be silent about our journey to have children anymore. After experiencing infertility in relative silence, I now know it’s important for me to share my experiences so others don’t have to feel the same need should they choose. Experiencing loss in silence wasn’t something I was meant to do, and in choosing to be more public with our story about Evelyn, I’ve found incredible solace in the loss community.
All this to say—I’m pregnant.
Today I am pregnant. We don’t know how this is going to go. I’m terrified every day. It’s easily the scariest thing I’ve ever done. It’s very overwhelming, and I have a lot of feelings that I’m still struggling to process. Pregnancy after loss is a lot of things that I can’t yet define. We know the reality of what could happen, but we are cautiously optimistic.
I’m not sharing when we’re due with this little one as due dates are incredibly triggering to me now. Having to cross Evie’s due date off all my calendars was just another reminder of everything we had planned for our lives with her. We just made it past her due date early this month, and it’s been really hard to say the least, especially being pregnant with a different baby at the same time. Just because we’re anticipating a baby’s arrival near a certain date doesn’t guarantee they will make it. We will hold our breath until that time.
I also won’t be sharing pictures of a positive pregnancy test or ultrasound photos. Both of these elicit an intense reaction for me, even pictures of my own tests or ultrasounds. I can’t explain it, but if you’ve been where I’ve been, where so many of us have been, then you know. The last ultrasound pictures we have of Evelyn are from hours before she died. Coming across ultrasound photos since she died has been incredibly painful.
This all might sound morbid to anyone reading this, but when your baby dies inside your body you don’t really have another course of action to protect yourself. In no way were we expecting that this could happen so soon for us, and honestly my brain isn’t really catching up. There are a lot of things we did and are doing differently, but that’s a post for another time.
I haven’t had the mental energy to tell everyone I have wanted to in person, so I’m putting it out here now. It’s also been stressful to hear people be so excited for us and to congratulate us. I honestly don’t know how to process that. We appreciate everyone who has matched our energy level and that have expressed that they recognize that this pregnancy brings up a number of very complicated feelings. I’m trying my absolute best to connect with this pregnancy and be excited, but I’m usually just terrified all the time instead.
So, today, I am pregnant. That’s what I will tell myself every day that I’m lucky enough to carry this little one. In this moment, everything is okay. We are incredibly grateful that we’re at this point, but it’s also terrifying. I’m currently pouring all my mental and physical energy right now into taking care of myself and our little seahorse. It’s sometimes hard for me to differentiate between this pregnancy and my pregnancy with Evie. Grieving Evelyn while simultaneously processing the possibility of having another baby is incredibly complicated.
When I saw the calendar this week, it took my breath away.
On the first of the month, I was making my breakfast and glanced over at the wall where our kitchen calendar hangs. I stopped what I was doing.
September.
Bill had changed the calendar, something I usually do, and it literally took my breath away, seeing it staring to me like that. Clearly I’ve known it was coming, known it would be here, and have purposefully planned for it in an effort to hopefully cushion the blow I knew was coming.
And there it was, still written on the calendar. Evelyn’s due date. September 5.
There’s several exclamation marks after it, a reminder from a time that’s long gone. It’s the only calendar I didn’t remove it from. After she died, I would find things in my planner or on my work calendar that were devastating to read. Her baby shower dates, due dates I had made for myself to have work done by in preparation for my maternity leave. A maternity leave that turned into a brief bereavement leave, four months early.
I know it’s just another date. In the grand scheme of my grief journey, it should just be another blip on the radar. There was and will be so many days that are just tinged with grief and meaning. But this will be the end of me looking down and holding my belly and saying to Evelyn: You should be here.
Every week since she died has been a reminder: I should be X weeks pregnant now. This has also been a reminder of how many weeks we have lived since she’s been gone. Evelyn died when I was 20 weeks pregnant, so we will soon have had exactly the same number of weeks without her as we did with her.
Now, she should really be here. We should be holding her for the first time. We should be bringing her home to the house we bought for her. We should be losing sleep because we’re caring for her and not because we’re consumed with grief and anxiety. There should be joy. There should be milestones. There should be our daughter.
We have a few things planned for the weekend to both distract ourselves and honor our sweet girl. We’re surrounding ourselves with family and are giving ourselves lots of grace. It’s not how things should be, but it’s what we have.
Milestones and important dates are just hard in grief. Anyone who has walked this path knows. I find myself already looking ahead to what would have been Evelyn’s first Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas and already dreading the weight those days will bring. It’s all hard. Parents weren’t meant to do this.
As we’re almost to this big milestone date, I’m looking back on how far we’ve come, and I’m still in disbelief that we’re here. The concept of time while grieving is baffling. It both drags on and flies by, and both feel awful. These days, I’m more equipped to handle my grief. My grief hasn’t shrunk, but I’ve grown. This has not been a small task, and I’m honestly so proud of myself for how far I’ve come. I’m comfortable with it now, and while my grief isn’t who I am, it is a part of me.
Moving past Evelyn’s due date is just another hurdle in our lives without her physically here. We will still keep loving her and honoring her memory and talking about her. Time is moving forward, and we have to as well. But she’s coming with us, every step of the way.
To Heaven and Back 