pregnancy after loss – To Heaven and Back

Parenting After Loss.

I’ve been trying to find the words.

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.

Never Complete.

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.

It’s not easy.

But it’s mine.

One year of Evelyn.

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.

Pregnancy After Loss.

**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.

This is what pregnancy after loss is like.

One day at a time.