De Ja Vu

6 months ago exactly from today, on May 21st, I found out that we had lost our first baby. Things had looked fine up to that point. Healthy ultrasound two weeks prior, healthy heartbeat, baby measured correctly. And everything just stopped at 11 weeks along. 6 months ago to the day tomorrow, on May 22nd, I had a D&C. It was horrific and tragic, but we chose to see it as a blessing. We believe that miscarriage occurs when chromosomes don't add up correctly, therefore, they are a blessing as the pregnancy stops before the baby progresses on too far and then later wouldn't survive or would have severe deficits and deformities.

Tomorrow, 6 months to the day after our first D&C, I am having another D&C.  I am almost 12 weeks pregnant, only things never looked right this time from our first ultrasound on. The pregnancy felt right - I have been very sick and tired, and with all the typical pregnancy symptoms. My HCG and Progesterone levels have been rising correctly. But the baby was not progressing normally on the ultrasounds. The baby was measuring behind. For the last three weeks we have begged and prayed and pleaded with the Lord to work a miracle inside me and provide us with a healthy baby. Prayed our dates were just off or we just had a little "late bloomer". On Tuesday, we found that His answer was not the answer we were hoping for.

A friend at work, who has also suffered multiple miscarriages and eventually had to go to other routes to have a child, was talking with me today. She said to me that she felt fertility problems of any kind, and definitely recurrent miscarriages, were a different kind of grief than most grief in this world. If you have gone through similar struggles, you would understand this. It's not just one event of grief, the miscarriage, the loss, but it's the little grief, the constant little things that cause recurrent grief over and over. It's the dates that you remember (I would have been this many weeks along, I would have been in this trimester today) every week from then on. It's the grief every month from then on, trying to get pregnant again and mourning the losses of your first tries all at the same time. Mourning when you aren't pregnant and mourning when you are. It's every baby you see or baby things you see in the store (or at work for me). It's every time you see a friend or a loved one get pregnant and have a healthy pregnancy, when yours just won't work right despite every effort. It's the due dates of your lost babies (for me, December 19th and June 14th will forever be hard days).

God doesn't promise us a life without grief or hardship. He doesn't promise us children or that things will always go the way we plan. This is hard for me as a planner. And this has not at all been my plan. But He does promise that He has a plan for our lives, whether it matches mine or not, one with a hope and a future. And He does grieve with us (I love the story when "Jesus Wept" as he heard his friend Lazarus died, even though he knew that Lazarus would be revived from the dead later).

Am I sad? Yes. Do I wish this were the way things happened with my life? No. But I also know that trials in life bring me closer to family and Christ than any other time. While we go through this again and are obviously devastated, we know God is writing our story. We know He has a plan and will see it on to completion, whatever route of having children His plan may be. And we know that the day we do have our first child, in whatever method that may come, will be ever sweeter because it has been so much work and tribulation getting there.