I never had a strong desire to be a mother.

Having children was always something I assumed would just happen at a later point in my life, but motherhood wasn’t something I aspired to. I didn’t hold the romantic view of motherhood that so many other women seemed to around me.

More than anything, I feared it.

I feared the enormous responsibility of parenthood. I feared the loss of my freedom. I feared all of the struggles those around me with littles seemed plagued by. I feared being a single parent, as my husband is called to military chaplaincy and will spend a large portion of time away from his family.

The thing I feared the most though, was having something in my life that I loved that much. Something I could potentially lose or see in pain.

So, my husband and I agreed we would wait until after we were both out of graduate school to discuss having children. This bought me some time to grow and truly reflect on my readiness for motherhood.

It was the day before our 6th wedding anniversary, just 2 months before he would finish his last semester of Seminary that we found out I was pregnant.

How I Knew

I had been feeling extremely tired for about a week. I remember falling asleep around 8 pm one night that week and sleeping until late the next morning. I assumed it was simply PMS and that my fatigue was simply because my period was due any day and ignored the symptom.

Just a few days later, I began cramping just like every other month and I prepped for that time of the month to begin. And it did, barely, and then abruptly stopped.

I thought that was so strange. It had never happened before and as I was talking with my husband about it, he suggested I google it.

The first search result terrified me: implantation bleeding.

I went immediately into denial mode. I brushed it aside, putting that possibility out of my mind, thinking my period might still come. The next day though, I woke up with a feeling that I was pregnant and that I needed to know now.

My husband drove us to the store to get a pregnancy test and when we got home, I took it and we waited and held our breath outside the bathroom.

Positive Result, Mixed Feelings

When we opened the bathroom door and saw the blazing positive test, my immediate reaction was overwhelm and shock. My husband’s immediate response was unmitigated joy. He squeezed me in a hug and shouted “you’re pregnant!!!” and began to laugh.

After a few moments wrapped in my husband’s arms, I felt the panic begin to subside and a smiled crept onto my face. I was pregnant and it was going to be okay. We would figure out whatever we needed to together.

I moved quickly from overwhelmed to overjoyed.

We spent the rest of that day basking in happiness and dreaming up fun ways to tell our loved ones about this new little life.

Making Preparations

I’m a planner, so my immediate reaction was to start researching. I wanted to learn all I could and be as prepared as possible.

I immediately began googling and with the help of some simple calculators online, I found my baby’s due date would be around July 4th, 2020. We found out very early, and I was roughly just 5 weeks at the time.

I researched OBs, got recommendations from friends and made my appointment for my first ultrasound. I ordered some maternity clothes that happened to be on clearance. I downloaded as many pregnancy podcasts I could find and I joined a few groups on Facebook of new moms due the same month as me.

We started dreaming of baby names and wondering if it was a he or a she.

We made plans to tell our families at Thanksgiving and then to announce it to the world around Christmas.

But just as soon as it began, it came to an abrupt end.

Just a few weeks after joyfully learning about my pregnancy, something in my body began to change. Before we even had the chance to tell our families, the cramping and bleeding started.

I called my doctor’s office shaking and in tears, trying to explain what was happening while keeping my voice even and composed. I woke my sleeping husband, trying to mask the panic in my voice as I explained I need to go to the OBs office for a blood test.

But before I could get the results back, my body and intuition told me what I already knew. When I was just over 8 weeks pregnant, our little one went to be with Jesus.

Even still, when the nurse called the next day to confirm it, my heart broke into a million little pieces. The ground I was standing on felt like quicksand and the future that was once so clear began to fade into nothingness.

What followed was the most physically painful thing I’ve ever experienced. Next, was days and weeks of waves of grief and guilt, unplanning plans, canceling doctor’s appointments, telling those who knew about the baby and those who hadn’t been told yet and learning to accept the new future that laid before us.

One of the hardest parts of my miscarriage was watching my husband grieve.

My husband adores children.

At every family gathering, he is the one running around with them, playing with them, and making them laugh. He has always wanted to be a father. If it were up to him, we’d have a small army already, but in deference to my fears and to school, he put those desires on hold.

To see him lose something he so deeply desired was hard. It broke my heart almost as much as losing the baby did.

A few days after we found out, he looked at me and said through teary eyes, “I don’t know how to move on from this.” He didn’t know how to make sense of it and neither did I. I watched him cry and wrestle with his anger and his faith and try to find a new normal.

As we grieved together, we both realized we were faced with a choice: we could stay stuck in hollowness we felt in the present, or we could look up and look for hope in the future. We could choose trust that God had a purpose for our experience and let Him in to heal us instead of pushing Him away.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.
Psalm 34:18

Moving Forward

I’m naturally a very positive person, but it took longer than I expected for the fog of this grief to lift. And while it is still with me every day, a lingering whisper in the shadows, it isn’t overwhelming anymore. Through this, I learned that my grief isn’t the enemy and I found some peace when I welcomed it into my life like a friend.

Instead of fighting it away, I started asking questions of my grief. What could I learn here? How could I grow from this? How will I carry this with me?

One of the most comforting things that we experienced was when we decided to pull ourselves to church the Sunday following the loss of our baby. Something in my spirit rebelled against my body and mind’s desire to stay in bed.

When we arrived, we soon found out why. That Sunday, there was a guest speaker preaching about heaven. As soon as he started talking, my husband and I looked at each other, knowing we were supposed to be there to hear it.

We cried together when he spoke about unborn babies and small children being held by loved ones gone before, waiting for their parents to reunite with them.

We were reminded that even though we didn’t get to meet them here on earth, our little one was in heaven with Jesus, waiting to see us one day.

It made heaven so much more real to me than it ever was before.

After that message, my heart and my body began to heal.

Finding Purpose in the Pain

All throughout this experience, my prayer was that God would use my experience for a purpose. I prayed He would make this little life, no matter how brief, have meaning. I prayed that this experience would only show me His goodness in the midst of my pain, but that He would help me to do the same for others.

I prayed He would use it to deepen my faith.

I got an answer to that prayer just shortly after my husband returned to work. A friend of his sought him out for comfort because his wife had just had a miscarriage at nearly the same stage in her pregnancy as I did. My husband was able to offer him empathy and a full understanding of his grief. He was able to pray with him and grieve with him (Romans 12:15). His friend relayed to him later that having someone to talk to who understood his pain was unbelievably helpful.

As we shared our news with our close friends and family, we found that miscarriages are so much more common than I realized. And now I’m far better equipped to minister to women I’ll meet in my future who are experiencing this same grief.

Nothing is wasted in the Kingdom of God and that includes that loss of this precious life here on earth. Their memory will live on every time I get to offer empathy and understanding to another grieving mother.

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”
Romans 8:28

My baby changed my heart and my life forever; I am different and I carry that with me everyday as I move forward.

I learned so much from this experience, like how to praise even in grief, how to see God’s goodness when nothing feels good at all and that I don’t have to be afraid of being a mother anymore, because I already am one.

At first, we tried aggressively to get pregnant again after our miscarriage, but as of the posting of this blog, that hasn’t happened yet. Months have gone by with nothing but negative tests and with each one, I’m having to learn to trust God’s timing for my life.

Maybe we’ll grow our family this year, maybe we won’t. Maybe I’ll be pregnant again, maybe I won’t. But my hope and happiness is not dependent on that.

I know I will end up in exactly the place I was meant to be and one day, our family will grow. It just might look different than we hoped it would.

March 2021 UPDATE: I’m leaving the above words because I want to remember that surrender to God’s timing, but as of the update of this post, we are expecting a baby girl in May of 2021! You can read more about that incredible miracle here:

Our Journey to Parenthood: How Struggling to Get Pregnant Grew Our Faith

1 in 4 known pregnancies end in miscarriage every year.

Statistically, it is likely that you or someone you know has experienced the loss of a child through miscarriage. It happens so much more often than I ever knew until I experienced it myself.

If that is you, here are a few things I want you to hear today:

You are not alone.
Your baby’s life mattered.
There is no timeline for your grief.
It is okay to move forward and have hope.

My prayer is that my story has helped you feel more understood and less alone if you’ve experienced a miscarriage yourself. If you haven’t, I hope hearing my story will help you to better understand a loved who one has experienced this kind of loss or be better prepared to help a loved one if they do.

Your Sister in Christ,