This is a very real look at what miscarriage looks like in my life. If you’re sensitive to this topic, or you don’t want to read something very personal, please feel free to skip this post. My intention is not to make you uncomfortable, just to remind you that you are not alone in your grief if it’s something you’ve also experienced.

April 21, 2018
It should have been the very happiest day of my life. Instead, it was a day just like any other. My husband didn’t even remember that that date had significance, and I couldn’t bring myself to remind him it should have been our due date. Sometimes just speaking the words is too overwhelming.

Miscarriage robs you of (what should be) precious moments. It arrives unannounced, breaks in when you’re just beginning to feel safe, ransacks you, and leaves you bleeding on the floor. The outside still looks perfectly normal, but the inside is wrecked entirely. Unlike other injuries, miscarriage leaves you with a disproportionate amount of emotional pain for the physical injury. Those wounds remain open and bleeding long after the body has healed.

April 21, 2019
The stabbing pain is nearly gone; that part is a distant memory. I don’t find myself uncontrollably sobbing on a kind stranger’s shoulder in the church bathroom while the baby dedication takes place in the sanctuary. I don’t run to the bathroom to cry when a friend asks me to take a photo of all of my other friends with their babies, and all I can think is that I should be in the picture rather than taking it. People don’t say insensitive things with good intentions anymore—hell, they probably don’t even remember at all. And they shouldn’t. It’s not their responsibility.

I’m not planning any First Birthday parties. There aren’t any gifts for a monogrammed Easter basket hidden in a closet. I don’t have any Feltman Brothers Jon-Jons or smocked dresses waiting for the perfect first-year portrait. Motherhood almost feels like a distant, unattainable thing. Something that happens to other really lucky people, but maybe not me. Maybe the 21 children I’ve had the privilege of nannying for over the last 15 years are the only ones I’ll ever love like my own.

I don’t pretend to know how my story ends. Adoption may be on the pages yet to be written. Maybe it’s fertility treatments. Perhaps it’s growing old surrounded by my rescue animals. I do know that I love a faithful God, who, for reasons I don’t understand, said “not now, not this one.”

In the words of one of the most wonderful humans to ever live, Mr. Rogers, “It’s not so much what we have in this life that matters. It’s what we do with what we have.” So here I am, using the grief and pain to remind you that you are not alone if this is something you’ve experienced. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last year and a half, it’s that there is no time-stamp on grief. It comes and goes, sometimes in a tsunami that wrecks everything in its path. Sometimes in a gentle, rising tide that leaves you stranded alone on a sandbar watching everyone on the shore going about their lives, and you’re just wondering if you’ll ever make it back to shore in one piece. I’m here to hold your hand and stand with you—no matter what comes.