Loved and Lost… and Lost and Lost.
By: Leann Forsyth
Tags: Loss, Love, Mwc Death, Miscarriage, Baby

Image by Alex Green from Pexels

“Congratulations. You’re pregnant!”

I was almost shaking with the revelation. Pregnant! Of course, we’d been planning on this, we were supposed to be excited but I was nervous and scared. Would I be a good mother? Would I be able to care for this baby? Why had I done this? Maybe I wasn’t really ready.

The one thing I knew about pregnancy: you’re not supposed to bleed. So mark my surprise when only a few short days after the nurse told me I was pregnant, I saw the one thing I wasn’t supposed to see.

I had a miscarriage.

When it was all over, I laid in my room with silent tears falling down my cheeks, wrapped in a baby blanket that was too small to grant me any warmth. I wondered if I would ever feel warmth again. I felt empty, I felt cold. I didn’t really know what to feel.

Pregnancy should be about life, but when a pregnancy ends in death before you even have a chance to know the baby, it just feels wrong. It’s not what you want to expect when you’re expecting.

Over the next two years, this experience repeated itself three more times. It’s not what a woman wants to expect, but eventually it becomes what she does expect when it happens over and over. Each time I got a positive pregnancy test I worried.

The emotions I had to deal with every time I experienced a loss were vast and deep and often confusing.

Sometimes I felt responsible. I thought “if only I hadn’t taken that hot bath, had that flu medicine before I knew I was pregnant, binged on all that sugar a few days before I lost the baby. If only I hadn’t done those things, it all would have been different.”

Sometimes I felt relieved that I wouldn’t have to start this big, scary journey of motherhood yet. And of course, I felt guilty whenever I felt relieved. And other days I just felt this deep, aching, gut wrenching sense of loss. Often I cried without knowing exactly why I was crying.

Jamie Anderson says it so perfectly I can’t think of a better way to express it.

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot give. The more you loved someone, the more you grieve. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes and in that part of your chest that gets an empty and hollow feeling. The happiness of love turns to sadness when unspent. Grief is just love with no place to go.” — Jamie Anderson

I feel this to my core. They talk about loved and lost, but they don’t talk about loved and lost and lost and lost again. Enduring multiple miscarriages takes a toll on a woman. I didn’t tell many people about my losses, and as I’ve gotten older and wiser I wish I had been more open about it. It’s so hard to go through this, but going through it alone and feeling so cut off from others was not healthy.

After my fourth miscarriage I couldn’t do it any more. We stopped trying, we moved to a different part of the city. I went through therapy after a bout of deep depression, and I just took some time to heal, time that I hadn’t given myself before.

Almost two years after my last miscarriage we decided to try again, and I was so scared. We’d found a really good OB/GYN, I’d learned some things about my medical situation that could have been the cause for my previous miscarriages, so I took a nervous breath and tried again.

We got pregnant almost instantly. But seeing those two pink lines on a pregnancy test was not a relief. Questions plagued my mind: would I ever meet this child? Or was I subjecting myself to another round of heartbreak? How long would this pregnancy last? 9 months… or 9 weeks?

The doctor ran blood tests to check my hormone levels and said there was a certain hormone that was borderline low. He wanted to give me a prescription for it, and I was chomping at the bit to get that prescription. I was hopeful that this would be the ticket, that this would be the thing I needed to be able to carry my baby to term. And then, only one day after starting the medication… I began to bleed again.

I’d always wanted a fairly big family. I grew up with four siblings and I loved it. That night when I started bleeding, my husband and I went for a walk, and I laid in the grass under a tree and cried to him. I said, “I’m going to have as many miscarriages as my mom has had babies!” I was sad, I was angry. I was ready to give up trying to conceive forever.

But a miracle happened. I continued to bleed and spot for another two weeks but never bled too much. I never lost the baby. Twenty weeks later I was told it was a girl. Several months later I was getting kicked in the ribs, or being kept awake at night with hiccups that weren’t mine. Nine months later I held a tiny little child in my arms and as we looked into each other’s eyes we realized there was such a thing as love at first sight.

To this day, the babies I lost still touch my heart, and despite how hard it was to go through those losses, I’ve been able to help many, many other women who have had the same experiences. Motherhood is an incredible gift, and losing that gift before you even get to open it is incredibly hard. We are always touched by our children, whether we hold them in our arms or not.

Every day I wake up to the voices of my children and realize how blessed I am to have them. Yes. I have loved and lost and lost and lost. But I have also loved and loved and loved and loved.