Six Years Later

 It was six years ago exactly. The hospital emergency department was humming with nurses bustling to and fro among patients, harsh UV lights and the smell of disinfectant. My face, calm in appearance masked a heart beating a million miles a minute as I and my husband kept reassuring ourselves and each other that everything would be fine, and that we would be seen soon. I was given a bed to lay down on, and in our little curtained cubicle we waited. Eventually a doctor came, stethoscope hung around her neck and told us that we could go home but instructed us to return the following morning for an ultrasound. She assured us it was merely routine, nothing to worry about, and she was sure everything was fine. We grasped on to that lifeline with both hands and believed her. Dutifully we did as we were told the following morning and at the ultrasound our world came crumbling down around us. 

If this sounds a little bit like the opening minutes of the pixar movie "Up" there's a reason for that - you might as well give my husband the moniker of Carl and I the name Ellie, because their story is our own. Six years ago today we found out that we were losing our little miracle and by the end of that week our peanut was gone, torn from my body in a birthing suite 8 months too soon. That same year I crumbled, and by the middle of 2017 I was off work on stress leave and barely functioning. As I sit here writing this the pain has dulled but has not left me - physical pain passes but in my soul there remains the grief that to this day still tears me apart. We have come a long way in six years. We had continued our fertility journey a little further before the full reality was conveyed to us: that having a child was not for us as written in our DNA. Shockingly I didn't turn my anger on God, or on myself. I saw it as a message that I had genuinely been asking for years: "God, please, if we are meant to have children please tell us. If we are not meant to have children, please please just tell us so that we know". I had prayed to God over and over to just give us an answer, and when I found out about my pesky chromosomes I felt somehow blessed that He had written the answer so clearly in my DNA that none could dispute it. For a myriad of reasons, we decided that our waiting and wishing had come to an end, and so that chapter of our lives closed 3 years after we lost our precious little one for good. 

It's now the beginning of 2023 - 3 years after we left that part of our lives behind, and six years since the miscarriage. There are days I am sincerely grateful to not have children as it affords us so much freedom and agency. I see parents down at the park when I'm walking my labra-daughter (and yes I do call her that!) and I think to myself "thank you God that I have the freedom to travel and enjoy my animals and to go about my life independently". There's other times when I watch the same parents down at the park and my heart aches. It's those times that I hold fur babies extra tightly, I laugh at their antics a little louder, and I count my blessings for they are many. I honestly don't think I would be able to live the way that I do if I had children. I can work and play with spontaneity and with whimsical abandon and I don't have to worry about babysitters or childcare or school holidays or basically anything. And when the pain hits me, when I think about my legacy dying with me, I take a moment to hold that hurt in my heart and remember that this is the life that God gave me - He directs my steps and He is good. I'm really proud of how far we've come, but I swear I will never forget that baby that never was. The crossroad has long since been past, but on days like this I take a moment and look behind me, and I hold on to the promise that one day, somehow, it will all make sense. And then, like now, I will shut the computer, wipe away my tears, stand up and move on to the next task, the next step, the next moment. 

Life may have been denied to my child, but I won't let it pass me by through grieving what was lost. Moments of pain come and go, but I hold on to the hope that somehow, some way, despite not having anyone to hand our memory to, that my life will somehow mean something and leave something when I am gone.