Losing something you never had

So, I have been meaning to write this post for some time. To be more exact – two years and four months and three days.

It is a post about life. A post about what happens when no one else is watching.

In November 2012, we lost a baby. I was pregnant and then I was not. Highest of highs, lowest of lows. I remember lying on the bed in our doctors office and the moment before she started with the ultrasound I got this nauseating feeling. In that second I knew that something was wrong and I was right. The next day I found myself curled up on a hospital bed with tear stained cheeks clenching my husbands hand.

During the days that followed, I cried so much that it felt like my brain was going to push through my skull. It sounds dramatic, but that is exactly the way I remember it. I cried when I went to sleep and I cried when I woke up. For two days C and I stayed in bed, watched ‘Walking Dead’, ate pancakes, slept, cried, talked and prayed. When I was alone I would beg God to wake me up, for it to be all a horrible dream.

Things got better as time went on. Some of our close friends knew about what we were going through, many of them didn’t. I was soon pregnant again and our lives took some crazy turns as we moved to a new country and took on a new adventure. A couple of months later I gave birth to the most incredible, healthy, cheeky & chubby baby girl who captured our hearts the second she came into the world. Big eyed and curious about everything around her. We were in love and all my fears could rest for a while.

Life has gone back to normal (or a new normal) and I do not think about our loss on a daily basis. But the experience has stayed with me. You see, while I was in the operating room God gave me a vision. He lifted the veil on our lives for a second and gave me a glimpse of..something. He showed me a little boy. Blue eyes, brown hair, around five years old. I saw his face in detail..a beautiful sweet face I had never seen before. Big blue eyes. It was the first thing that came to mind as I opened my eyes and I the first thing I told C about when I woke up. As time passed I have wondered about this vision, I wondered if God would one day give us this boy, if we would adopt a boy that looked like this or if this little boy was waiting for us in heaven. I don’t know. It is a mystery that I don’t dwell on too much. All that I know is in that moment I was not alone.

So this might seem like a odd time to share this, as this post has been in my drafts folder for more that a year. At some point I deleted it, and then rewrote it again. It’s deeply personal and something that is part of my story. But this post is for my friends that are hurting. It is for those friends who have been through much worse than I have and who keep doing life the best way that they know how. Your pain is real even if most people do not know about it. You are not alone and there is a God that cares deeply about you.

This post is for myself and the way that I treat people. To remind myself to pay attention to the people around me and what they are going through. To realise that when someone is shutting me out or if their behaviour seems off, they are probably working through things that has nothing to do with me.

We need to be kind, we need to reach out, and we need to share our stories.

They say that it take a village to raise a child, but raising a child starts long before he or she is born.