The Acuity

Dear Elias,

I visited the OB/GYN last week, and it was awful.

I went alone; Baba was unable to come.

At the landing of the stairs, exiting from the OB/GYN area, I was met by a pregnant woman. I gulped and mentally steeled myself for the multitudes of pregnant women I would encounter during the appointment.

Every woman in the waiting area happily chattered away with her husband, one hand grasping a brown paper bag. Each was there for an OB visit; the brown bag held her urine sample to test for protein and glucose levels during pregnancy. There was a lightness and innocence of the visit for each couple, something I had once known and would not know again. They were glowing but I felt ancient and anemic inside.

An expectant father approached the front desk to make the next OB appointments, informing the girl of his wife's impending due date next week.

I tried to busy myself with my phone but could not think of which icon to press. I stared, dumbfounded frozen, at my home screen.

I looked up at the board showing which doctors were in, and caught sight of the name of the OB who ripped you out of me. The OB who said nothing to me after you were born; showed no look of compassion or condolence. The OB who performs D&Es on innocent lives.

The more I suppressed the growing lump in my throat, the faster the hot tears dribbled down.

Everyone stared at me without saying or doing anything. I remembered weeping heavily in the Labor & Delivery elevator after delivering thank you packages to our nurses, an elevator full of people yet no one said or did anything. I knew they did not know what to say or do because they had not experienced anything similar.

I felt like I was having a panic attack: I inadvertently found myself pacing outside the waiting area.  I was sweating while trying to focus on staying in my seat.

At last, I was called.

I was ugly-crying by the time we arrived to the exam room.

The nurse tried to hide her horror. "Did you just have a miscarriage?" she inquired.

Another flood of memories from my postpartum appointments for you, like the nurse asking if I was breastfeeding as soon as I walked into the room.

After squeaking out a brief explanation of what happened to you, the nurse (thankfully) tried hard to be comforting.

The nurse left, and I loudly sobbed into my thin drape.

Everywhere I looked was a fresh memory of you... funny how I could hardly remember anything about these appointments for your brothers.

And then I did not know where to look in that exam room.

Should I look at the adjacent wall full of holiday cards with newborn babes and joyful families? Or should I inspect the posters on the opposite wall of normal female reproductive health, the reason for which I was there because I was lacking it? No, or should I stare at the ultrasound machine screen we last saw you moving and alive? Or should I look at the large, framed photograph I gazed at when the OB told me that everything had come out, that there was no more remaining tissue inside?

Somehow, I made it through the remainder of the appointment. My doctor was kind and understanding.

I still never want to go back.

J's Processing

6 months in, J is still making sense of Elias' passing.

As younger siblings are born to his friends, J monologues aloud with contemplative pauses in between:

          "But where is our baby?"

          "Our baby died. Our baby was sick."

          "Why do my friends have a baby?"

          "I miss our baby."

          "Why do my friends have a baby?"

          "We need to pray to God for a healthy baby."

J will randomly tell me he misses our baby and that he feels sad.

More heartbreak.

Numbering My Days

I have been thinking about time lately.

They say time heals, but each ensuing month's disappointment of a new pregnancy just intensifies the pain of our loss. It feels like we have waited 1 year for a baby.

Our church's women's group is reading through None Like Him by Jen Wilkin.

Last week's read on God's eternality was a (good) punch to my gut. Wilkin skillfully expounds the incongruity in God's vs. our perception of time:

"Free to act within time as He wills, He exists outside of it. He is simultaneously the God of the past, present, and future, bending time to His perfect will, unfettered by its constraints. [. . .] The writer of Ecclesiastes goes on to say this: 'He has made everything beautiful in its time.' [. . .] " We expect Him to make everything beautiful in our time. But the One who determines the beginning and the end does not operate according to our timelines. He will work all things according to His purposes. Every sorrow or harm we suffer will be redeemed for good. But sometimes it takes more than one lifetime for the ugly to be made beautiful. [. . .] This does not mean what God is doing is not perfectly timed. (pp. 71-72)"

Nothing happens that is not unknown to Him, and all things happen at their appointed time.

Wilkin then suggests 3 ways to redeem our time.

1. To let go of the past. This includes idolizing life before Elias, or wondering what life would have been like with Elias. "We are allowed to grieve the passing of happy seasons, but we are not allowed to resent their loss. There is a difference between missing the past and coveting the past. The antidote for covetousness is always gratitude: We can combat a sinful love of the past by counting the gifts given in the present" (p. 75).

2. To let go of the future. This includes fretting over if/when God will give us a healthy baby. "We indulge sinful anticipation when we constantly covet the next stage of life. [. . .] As with sinful nostalgia, sinful anticipation is quelled by gratitude for the gifts we have been given in the present. We feed anxiety when we live in dread of the future" (p. 76). I must put away coveting a healthy child and not under the guise of being resigned to getting pregnant again.

3. To live today fully. "Redeeming the time requires being fully present in the present. [. . .] Note the generationless, everlasting timelessness of God laid against the grass-and-flowers brevity of man [in Ps. 90:1-4]. Moses responds to this knowledge with a supplication: 'So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom'" (pp. 76, 78).

May our patient God grow in my heart contentment of my today and wisdom from numbering my days.