I Lost a Baby

Ten years ago, I lost a baby.

Jared and I got married and had wanted to wait a few years before starting a family. We wanted to enjoy our time together and build a life before we welcomed children. We went to Hawaii on an incredible honeymoon and I came home pregnant. Whoops!

Having always wanted to be a mom, I was over the moon excited. It wasn’t what we had wanted but it happened and we couldn’t have been happier. Being young and naive, we told everyone, right away. Telling my family I was pregnant was probably the best feeling in the world. Jared and I couldn’t have been more proud and anxious to have that baby in our arms.

Eight weeks pregnant, the cramps and bleeding started and just like that, a life was gone. My world was shattered. I spent the entire summer mourning the loss of the baby and the loss of being a mom. I was a recluse. Miserable. I didn’t know how to continue on with life.

At one point, dear friends of mine actually forced me out but I was still bleeding pretty bad. We were out to eat and I came back from the bathroom soaked in blood. They took me next door to K-Mart and we got new undies and pants so I could continue on. Not a highlight of my life but I remember it like it was yesterday. I was so ashamed. Ashamed of the situation at hand. Ashamed I had lost the baby. It was my fault. But I had to move on. I wasn’t the first woman to have lost a baby and I wasn’t the last. It happens often, to many. And it truly wasn’t my fault but it just took me a while to realize that.

I don’t talk about my miscarriage often because so many sad, terrible memories come flooding back. But every once in awhile I think about how I’d have a ten year old daughter right now. Everything else in my life would be different.

A few years ago when Lyla was little she was sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch. She said to me something about her sister. I told her she was being silly and she didn’t have a sister. She insisted that she did too have a sister; a big sister and she was 7.

My mouth dropped open and I almost passed out right there on the floor. I don’t believe in ghosts or spirits or any of that crap honestly. But my little girl was so convinced that she had a big sister so at that moment in time I lost all sense of prohibition and allowed myself to believe. I believed that I had had a daughter who had passed and she was looking out for her little sis.

I never lost that baby, but she was there, somewhere.