One Year Later.

A year ago, today, was the day the ultrasound tech let me know there was no beating heart in our baby. That’s it. Just a quick scan, a click of a button that made a machine shut off, and one sentence: okay, there’s no heartbeat — I’m sorry, this happens all the time. And that was that. I said okay. I stood up, fixed my clothes and took a long walk to the end of the hall to wait for a doctor to explain the unexplainable. It was a terrible walk, but nothing compared to walking from that room, all the way down the hall, out of the office, to the elevator, down four flights, through the hallway, out the entryway, across the parking lot to my car. I started the car, put on a song, and drove home.

The days that followed were traumatic. My body was uncooperative during the miscarriage, not even knowing it was happening, which meant I needed to have a D&C. I cried and cried and cried. I didn’t even know it was possible to cry so much. Surely, tears dry up? Eventually you run out? The first week was difficult but I still held on to hope that they were just… wrong. I thought, when I went back and had another ultrasound, there was going to be heartbeat. Of course there would be. And of course, that’s not how it happened.

After the surgery, I was just in so much pain so I would cry plus I was devastated and so I would cry. I would be with my children, and have to leave the room to cry. I would drop them off at dance class and cry in the car. I would do bath time and cry while they were splashing in the bubbles. I would read bedtime stories and go cry myself to sleep. And when I woke up, I would still be crying. I would just… cry.

There’s a line in a song “desperate people find faith, so now I pray to Jesus, too”. And that’s how I felt. I would stare at my ceiling in the middle of the night and ask what I did wrong. I questioned everything. Myself, my body, my skills and abilities as a mother. I felt like I needed to get out of my body and I couldn’t. I had to will myself out of bed in the morning to go to work. I couldn’t watch TV. I would try and then realize that 30 minutes had passed and I had no idea what I was watching. I couldn’t listen to music. I couldn’t be with my kids. I was in the room, but I wasn’t there. Well obviously you weren’t allowed to keep this baby, you can’t cope. And then I would cry some more.

The weeks and months that followed were painful, physically and mentally. I returned to the doctor multiple times in February and just kept saying I don’t feel well. I don’t feel the same. Something is wrong with me. And they gave me a prescription for zoloft. I started taking it and about a month later stopped crying. I started sleeping. I stopped reading reddit forums about miscarriage. I was no longer obsessed with the idea that I did something wrong. I started being able to focus on my kids, to laugh at sitcoms, and to sing my favorite songs. But I was still in pain. In late March, they decided to check my hCG levels and do another ultrasound which revealed my body still thought I was pregnant because they didn’t actually remove the entirety of the contents. With that news, any progress I had made — fell apart. I was right back to where I was on January 12th — walking down that hallway, very much alone. In a — and-the-hits-keep-coming-scenario they also said that in addition to a second D&C, I needed a hysteroscopy because they were concerned something they saw on the ultrasound was cancerous. To say that I was apathetic would be an understatement. I didn’t even cry. The tears had finally just… run out.

By April, my body wasn’t in pain anymore. My mind wouldn’t stop racing and I just kept telling Sean that I felt like I needed to do something, to move, to… go, to run? I couldn’t explain it but he said, then go run. As a non-runner, I brought myself to the track near our house every other night for a month. I put headphones in, listened to Eminem from 1999 and ran and ran and ran. It wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t fast or graceful and even though it made me feel like my lungs were going to burst out of my chest, it was the first time I felt like I could breathe.

In May, we discussed trying for another baby. And every negative pregnancy test would bring me to my knees. In June, I finally made it off the waitlist for a local therapist who specializes in baby loss. I didn’t want to go. It had been five months and by then I knew this wasn’t my fault, I knew my feelings were valid even though I had living children, I knew it was okay that I was triggered by my friends having babies, I believed I was on the right track to healing. And then in July, I got a positive pregnancy test and it broke me.

Am I replacing the baby we didn’t get to have? Does this happy pregnancy news take away all the pain from the last time? Is this happy pregnancy news? What if the same thing happens? Will I make it? All of this coupled with the due date in August, sent me spiraling.

And the thing is, in a lot of ways I feel like I’m still walking out of that exam room like I did last January 12th. I’m still hovering somewhere between the painfully long hallways, the uncomfortable elevator ride, and the safety of my car. That feeling of just keep putting one foot in front of the other is what I have every day. Just keep going. Just keep moving. Hold your breath if you have to, but just make it.

I still think of the months that pass in terms of what I lost. I still think that I should already have four babies. I still imagine if the baby was a boy or a girl, and what we would have named him or her. I wonder about personality, and family dynamics, and what our life would be like. I’m bitter about starting over, having to try again, and about the even larger age gap between the kids that the loss created. I’m upset I never got anything to remember the baby by — no memories, no ultrasound pictures, nothing. So now I wear four rings on my ring finger; one with a name of each kid plus a ring with four little hearts on it to represent our fourth little baby that would have come on August 4th.

I’m also just sad about the year being, well… so sad. It was the worst. The worst. But even through the sadness, I know there’s a lot of happiness, too. There was a lot of good that happened to our family in these last twelve months. And I think that’s what I’ve learned. Two things can be true at the same time: utter devastation and pure joy. You just have to take turns and make choices on what to feel in the moment.

And I miss you in the morning when I see the sun. Something in the orange tells me we’re not done.