A More Difficult Journey

Pregnancy is not for the faint of heart. Social media can make it seem like everyone gets pregnant easily and nine months later, voila, healthy baby! We see the pretty parts—pregnancy announcements, cute “bump” photos, trendy nurseries, and hip onesies. We often get highly selective images of pregnancy and birth, which can be isolating when you experience fertility issues and/or loss.

Few people talk about how hard the journey is for many of us. I haven’t shared that I’ve had two “chemical pregnancies” since Ellis was stillborn last May. A chemical pregnancy (I hate that term) is basically an early miscarriage, where an embryo forms but does not result in a viable pregnancy.

I had my second one this weekend. This past Friday, Hunter and I were filled with hopeful expectation upon seeing a positive pregnancy test, yet when I tested again in the days following the line started to fade, giving way to anxiety and sadness. As I expected, I got my period yesterday.

When this first happened in November, I got a very, very faint positive test but then got my period the next day. I wrote it off as a fluke. But this time reality hit—my first baby was stillborn, and now I’ve also had two miscarriages. Tragedy does not earn you immunity points.

After three losses in less than a year it’s easy to assume that something is “wrong,” yet so far all the testing we’ve had before and after Ellis has shown that everything is “fine.” I’ve also read that chemical pregnancies are pretty “normal.” One of the hardest lessons I continue to learn is that when things go “wrong” we might not ever know why. There are inexplicable, devastating, perplexing events, both big and small, that happen in our world everyday.

I hope my experience is helpful to those of you out there who may be suffering in silence or who feel like the image of your life doesn’t look like other people’s images. To put it bluntly, this shit is hard! I hope to share a pregnancy announcement and baby pictures in the future, but I also want people to know the reality of our journey along the way. Love to you all and thanks for loving us.