Pregnancy After Loss

As the title suggests, I am pregnant again. I'm currently 12 weeks and feeling it. The sickness is all day, and the aches and pains are building. There are moments when I feel overwhelmed and want to shut off from the world, but I am also always grateful. I am grateful for every extra day of pregnancy, every day this life still grows inside me, and I am thankful that I can give my Earthside or Heavenly angels another sibling. of course, I want the baby Earthside. Still, there is some comfort in knowing no matter what happens. This baby will have siblings.

As I am at the end of the first trimester, I will go over what it was like PLA (pregnancy after loss). I spent the first seven weeks constantly checking the tissue when I used the bathroom. I was looking for the sign of the end of the pregnancy, a sign I had grown to expect after two losses this year. I occasionally checked after that, but the further through I get, the less I look and feel it necessary to look.

The first ultrasound was so nerve-racking. I didn't want to go in. I was expecting an empty sack, but there it was, a little bean with its heart flickering on the screen. Strong and steady. I stared for a while and asked the radiologist, 'that baby is really there, right?' I told her I needed proof for later, so she printed me an image of the baby. I so wanted to take the whole monitor to record it as proof that life was growing inside me. I didn't make that request, haha. I held it together in there, but tears of joy fell when I got outside and called my husband to tell him.

Grief has undoubtedly been an interesting experience through this pregnancy in that I am so grateful to be pregnant right now, but I am also so sad and grieved over the loss of my two babies before this. As a mother to three, Earthside, I can tell you every child is distinctly different, and I know that the two babies I lost would have been no different. They would have been unique. They would have had a character, a way of behaving. They would have had their interests and dreams. I think that is often the hard part of loss. Knowing that you have lost something very real and life would have been very different if you hadn't lost.

Today instead of being in my first trimester, I would be in my third and the final few weeks of pregnancy. I would be expecting the baby any day from before Christmas until just after. There are days where I don't think about this, but then there are days where the grief catches me off guard, and I am crying uncontrollably in the car while listening to Christ Tomlins Noel or crying in Best and Less because I just walked past the baby Christmas clothing.

God, My heart aches for the losses, but I know that once I have had this child. I cannot say 'if or but' because if I had given birth to that first loss, this child would not be. I pray I feel contentment and acceptance of the miracle I will birth into the world so I can let go of the 'what if' and embrace reality. Remembering my angels, but no longer fighting the fact that they're gone. Amen!

There have been moments in this trimester where I have felt like I was suffering from PTSD or something. My mother, who has studied psychology, told me this: You have gone through a trauma, but what you are experiencing right now is not PTSD. It is a normal and just reaction to being in the same situation. You have thoughts and worries because you are pregnant again and had two miscarriages in your last pregnancies.

This brought comfort because I realized there wasn't anything wrong with me. Anxiety and fear over losing another baby are expected, especially after it has already happened to you or someone close to you. PTSD is when you still feel strong emotions and relive the experiences years after your loss.

I will be going for an ultrasound next week, so I will write about that second ultrasound after. Right now, I feel apprehensive about going in. I am feeling so sick with morning sickness, but I am still so worried that I will go in there, and they'll tell me there's no heartbeat or the sack's actually empty.