Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness 2019: Our Story

Before you read any further, do me a favor. Go to YouTube or Spotify or wherever and type in “D.R.A.M sings Special” and play the Chance the Rapper song that comes up. Once it’s playing, then read the rest of my post.

In the fall of 2016 I was taking a few classes at Loyola University. Chance the Rapper’s album Coloring Book had come out that summer and we basically listened to it nonstop. Driving up and down Lake Shore Drive to and from Loyola a couple days a week, I would blast Coloring Book in my car while the sun sparkled off the lake and the high rises and every time this one particular song would come on (hopefully the one you’re listening to right now) I would get a lump in my throat and tears would spring up in the corners of my eyes. Sometimes a tear or two would even escape and roll down my cheek. I was always kind of puzzled about why this song was making me so emotional but I just figured it was a sweet song that tugged at my heart strings. 

Fast forward a couple of weeks and my period had not started on time. I told Justin and we decided not to do anything or bother worrying until the following Saturday, about 5 days away. When Friday rolled around and my period still hadn’t started, we went to the grocery store to buy a pregnancy test to take the following morning. I can still recall the feeling of standing in the aisle in front of the pregnancy tests, picking one out at complete random, handing it to the cashier, wondering had anyone noticed, what were they thinking? I felt extremely self conscious and at the same time it was such a nervous and excited rush.

That next morning after we read and reread the directions, I took the test and as we held each other, waiting for our 3 minute timer to go off, I giddily whispered, “I think I want it to be positive!”. This pregnancy had not been intended but as we lay in bed together that morning, completely shocked, stunned, awed, and thrilled, our hopes had already started to bloom. 

The rest of that fall, I listened to that song over and over, singing it with tears in my eyes every single time, imagining it as my baby’s lullaby. I vividly pictured laying in a hospital bed, Justin’s arms around me and my arms around this little baby already blossoming in my belly as I sang to it, “everyone is special, this I know is true when I look at you,”. This child was a precious gift that simultaneously scared the hell out of me and made me whole. Our life was a perfect bubble that fall as we kept the pregnancy entirely secret from our family and friends, intending to tell them the good news over the holidays when I would have been 16 or so weeks pregnant. 

But the world came crashing down around me one December night when I noticed a spot of blood while I was going to the bathroom after getting home from work. We talked to my midwife’s office where no one seemed too concerned but I knew I wouldn’t rest until we went to the hospital to be checked out. As we sat in the waiting room, I sobbed into Justin’s shoulder saying I just wanted to be seen so we could be told everything was ok and we could just go home. When they finally called us back, after lots of questioning they took me for an ultrasound and I asked if Justin could come because I was imagining this was our baby’s first ultrasound and I wouldn’t want him to miss that! I wasn’t imagining the reality which was that this was the moment we would find out that our baby was no longer living. When the ER doctor came back with an OBGYN, Justin said he knew instantaneously what they were about to tell us but until the words came out of her mouth (“Your pregnancy is no longer viable”) I had no idea it was coming. 

Those were the most utterly devastating days of my life. It is still the most gut-wrenching pain I can ever recall feeling. The pain from that loss left me feeling so completely alone for most of the entire next year. I kept track of how many weeks I would have been pregnant until our due date (June 22, 2017) rolled around and on that day, I held my client’s 13 day old baby in their precious, cozy newly postpartum cocoon and cried big fat tears into her fuzzy newborn hair. It wasn’t fair. We should have been in our own newly postpartum cocoon, with our own warm, cuddly newborn on my chest, not someone else’s. 

That experience of loss changed me forever. It will always be a part of who I am. My rainbows are here now but the second I hear the notes of the song I asked you to listen to, I can feel the joy that pregnancy brought me. I was giddy and naive and so blindly happy. It was one of the most beautiful times in my life. And in the very same instant, I can feel the hole that pregnancy left in my heart, the empty space that should be filled by that child who would be two and a half by now. I also now have a second hole for a baby who would have celebrated their first birthday last month. It’s crossed my mind several times lately that the journey of our family may yet leave me with further holes because once you’ve experienced pregnancy loss, that possibility will nag at your nerves every time you’re lucky enough to see those two pink lines. As many as one out of every four pregnancies ends in a loss and yet it’s the most isolating thing I’ve ever experienced. I grieved mostly in silence for over a year while the sisterhood of pregnancy loss likely swirled around me. 

I choose to share this story, despite the fact that it feels incredibly vulnerable, like I’m sharing a treasured secret because if you ever know this pain like I’ve known, and I pray that you won’t, I want you to reach out to me. I will sit in that pain with you. I will wrap my arms around you, I will FaceTime with you, I will sit silently on the phone with you, I will cry with you, I will acknowledge your pain because I know it all too well.