**TRIGGER WARNING** This blog post talks about pregnancy loss. If you are in a place where reading about this isn’t going to help or heal you, consider skipping this article!

I really never thought this would happen to me. I don’t know why I thought that? I don’t know what made me so sure? Suffice it to say that I was blissfully ignorant of the 1 in 5 statistic. How is it that so many women go through something like this, and yet girls like me can still naively believe that this sort of outcome isn’t even within the realm of possibility? I still don’t have answers, all I know is that six weeks ago I was finishing up my first trimester of pregnancy, and now I’m not pregnant anymore. 

Perhaps I should start at the beginning? Maybe if I start there I can make sense of this whole thing – although I seriously doubt that it makes any sense. These things hardly ever do. They’re just tragic and we learn to heal the wounds and live with the scars. 

The Beginning

I woke up on April 11, 2022 feeling nauseous. Like, NAAAAUSEOUS. I should have known then, but truly it didn’t cross my mind until I was hanging over the toilet, sick, with no real reason to be. A list of possibilities scrolled like flashing neon warning signs across my mind. Was it something I ate? Did I catch the flu at work? It’s flu season, isn’t it? Or is that in the fall? Wouldn’t it be crazy if I was preg– I stopped, trying to remember the last time that would have been absolutely impossible. It was more than a month ago. 

No. Way.

I scrambled into my car and arrived at CVS a whole two minutes faster than my iPhone anticipated. Feeling dizzy, and like I was going to throw up any second, I stacked my plastic basket with Ritz crackers, ginger ale, peppermint essential oil and a Clear Blue pregnancy test, because I couldn’t possibly risk a faint, does-that-count??, double line fiasco. No, not today. Today I either needed to be “pregnant” or “not pregnant”. 

I got home, still queasy and uncertain if that was because I was anxious or because my body seemed to be dumping hormones into me like Niagra Freaking Falls. I was 100% sure I knew how to pee on a stick but I read the directions just for good measure, then I set the test down on the counter awaiting my fate.

How crazy would that be? I thought, the “loading” sign blinking on the test. All that was left for me to do was wait the standard 2-3 minutes while the rest of my life hung in the balance.

 We weren’t planning on even talking about kids for at least another year. We were just figuring out how to be married. We were…

“Pregnant.”

In the time it would take my microwave to heat up my cup of coffee for the second time that day, my entire life had shifted. Suddenly, like a revelation, I was somebody’s mother. Life was forming inside of me. We had a baby on the way. 

Oh God, did this mean no more Diet Coke?

I called in sick, the nausea becoming unbearable, and I sat around the couch all day oscillating between two thoughts: Holy shit, this is crazy, and yeah, no, I’m definitely gonna throw up. It was an unrelenting dizziness, a revolving door of sheer terror and unadulterated anticipation and excitement. Out of the chaos and the turmoil that the first year and a half of marriage brings navigating between hurt feelings, the resurfacing of deep unresolved traumas, and OH-MY-GOD-PUT-YOUR-TRASH-IN-THE-TRASH-CAN, God had created a new beginning between us. If ever there was a time to believe in a sign, this new little one would be a living, breathing monument erected in flesh and bone. One that would help us remember that God creates the way forward when we feel like the wilderness is too wild a terrain to weather.

I couldn’t wait to tell Izzy…

We had always said we wanted to just be married for a little while before we brought more children into the mix. We thought in two, maybe three years we’d be ready for a baby. This certainly was a surprise but would it be a happy surprise or a worrisome one? It took all my strength to wait until dinner to tell him. 

Unsure of how he’d respond and if he’d need some time to process outside the restaurant, I told him to meet me in the car. Oblivious to the life-altering news I was grasping with both hands, he came to the car chatting away with his sister. I didn’t even say hi to him. 

“Hang up the phone.” I didn’t have to say anything else after that. He froze.

“You’re pregnant.” He said, shock hanging from his jaw like a weight. I’d told him earlier that day I wasn’t feeling well, but I’d never followed up, so I knew he might have some sort of an idea. 

“I’m pregnant, Babe,” and immediately I started to cry. I watched as the shock on his face spread into a smile, then sweet, bewildered laughter.

“Oh, my gosh, Babe! Wow! Oh, my gosh!” We were giddy. He hugged me tight and relief spread over me like a fresh load of warm towels straight out of the dryer. We prayed, we sat in silent disbelief, we told his sister. We were just so happy. 

We didn’t wait to tell the rest of our families. I always thought that telling everyone right away would be the way I’d do it. This way I knew my family would be praying and I could be sick and tired on Easter without having to pretend I wasn’t. It was ironic, finding out about this new life being formed on Holy Week. Izzy and I had been through so much already and had been watching the Lord make our relationship totally new through completely supernatural ways. This baby just felt like such a fitting end to this season that we were coming out of. It was a way in the wilderness and streams in the desert. It was the valley of dry bones rattling triumphantly to life.

It was an end and a beginning all at once, just like the story of Easter.

We announced to my family on Resurrection Sunday that we were expecting. We told Izzy’s family, too. Everyone was as excited as we were. We went in for our first ultrasound earlier that week, found out I was six weeks pregnant, and heard what every parent wants to hear: a healthy, rhythmic heartbeat. 

Other than the endless nausea, everything seemed to be going great. We were making space for the baby, finishing up house projects and finding new rhythms in life. It was six weeks of emotional bliss. Six weeks of planning, of joyful anticipation, of guessing which of our features this little one would have. We were so excited for this new person to enter our lives – and I was so excited for the first trimester to be over. I had all the symptoms but I kept hearing that the second trimester was pregnancy heaven so that’s what I kept my eye on. 

Just make it to your 12 week ultrasound. You’ll start to feel better then.

Oh, how I wish that would have been true.

The Unthinkable

I had my mom with me the day of my 12 week ultrasound because Izzy couldn’t get the time off work. I promised him I’d call with an update before I went into work, myself. It was no big deal. Nothing more to think about. Just a routine ultrasound to check on our little nugget before I turned my attention to the rest of my day.

The appointment was running behind schedule so my mom and I just sat in the exam room waiting, dreaming. We were anxious to know the gender although we knew that wouldn’t be for a little while longer.  When the doctor finally came in, she apologized for the delay and went right for the sonogram, making happy chit-chat as she went along. She set up the machine and placed the instrument on my stomach.

 I knew immediately that something was wrong. 

The chatter had stopped. There was silence in the room. She leaned her face against the screen like children lean up against the glass at an exhibit. She pressed hard on my stomach, searching. 

“You know, I’m just going to grab the other device because sometimes that gives us a clearer picture. I’ll be right back!” I was still. 

“I’m worried.” I said to my mom. She didn’t seem to be, so I focused on her sense of calm while we waited for the doctor to come back.

When she arrived, she brought the new device and a nurse. Something was wrong. Why is there a nurse here? Why isn’t she saying anything? What is going on? She inserted the device and stared at the screen for a bit. I saw much of what I saw the first time, the weird, cape-like shape of the picture of my insides, the sac, the little alien form, but this time something was missing.

“Sweetie,” She said matter-of-factly, “I can’t find a heartbeat.” 

And just like that, just as quickly as I had become a mother, I had just as suddenly unbecome one. Stripped of my crown, I was something else now: heartbroken, disappointed, life-less. I was an un-mother while our tiny little one lay motionless on the screen.

I can’t remember much of what she’d said to me after that. Between the hurricane of tears flooding out of me and the confusion because I’d had no signs of a miscarriage, I was, in a word: stunned.  It turned out that I’d had what they call a “missed miscarriage”. My baby had passed weeks prior but my body never recognized that we were carrying a no-longer-viable pregnancy so I’d had all the pregnancy symptoms and no signs that something was wrong. 

Walking out of the doctor’s office, I felt…strange. In the back chambers of my mind, I could hear this small echo, a voice saying gently and empathetically, “The Lord gives and The Lord takes away.” It was strangely familiar though I couldn’t place it. It felt like an old friend, an anchor…at the very least it was something to hold onto.

I sent my mom home, assuring her I would call Izzy and he’d be with me soon enough. I choked on the words when he answered the phone, and he rushed home to be by my side while we grieved the loss of the life God had created between us and all the possibilities that died along with it.

We spent the weekend on the couch. We held each other, we binge-watched “The Handmaid’s Tale”, and about every two episodes, we’d turn to one another, cry our eyes out and then continue on our marathon. He made me laugh. We ignored our phones. We went to the driving range. We prayed. We spent time with family. We ate good food. We watched a soccer game. 

All wasn’t well but it was in the weaving of those heartbroken moments and those fractions of time where something made us smile that the tapestry of healing began to take shape, God directing the pattern all the way through.

The Lord Gives + Takes Away

I kept hearing that familiar yet inexplicable refrain, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” when one day suddenly, it dawned on me where I’d heard it from. I remembered many years ago, watching an episode of “19 Kids and Counting” where Michelle Duggar goes in for an ultrasound of baby number 1,042, only to discover that she had miscarried. Through her tears, she manages to say “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.” She was quoting from the book of Job. Like Scripture often does, this phrase stuck with me, and surfaced when I’d had my own horrifying discovery. Surely, there was a lesson to be learned here. Surely, there was a reason it had begun to stir in my spirit.

Job was a faithful servant to God and was blessed materially beyond anyone else in his town or time. One day God allows the Tempter to test Job’s faith, and he takes everything: Job’s wealth, Job’s retirement fund, and even the lives of Job’s children. In the tragic unraveling of life as Job knows it, he takes a posture of mourning and says “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)

I think it’s often assumed that Job has a happy ending because God gives him 10 times the riches he had before this period of tragedy in his life but any parent knows that you can’t replace one child with another and tragedy changes you forever. Job’s story isn’t in the resolve of things, it’s in the enduring of them. It’s in how his soul was enlarged through grief, how his trust in the Lord was strengthened through the uncertainty, and in the depth of the person he became after living through this tragic turn of events. 

It certainly wasn’t happy, and I have to wonder if Job even cared about the restoration of all his wealth? He must have been such a different man when he got to that point. I wonder at all the things the story never tells us: how did he run his business differently? Did his demeanor change? What was the wisdom he’d impart to his sons and daughters after living through what he’d lived through? Did he ever cry again over the death of his first children?

My guess is yes because much to our dismay, grief isn’t linear. We spend the rest of our lives stumbling into it like a pair of shoes in the walkway of a midnight bathroom run; unexpectedly, surprisingly, and with nothing to brace our fall. But the grief changes us. It makes us softer, more compassionate, gentler with others and ourselves. It makes us more like Christ, the Man of sorrows. 

I’m not here to tell you everything happens for a reason. I’m not here to say that tragedies happen so that God can strengthen our faith, or make us trust Him more, or teach us to sing His praises in the midst of our tragedy. I don’t know why terrible things happen but when we begin to wonder “Why, God?” Why me? Why now? Why this? Why in the world? And we come up with no answer, we can cling to the knowledge of His heart for us. We can trust in His character. We can quell the worrisome “whys?” with an assurance that God will take the chaos of the universe and all the shit that life hands us and weave it into something beautiful, worthwhile, and immeasurably valuable. He is working out all things for the good of those who love Him and who are called according to His purposes – even for some of us, our un-motherhood.

I never thought I’d walk this path. I never thought I’d call grief a friend, but some days it’s the only proof I have that my little one was here, swirling in my abdomen, alive in rapid, racing heartbeats. And sometimes it’s a promise that one day I’ll get to meet them and see them and hold them and kiss their little cheeks and call them by name. 

Oh, how my heart yearns for the day…

In spite of the heartbreak, I’m still dreaming, still anxiously anticipating the day I get to hold my child when eternity finally makes its way here. I don’t want to dream with disclaimers, I don’t want to temper my joy with doubt. I want to stay soft and malleable – breakable even – because it’s only when our hearts are vulnerable enough to pierce that we can experience joy and love and the fullness of life. 

 I’m not the same girl I was before this loss, like I imagine Job wasn’t the same man after his, but somehow I am more whole and less so all at once. It’s like somehow losing something so precious has made me more complete in some absolutely upside-down way. It’s the way of the Kingdom, I suppose. Not that I’d ever want to repeat this season, not that I’d ever wish this on anybody else, but somehow I’ve changed, and I think it may be for the better. In our posture of mourning, and on our journey of healing, I am learning that no matter the “reason”, at the very least, God is with us in the tragedy. Closer than our own breath, gentle as a friend, God is near to the brokenhearted. 

Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

The Now

There has been a lot going on for Izzy and I, and so many of what feel like some foundational parts of our lives have shifted. Some of that has been sad, but so much of it has been just holding each other’s hands and watching God forge paths for us where there were none before. It is riveting and scary all at the same time because we know that wherever God’s taking us isn’t where we were originally planning on going.

But our job isn’t to figure out where we’re going, it’s just to follow Him wherever He leads.

As you may have noticed by now, that’s meant taking a step back from photography. I’m still letting the dust settle a whole year later. I’m watching the pieces land. I’m trusting in God’s wisdom and using it to make a decision that allows me to be still. I don’t know where God is taking me, but I know that running a million miles a second isn’t a life, and it certainly isn’t life to the full. So, I am intentionally slowing down so I can catch up to God. I’m be reading more books, writing more words, spending more nights on the couch, eating Hot Cheetos with the Diaz boys. I’m spending time in the quiet and spending time in His presence and I’m not going to worry about what’s next because I know whatever it is, the Lord will be with me in it.

So follow along if you need a good book recommendation, if you want to know what’s going on in Casa de Diaz, if you want to see all the cute Free People dresses I found at Marshalls, all my tried-and-failed Pinterest recipes, or if you want to hear some thoughtful sentences. I’ll be doing a whole mix of all of those things and more. I hope to see you here.

And for any of you struggling with the grief that’s made its home in the empty space where your baby used to be, I’ll be right there with you. We can cry and lift our eyes together.

xo,

Jess