Stormy Seas

   I feel angry again. I wish I could figure out a way to get past that. I feel angry that I had things taken away from me. I had the baby taken away from me, and with it, other things too...I had my innocence taken away. My ability to have more children. Oh sure, I could go on to have more besides my little two month old boy I have now, but now with my medical history, I'm in the high risk pregnancy category. And neither I nor my husband want to go through a difficult pregnancy again. We also don't want to push our luck with having another miscarriage if we were to try again. And, our two month old has some medical problems of his own (kidney problems inherited from me), so we don't want to risk having another one that has the same problems. I think having him was our last chance at having kids, and I don't want to push my luck. I also struggle with depression and am on medication for it, and it always gets worse in pregnancy and in the postpartum period. I don't want to spend another 9 months or more battling depression. Because when you're pregnant, they worry more about the baby than they do you, so if that means restricting the antidepressant medication that you need, then they will do it. Regardless of whether you feel like complete crap or not emotionally, every day. If you can still eat enough for the baby, and you don't feel like killing yourself, then it doesn't matter if your marriage is tanking because of your awful mood or if you feel like you're neglecting your three year old toddler. So long as the baby's ok---it's all good. Or so the medical community thinks. So, I can't sacrifice another year of my life to this mood disorder on the hopes of having it pay off in the end. I feel angry about that because I feel like it's partly because of the miscarriage that I have had that choice taken away from me.
   I'm also angry that I don't have a little baby girl. All my teen/adult life I have wanted a girl. Two girls, in fact. Now I have two boys. My sister, she was going to have the boys in the family, and she did have two boys, but she also went on to have a little girl. I feel cheated. I wanted girls, so I could pass on things like sewing, knitting, painting, cooking/baking, cross-stitch, quilting, beadwork, and things like that. I don't think little boys would appreciate me trying to teach them how to knit or make quilts. After we lost the one baby, I thought I would like to have 3 kids altogether. And who knows---if I were able to try again, I might be able to have a little girl. But it's too risky to try again. What if something happened to me and my two boys ended up having no mother? I can't risk myself on the chance that I could get a girl. I could very well have 3 boys. I don't know that I want that many boys. I love my boys, but they are a handful. 
   If I had had the baby instead of her dying, I might have had a little girl. See, I don't know for sure the gender of that baby that died, because he or she was too little to tell the gender on a scan. But I just feel like she was a girl, whether that is true intuition or wishful thinking, I don't know. What I do know is that whether she was a she or a he, I would have welcomed either one. 
   
   My mom says if I don't have a girl, then I can just enjoy my niece, and look forward to girl grandbabies, but how can that be fulfilling? I want one of my own. My sister's daughter is not my daughter. She's a lovely, beautiful girl, and she's precious. But she's not mine. I also don't want to adopt---I just know that's not me. I don't want to deal with the potential problems emotionally that an adopted child has, from being torn from their parents at a young age. Even babies that are given to their new parents at birth, can still have emotional scars. I don't really want to go through another pregnancy, but at least that child would be mine. 

   It's so hard to get past the "I am angry that I lost so many things" to a place of acceptance and seeing the silver lining. Somehow, people seem to do that. But I have no idea how. How do you get from one place to another? How do you make that transition? I feel like I could get lost in my anger if I thought about it too much. At this point I don't see anything good from losing that baby. I don't see how it could be good for me---it has destroyed me.

Realizations

   Today I made a connection. I know that I worry a lot more post-miscarriage than I did before it. Things like imagining what I'd do if someone broke into my house, how I would feel if my husband died, how it would look if one of my living children died, etc. And I see now where that stems from: the feeling of me, as a mom, failing. When I lost the baby, I felt that I failed in my duty to protect the little life in me from harm. So if I can fail at that, I can fail to protect my living children from harm, say from an intruder or accident or any other external force. I can fail to protect my husband, too (even though that's not really my job, I still want to make sure he doesn't get hurt either).

   Because the unthinkable happened to me, I now have lost the naiveté that would allow me to think, "It would never happen to me." I used to think, well, I'm a Christian! So God will protect me from bad things happening to me! God will protect my children, my unborn, my family from harm. Well, I learned otherwise. Being a Christian doesn't protect you from bad things happening. God doesn't protect us, like I originally thought. I'm not even sure why people say that He does, because bad things happen to good people all the time. People get hit by cars, murdered, abducted, raped; they fall ill, they get cancer, they die. And sure, you go to heaven, but what about the families left behind, ravaged by their grief? Did God protect them from that? No. He stood by and let it happen. He doesn't cover us with His hand while the plague passes us by...no, he just lets it all hit us full force. 

As you can see, I've hit a major pothole in my faith. Something I thought was a given---God's protection---has been pulled out from under me, and it's really made me question my faith. Does God even care? Does He even love me? If He loved me, He would protect me from harm, wouldn't He? If He loves me, doesn't He love my unborn baby? Does He love anybody, or is it just an illusion? The hard questions come when you're faced with the reality of death. When it's no longer an abstract concept, but it has touched you with its cold, clammy fingers, then you begin to look deep within yourself for answers. And many times, those answers you had down pat really don't hold up water anymore.