Happy New Year. It’s another foggy night here in Shadow Lake, but people are still launching fireworks anyway. It’s been a week of foggy nights, cloudy days, and the occasional sunny day. We have had a few warm days, pushing into the 50s, but tonight, we settle back into frigid lows, with a potential for snow. There were attempts all day at snowing, but just the odd little speck flying around. Nothing that will stick.
These days, I read Proverbs 31 a lot. I want to consider the qualities that King Lemuel’s mother thought valuable enough to teach her son. The qualities that make a woman so wonderful that she is worth more than rubies, and her husband never lacks confidence in her. Someone who brings good to him all her life. I frequently doubt my abilities there, especially because when my husband gets sick with one of his headaches, it makes me feel angry. Things to work on this year, I suppose.
One verse that stands out to me at the close of this year is this, “She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come.” (Pr. 31:25). If I can be completely honest, the thought of this brought me to tears the other day. Of course, inconveniently at the dinner table. After excusing myself to collect my feelings and thoughts, I came to a better understanding of why this affected me so strongly.
I can’t see where I’ll be a year from now. We plan to move sometime this year, so physically, I’ll be somewhere different. But it’s deeper than that. Will I be holding a new baby this time next year? Or mourning more losses? Will I be a kinder and more generous woman, tethered to some deep peace that my faith is supposed to provide? Will I be a good mom and a faithful wife? I don’t look at this year with the same naïve and hopeful joy I used to look at the new year. Just because it’s a new year, doesn’t mean the same troubles and pains of this year will suddenly end.
This year, 2024, has been one of the worst years of my life. Probably the worst year, but I’ve had some bad ones, so I leave it there. This time last year, I knew I was pregnant, and I was anxiously awaiting those precious two lines that prove it to everyone else. They never came, and my confusion turned to anguish as I experienced my first miscarriage at the end of January.
Because it was such an early loss, it was dismissed out of hand as just being the result of my first period since having my son, Little Lion, 17 months earlier. My husband refused to take me to the ER not believing me that I was pregnant, and dismissing the amount of blood as being unusual and worth wasting the time and money on, so my dad took me instead.
The blood pregnancy test came back negative, which wasn’t surprising, considering no test had ever come back positive. The ER doctor even had the nerve to tell me that my dizziness was due to anxiety. I guess the copious amounts of blood I had lost didn’t factor into her diagnosis. (Already by the end of my first day, I had bled more than is typical in 5-7 days). I later researched how this could have happened, and learned if a miscarriage happens early enough in a pregnancy, the hCG can be completely gone from the blood before the miscarriage passes. I’ve also had enough periods and miscarriages since then to confirm that first loss as a loss, and not just some figment of my imagination.
I was weak for a long time after this, having become anemic (that’s how much blood I lost!), to the point where I lost my energy and breath very quickly. I would fold laundry sitting, and spend much time just resting. I didn’t start to feel stronger for months. Thankfully, it was still cold out, so there wasn’t much impetus to take my child on walks and expend a lot of energy.
I got pregnant again in February, and this time, after a few weeks of anxiously waiting, I got my very faint positive. I showed my husband that day, and he was excited, but later admitted that he couldn’t see the second line. So, I kept taking tests. The first one had been a Clearblue test, and then I was out and switched back to the cheaper stick ones. None of them came back positive. Distraught, I threw out the first one, the faint positive.
Towards mid-March, that baby passed too. This time, I stayed home. It wasn’t a surprise, and I wasn’t as absolutely shocked as I had been in January. I wasn’t even terribly sad by the time it was done. I wasn’t completely ready for a second baby, so there was some relief there. Even gratitude. Like, I know this baby is with the Creator, who will do a much better job at caring for him/her than I would have done.
March, April, May, ticked by. I joined a Bible study that I hardly participated in. I hardly remember much else, except the uncertainty of whether we would make the trip out to visit family and attend my sister’s wedding at the end of May. We did, thankfully.
That trip was probably the highlight of the year. We drove through Colorado, and had many delightful stops on the way. Even Utah had it’s charm, though it was sorely lacking for places to stay or eat. Once we hit Nevada, we were in sweltering heat, and it stayed that way for most of the trip, until we heading back home from Texas. My car also had started having problems with the A/C before out trip, so the heat was pretty rough, especially in New Mexico, which was literally so hot that it was on fire.
But seeing family, family I hadn’t seen in absolutely ages, was the real piece of cake. Different aunts and uncles hosted us. I saw my younger brother, whom I only recently met as an adult. Even my (formerly?) estranged mother and I got together for a meal and to discuss old wounds.
I think often of the impromptu barbecue that we held at my youngest aunts, with my sister and her family, and even our grandmother (who had just met all her grandbabies that day). It was so incredibly special. So deeply ingrained as a core memory.
When we finally came home, I mourned those days in California, wishing my son could grow up with his cousins, and I could be close to family. I felt so sorry for him that he was stuck with just me in our tiny 600 square foot home, without even a yard to play in. I still do. I feel so sorry for him that he’s all by himself with me. He really deserves so much more, and he doesn’t even know it.
June and July… well, half of June was taken up by our trip. Other than that, what did we do? Besides watching an incredible fireworks display from our porch, not much stands out. Oh, I remember now. I had joined a community garden with great zeal, but the reality of gardening with a toddler was very different from the dream. It was just too difficult to manage, but I tried.
August came, my son’s birth month. We eagerly planned his birthday, and I became pregnant again. This time, I was ready. I was so excited, I told my son, “You’re going to be a big brother, mommy is having a baby!” My husband’s birthday was coming up at the beginning of September, so I kept it a secret until then.
My son turned two, and the next week, we celebrated my husband’s birthday as well. His gift was the positive pregnancy test and a small onesie that I had dug out of Little Lion’s outgrown wardrobe. He was so shocked and excited, that he cried.
After that, I worked very hard to find a homebirth midwife outside of our state. My state is the only state in the entire USA that still prohibits midwives from attending homebirths. I am extremely and exceedingly upset about this, I’ve written senators, I wrote the papers, I even wrote an article for the paper, but we haven’t seen much traction. Hopefully this upcoming year we do. Anyway, I digress. I had to find someone outside of the state.
There is a midwife just over the border that delivered my friend’s baby, but she was going to be on vacation around when I was due. So, I had to expand my search radius.
Des Moines was promising until all the available midwives nervously asked about my c-section which made me nervous, and that’s a big nope. Next was Kansas City, and I found a delightful midwife team there. They were perfect. We literally drove there and back to meet them and regretted it about halfway down, and all the way back. It was a long drive, and my poor Little Lion was absolutely miserable on the way home. We (I mean, I) did not factor in that instead of being 2-3 hours there, it was actually… 6 or possibly more hours of driving because we would be coming back on the same day. So, Kansas City was out. Even though I liked the midwife quite a lot.
I remembered the birth center in Lincoln and looked them up. Well, after being acquired by the hospital, they were closed in June, despite a lot of protests. Surprise, surprise. Why would a hospital want the competition?
It left me nowhere to go but back to the hospital. I was exhausted after spending nearly two months fighting awful morning sickness, fatigue, and hunting for the care team of my dreams. I did not want a repeat of my first birth, where I really think the care team played the biggest role in me ending up with a c-section.
My husband told me to just wait and we’d look some more later. And then… someone posted in a homebirth group that I’m a part of, looking for a midwife in our area! I posted something salty about midwives not taking anyone in our state anymore, because they’d been scared off by prosecutors. But someone posted something very intriguing, asking the original poster to message her. You bet my husband told me to message her, so after dragging my heels a bit, I did. And lo and behold, I was connected to a homebirth midwife in my area.
We set up an appointment a few weeks out to meet, right after the first trimester ended. I ended up losing my baby, a boy from what I could tell, the week after getting in touch. She did what she could to help, and we occasionally keep in touch.
I ended up going to the ER because the placenta hadn’t passed for several days, and they told me to find an OB to get to the bottom of all these losses. That ER was absolutely delightful. We literally drove almost an hour to go somewhere where I felt like I would be treated with respect and dignity, and I’m glad we did, even though I felt guilty about taking everyone’s time.
I even apologized to my husband, Honey Badger, about the choice to go so far out, and he told me that he was there to support me and would do whatever it took to help me. Such a big change from January, and it was so healing. The whole trip to the ER healed some wounds that he’d put in me at the beginning of the year with the first two. There was finally some acknowledgement.
I did get connected with an OB, and she was so kind and understanding. I actually wish I had gotten in touch sooner, but I had a stigma in my mind about OBs, so I’d avoided them. Maybe things would have been different. Maybe. The tests weren’t conclusive, but there were some things that came up as abnormal that she’s having me work on. Hopefully they make a difference.
November came, and my husband plotted a surprise party with some friends of mine. It was nearly three weeks since I had lost the baby, and I was still distraught, angry, sad, teetering on the edge of depression. It was the first week I had even gone back to church, if that’s any indication of where I was at. Punctual or not, I have always made it to Sunday service. But much of the miscarriage, or fighting the miscarriage, and hoping it wasn’t what it was, happened there at the church, because I had been attending a conference. So, it’s been hard going back and feeling the echoes of my heartbreak all over.
Anyway, I was angry and I wanted to go home, not go to this meal that my husband had just told me about the day before. Not that I had plans, but what if I did? I was gobsmacked and immediately regretful of my attitude when I walked in and was literally surprised by the beautiful decorations and shining faces of my friends. Unexpectedly, I wept and I had to take a few minutes to compose myself. That party was such a gift in a very dark period for me.
Thanksgiving passed by, and was nice. We celebrated with family. Then we got our Christmas tree a few days later. Actually, this whole season, Christmas included, has been enjoyable and nice. I just feel deeply unhappy and angry much of the time. I think about my baby every day. I look out at the lake and try to find the spot where he is buried. When it rains, I worry that the flower bulbs I planted will be confused and sprout early and then die. I wonder if they’ll even grow at all, come the spring. I wish he had a name. I just call him Baby Aspen, since we buried him under an Aspen tree.
When friends of mine share that they’re pregnant, I want to cry. I was pregnant at the same time as three of my friends. Now I’m not. I’m out of the race, but they continue. Maybe I’m just not meant to be a mother. Those are the kinds of thoughts I think. My pregnancy with Baby Aspen was difficult, exhausting, and I felt sick almost all day, every day. I swore that I didn’t think I could do this again. But I was looking towards the prize, that shining day in May when I would be holding him in my arms and the suffering and difficulty would be worth it. Now, I hold nothing, Just broken dreams and doubts about my capabilities and worthiness as a mother.
I don’t even dare to dream of what this year could hold. The future feels covered in fog, veiled in the same mist that covers Shadow Lake and hides her from view. I feel chilled by the wind, through to my soul. I’ve struggled to find comfort in my faith and in the Creator. All I can manage is to keep doing what I have to do to keep my house running and to care for my son. My one, precious boy. Maybe next year, I’ll be writing a different story. I hope so. This one was a hard one to write. I can’t even believe it’s my story. But I have no way of knowing, and no guarantee. I’m not as hopeful as Honey Badger. So I hope he’s right, that good things are ahead for us.
This wraps up 2024 for me. I wish you all the best. I hope your year is bright and that you can find things to dream about.
Sierra
Little Home on Shadow Lake 
Leave a comment