The Last Mother’s Day

This weekend we announced that we are pregnant again. Again? Most of you probably know, but some of you may not. Last September Brittany and I found out she was pregnant a few days before I was supposed to leave for my new job in Denver.

Long story short, we suffered a miscarriage. It was some seriously dark days. Have you ever felt like everything happening around you wasn’t real? I felt like I was moving and speaking and working, but that it was someone else’s life. It sounds so cliché, but I literally found myself on my knees crying in a hotel room. It was rough. I don’t cry very often.

I don’t pretend to understand why it happened. I doubt either of us will ever understand the why. I wish I could tell you what I’ve learned from the loss, but that’s what’s so difficult about the miscarriage – we’ll never know exactly what we lost. You’re just left with questions that don’t have an answer. It’s unsettling. Unnerving. It shakes you to the core. It hangs over you like this heavy darkness. Every day has been different. I think I’ve moved on, and then something else knocks me back to my knees.

But back to finding out we are pregnant again. About a month ago, Brittany had some unexpected bleeding. The doctor wanted her to take a pregnancy test just to rule it out. Well. It was positive.

Here we go again. I know that’s what both of us were thinking. I mean, really, how could this happen again? I feel like both of us had grown in so many ways since September, but it felt like in that moment, we were both back to square one. That was kind of depressing. In an instant, I felt like I was just as weak as I had been before September. I felt like we were knocked back to our knees again.

Then, so many people came to us and got down on their knees with us. I can’t begin to explain the amount of love we have experienced these last few weeks. One night we had our small living room packed full of friends from church who came to pray for us. That kind of supernatural experience is foreign to me. To be honest, I struggle with that kind of stuff. It makes me uncomfortable sometimes, but I was to a point where I was comfortable with the uncomfortable. I wasn’t going to let myself get in the way of what God was trying to do in our life. I can’t thank our friends and family enough. They didn’t just try to pick us up – instead they got down with us in our pain.

Fast forward a few weeks, we received great news at our last doctor’s visit. We have a blob and a heartbeat. Pretty cool stuff. We were to the point where we felt comfortable announcing the good news.

So this is our last Mother’s Day without a baby.

This morning Brittany and I took my parents and nephew to our church for Mother’s Day. I got hit pretty hard with some emotions just thinking about our baby, Mother’s Day and how God is our Healer. I’ve never believed that before. But how can I deny that now? How can I look at the last few weeks, the prayers on our behalf for a healthy pregnancy and the good report and not see God at work in our struggles.

I go back to trying to pinpoint what I’ve learned from all of this, or how I’ve grown, and the only thing I can come up with is that I’ve learned to stop limiting God in my life. In our desperation, I opened up to God like I never have before. My hope and goal is to start opening up to Him in the calmer times of my life and not just turning to him in the hard times. I think that’s a goal all of us can relate to.

I’m going to be a dad. Brittany’s going to be a mom. Wow.