I am fifteen weeks pregnant, confidently in my second trimester, and I am finally beginning to breathe a sigh of relief. A little over a year ago, in November of 2013, we experienced a miscarriage when I was around ten weeks pregnant. Having had two completely perfect and uneventful pregnancies in the past, this of course came as a huge shock to us.
When we found out in October of 2014 that we were pregnant again, we were very cautious in telling our family, especially our two sons. For those of you who have experienced miscarriage, you understand that pregnancy loss does not only affect you and your husband. Many, many people shared our grief. Miscarriage is devastating to children, to grandparents, to aunts and uncles, and to close friends. We wanted to be mindful of this as we shared our news with others. We knew that, by telling close friends and family that we were pregnant, we were potentially exposing them to future heartache. And we especially didn’t want our children exposed to that unnecessarily.
However, as a couple of weeks passed, my husband and I grew sad over the fact that we had nobody with whom we could share our joy. So after many conversations and much prayer, we finally decided to share our news. I understand why so many people choose to keep pregnancy a secret until their second trimester. Truly, I do. But here is why we decided to share our news with our family and friends:
- We wanted to celebrate and rejoice in the life of our child, even if that life were to be brief. One thing that was very important to me after we lost our baby was that we remembered the life of that child. We wanted to always include him/her in our family’s history and to celebrate the brief time that he or she was with us. Matthew and Ben still talk about their “baby sister (they decided it was a girl) who lives in Heaven.” I don’t ever want our third child to be a tragedy to overcome; I want him or her to be remembered and loved. We felt that, if we were to keep this new pregnancy to ourselves, we would be tempted to just pretend like it had never happened if we were to lose the baby.
- We knew we would need the support of close friends and family if we were to miscarry again. Without a doubt, one of the greatest things to come out of our miscarriage was the realization that we are absolutely cared for and loved. We had never walked through a loss before, and so we were completely caught off guard by the support of our loved ones. We had friends come over simply to cry with us. People cooked for us and offered to watch our children. It was amazing. I knew that, if something terrible were to happen again, we wouldn’t want to have to walk through it alone.
Ultimately, we are so glad that we did decide to share our news. We are over the moon about our new loved one, and we have enjoyed the freedom and the joy that have come with letting others in on our little secret.
