Entry 023

In my last blog post, I shared about my sweet baby nephew joining the world and how his presence is helping me heal. About how he’s fulfilled part of my longing to hold and love and watch a little one grow. About how his innocent life is deserving of an auntie who loves everything about who he is, not who I wish my children were. But for the fellow loss mom who may have an infant in her life and feels at fault because this healing hasn’t come for her or for those who may have read that post and think I became whole the instant my nephew breathed his first breath outside of the womb like magic, I want to expand on what healing looks like for me and what I’ve come to learn through it. So here it is:

Healing doesn’t happen over night. Extreme emotional, mental and physical trauma can’t be resolved because of someone else. And progress doesn’t mean completion.

Let me elaborate.

Healing is not a quick process. I have to make the conscious decision every day to try to heal a little bit more. For me, this started after my fifth miscarriage. I’ll save the details for another time, but after losing our fifth baby my husband and I realized that there is a very real possibility that we will never have a living child—which makes having each other even more important. With every miscarriage, we lost a piece of ourselves. We lost pieces of our hope, our optimism, our happiness, our light, and our joy in this life time and time (and time and time and time) again. Knowing we may have only each other forever, we knew we needed to recover some of those pieces of us that we lost. So I decided to start making the daily choice to heal months ago.

Healing is internal. Unless you’ve experienced it, the agony, trauma and grief of losing a child is heavier than imaginable. That pain can’t be overcome through someone else’s actions or inspirational speech. I can’t heal you and you can’t heal me. It would be unfair to put that expectation onto someone else. You are the only person who knows what you need. If you’re like me, you need answers and closure that you know you may never get. So you have to push yourself to find some form of peace or acceptance within yourself. And that’s damn tough if you don’t have a reason to do it. Sure, a person can motivate you, help provide the tools or be the reason for growth and healing, but they can’t do it for you. You have to heal you.

Making healing progress doesn’t mean you’re healed. I think my heart and mind are healthier now than they have been since losing our first baby. But some days, I want to be sad. I want to just sit in the sorrow and feel bad for myself and all we’ve been through, so I do. I used to see a pregnancy announcement or even childbirth in a TV show and feel uncomfortable. My heart would race and I’d question if the people in the room with me wondered how I was feeling. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I still have a Pinterest board full of images, paint swatches, name signs and furniture for a nursery I so badly want down the hall. I still yearn to feel what it’s like to learn the gender of my child while it’s living instead of by genetic testing on its tiny, lifeless body. I still see pictures of a beautifully decorated baby shower and pretend for a second that it was for me. But I don’t linger in the wishing or the sorrow or the self pity for days like I used to. I still feel it—sometimes very deeply—but I know that those feelings won’t change what has happened. The wishing won’t bring my babies back. The sorrow won’t erase the years of suffering. The self pity won’t make what I’m envious about mine. Those feelings remind me where I’ve been, the things I’ve endured and who I’ve lost, so while they’ll probably never go away (truthfully, I don’t know that I ever want to lose those reminders), I feel them for the moment then let them fade away as I learn how to control them.

Just like how grief isn’t linear, neither is healing. Some days, I feel like I’ve taken a leap forward while other days, I move an inch. Then there are the days when I hear one of my babies’ names or an important date rolls around or another medical bill from miscarriage—or in hospital language, “spontaneous abortion”—treatment arrives and I fall ten steps back.

I used to think healing meant moving on. I used to thing that if I healed, it meant that I don’t think about my babies every darn day of my life or wish they were here. I used to think healing meant that I had to forget or that I wasn’t bothered by death of my children. But I’m choosing to see healing and moving on as two different things. I’m choosing to heal and think about my babies. I’m choosing to heal and remember the joy of my pregnancies along with the hard things that came after. I’m not moving on; I’m healing.

It can be difficult to find the need to heal when you’re surrounded by people who know what you’ve experienced. And it’s easy to sit in the grief when you’re the only person it affects. My nephew is brand new to the world. He doesn’t know the pain life can hold and I pray it’s a long, long, long time before he learns of it. So he’s making my daily choice to heal a whole lot easier to make.

Emily Lindquist