On Pregnancy after Miscarriage

I remember the day that I found out that I was pregnant with Lily. I was furious.  It was the end of October, a couple days before Halloween.  Previously, I had not known just how fragile these little lives could be.  The discovery of this new life was shadowed by the loss of the previous child. My “baby blue,” as I called it, named after the clear ocean off of the Cayman Islands. It seems so calloused to call my first child an “it”, but I never knew.  I never found out if it was a boy or a girl.  It slipped into the ocean, unknown, unnamed.  But not unloved.

I was not ready to have another baby growing inside of me again.  I could not lose again.  Not another life, not so soon.  I would have been 18 weeks along, past the terrifying first trimester.  But now, I was 7 weeks along.  That tenuous time, where she hung delicately, so precariously.  I couldn’t take it.  It felt like God was teasing me. 

A time of hope and excitement was shrouded by the lingering crippling grief from the loss of my first child.  The child with no name, the child lost somewhere in the Cayman Islands, confirmed by a doctor on the trip that was supposed to be a honeymoon.  The happy vacationers in the cabin next door on that Carnival cruise laughed at the wails of a mother who had just lost her baby.  If they had known the origin of the cries, I am sure that they would have swallowed their mockery. I'm sure that they weren't malevolent. Probably just drunk.   The agony of grief was out of place on a ship called “Freedom.” 

They said that it wasn’t because we went on a cruise.  It would have happened anyway.  They said that it wasn’t because of anything that I did or didn’t do.  They said that it wasn’t my fault.  I didn’t kill my baby.  It could have been anything.  In the Grand Cayman, seeing the empty ultrasound, holding the hand of my grieving husband, knowing that we were supposed to be enjoying a tropical beach excursion, I sucked it up.  Sitting on the little boat, looking into the clear blue water, I felt numb, in shock. 

The claustrophobia of the tiny cruise ship cabin was too much to handle.  The laughter and the celebrations of the other passengers on “Carnival Freedom” juxtaposed the deepest grief that I had ever experienced. 

In the hot months of the summer, I had celebrated that first positive pregnancy test.  The world had opened up for me with that double line.  A surge of excitement and expectancy struck me like a lightning bolt.   The second set of double lines two months and a thousand tears later sent a different surge.  Terror, anger, and grief echoed through my broken and raw heart.  No one had warned me about pregnancy after miscarriage.  I shut down.  I tried not to care. I couldn’t tease myself with excitement.  I couldn’t handle a second broken heart.  If it wasn’t my fault that I lost the first one, I couldn’t do anything to prevent it from happening again.  I was helpless.  I could only wait and hope that my body would not fail this second life.  I held my breath and couldn’t dare to step into celebration or expectation.  

But at Christmas, we made it through the first trimester.  Then the second.  And then she came, perfect.  This child, this little girl, was given a name.  Lily Grace. I love her with every fiber of my being.

It is strange to think that if Baby Blue had not left us on that cruise ship, Lily would not be here.  I love her with all of my heart.  I also love my other child.  Grieving a miscarriage is difficult.  Figuring out pregnancy after miscarriage is also agonizing.  

I remember coming home from the cruise and seeing the September sunflowers lining the Kansas roads.  Kansas is beautiful in the fall.  In my pain, the sunflowers whispered messages of strange joy.  I simultaneously hated and loved the Kansas sunflowers. This fall, Lily was three months old when the sunflowers bloomed again.  Once again, they spoke, reminding me of my Baby Blue and celebrating my sweet Lily Grace.

Humbled before the Word

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” 
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Words frustrate me.  Historically, I delighted in them. I thought that if I used them well enough, learned enough about them, or arranged them in the perfect way, that I would hold the keys to the kingdom.  I just knew that the secrets to life were found in words.  Later, I grew disillusioned with those miserable little excuses for expression.  I am sure that in this frustration I was being arrogant.  It seems that most of my frustration is rooted in some kind of pride. What is more arrogant than thinking that you are “above” human communication? In my anger with language, I grew angry with the Bible.  This seems intuitive. What follows frustration with words but frustration with the Word of God? Ultimately, this would lead to frustration with Christ, the highest Word of God.  It also followed that I would boycott writing, hence the four-year blogging hiatus. Who blogs when they hate language? This anger at language was something that I had never really felt before.  When you get right down to it, what do you have to stand on if you cannot stand on language and spoken word?  I am no linguistics expert, and I cannot pretend to be one.  I have never really studied the philosophy of language.  Ironically, in my anger at language, I tend to be a grammar tyrant.  I guess that we hold onto some form of structure even when we question.  What is more terrifying than a formless void?  I find the idea of a black hole of absence of expression pretty difficult to reckon with.

To me, our language seems derivative.  It is also representative.  Words represent objects or experiences.  The objects or experiences precede the language that is used to represent them.  The concept or idea communicated through language is nothing without its embodiment.  Or is it? There is a need or a longing to be communicated, or “named.”  I am currently reading Madeline L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.”  In this series, life comes from being “named.”  Beings exist in her universe, called Echthroi, and their primary job is to rob creatures of their names. As the Echthroi un-name, they destroy.  The connection between word and life is mysterious to me.  In my animosity toward the spoken word, I believe that I inadvertently became an enemy of life.  I cannot decide that words are void without on some level claiming that Christ is nothing.   Who is He but the Word, or the logos? Christ, the word, the Logos, was with God in the beginning.  So really, is language truly derivative? God SPOKE the universe into being.  God chose words to communicate and endow life into nothingness.  What greater God-expression is there but the Logos, Christ, the word?  Who am I to choose silence? This human communication that I thought that I was so far above?  Where is this birthed but in God’s communication?  Surely there is more to it than meets the eye, or more aptly, the ear, but on this planet, in this lifetime, it seems that language brings us into greater understanding of God.  Our proclivity toward verbal communication seems to be a reflection of the Imago Dei within us.  The frustration with our limited range of language should point me to the hope of heaven, where I am sure that the Word is much more complete.  At this point, however, I am pretty sure that this awareness should not prevent me from communication and expression through language. So for now, I suppose, my vow of silence is broken.  I will join my Creator’s song in the language that I know, with eager anticipation of the Word that will be unveiled when I see Him face-to-face.

The Redemption of Time

So time.  Time is a strange phenomenon.  It is one of the most bizarre things for me to think about.  Understanding God in the context of time is so far beyond my little brain that it gives me a massive headache, but I still try, probably in vain.  

I am always fighting time.  It either goes way too slowly or way too quickly.  Everything that we experience is measured within the framework of time.  I want out.  Time seems to be a prison. Aging is the strangest phenomenon.  We are constantly fighting aging, but it is obviously a losing battle.  Birthdays are one step closer to death days.  How do I stay in the present moment, as it is constantly leaving me behind, or I am leaving it behind?  I celebrate Lily’s milestones as she grows up. Each month, we take pictures, capturing her development and growth.  She will never ever be this age again.  She will never be this little again.  She will never again roll over for the first time, take her first bites of real food, smile for the first time, have her first giggle, discover her fingers and toes, and she will only have one first step.  When moments are wonderful, we want to freeze them.  But they expire.  I often feel like time is an enemy.

We fight time with photography. We carry reflections of past moments with us into the present through these images that give us visual representations of things that we don’t want to forget. We fight time through writing.  We use words as snapshots to look back on, so that we won’t forget. My feeble attempts to thwart it are pathetically laughable.

Chronos, you are so frustrating!  I feel like I am missing something, like there is some key to experience that I have yet to find.  There is a deep desire to be outside of time, to move freely, without limitations.  Maybe I am alone, but time travel sometimes sure seems desirable, not necessarily to go back and change things, or to know what is in the future, but simply to be without restriction.   But God created time, so there must be something redemptive about it.  God wouldn’t create something intrinsically evil, would He?  Time existed before the fall, so it is not the result of a fallen world.  He created day and night in a yet sin-free creation.  This is before death.  

Maybe death is the ultimate time-destroyer.  So could time be liberated if death were absent?  Is this Kairos? Untainted time?  Surely God had a reason for creating such a thing as day, and such a thing as night, and seconds, and moments, and hours.  So is the key to outsmarting time really about fighting aging and capturing moments on film or paper?  Or is it understanding the power of Christ outsmarting death?  Death is what destroys time for us.  

Is Kairos about understanding resurrection power?  How can we really practice “mindfulness” or staying in the present moment with the looming whispers of death all around us?  Is it in the understanding that death has no power and that life has already won?  Is it found in the knowledge that time has been redeemed, bought back, by the life that destroys death?  These are only ponderings.  They may be utterly off-base, but in a world where it seems that time travel has yet to be discovered, at least by myself, this awareness of resurrection power makes time more bearable, and possibly beautiful.

Looking out for something more

I want to feel safe and secure, but I am sentenced to life on this earth.  How can you ever feel safe and secure with such a sentence, unless you have some kind of investment elsewhere?  But, really, while you are on this earth, how can you ever really truly trust in some kind of external investment?  I read a passage in Revelation last night, of the New Jerusalem descending.  The old heaven and the old earth passing away.  God wipes every tear from our eyes.  He WIPES away our tears.  He doesn’t just stop our crying.  He actually stoops down, brushes our bangs aside, and slides his gentle, calloused finger across our wet cheek. He wipes our tears away.  What a God.  In light of this magnificent new Jerusalem’s condescention, God intentionally takes our grief-stricken faces in His huge hands….but He makes His hands just small enough to fit our chins in his palms.  Is there really hope in this?  Will he really wipe our tears away?  Is this just allegory?  Oh God, I hope not.  Greater than the fear of losing my child is the fear that none of these promises are true.  If this is all that there is, then I am lost.  Because these short years are vapor.  I am vapor. Jordan is vapor. Lily is vapor.  My goals, accomplishments, dreams, are nothing.  How does one live in this wrenching insecurity?  What of value lasts?  When someone enters this world, who, if departed, would take my heart with her, how do I live in the unknown?  Oh, God, please be the God that you claim to be.  Let us not have created you out of nothing.  Please be the One who created us.  Let there be something greater than us in existence.   Let there be One who no eye has yet seen. Please let these pleas not be to an empty computer, but to One who really does live outside of time and space.  And if you will, somehow, give me a clue, or an impression, or a taste of your eternal glory on which I can lean until I know for sure.