-

August 21, 2020

To my Rainbow Baby,

Today, I am 13 weeks pregnant! I am starting to get antsy about how you are doing in my tummy. It has been 6 weeks since we saw you as a little peanut and heard your tiny heartbeat pounding away. I have one week to go until I have my first appointment with the doctor at my OB office. And I am anxious for that moment. I want to know that you are flourishing in there, little one. That you are growing the way you should be, that your heartbeat is still strong, that we are coming to the end of this nervous-wrecking first trimester with joy and hope about one day holding you snug in our arms. Most of the time, I feel confident in God’s plan for all of this. I trust that He is keeping you safe and helping you to grow. I believe that the desires on my heart to share this journey with others is from Him, and that He will allow that plan to come to fruition with a healthy pregnancy- it would be pretty hard to share with women going through pregnancy after a loss if I have not done it myself. These things help me feel comfort and peace over this pregnancy, and I settle my anxiety on the fact that I am still feeling normal first trimester symptoms, and that I haven’t had any symptoms of miscarriage. I lay all of this in God’s hands and I can rest easy.

But there are moments when the thought spiral gets away from me. It doesn’t last for long, because I have been practicing speaking God’s truth over those spirals, so I am quick to intercept them and replace them with truth. But before that happens, I start to imagine all the horrible things that could go wrong in the next 7 days. I imagine experiencing symptoms of a miscarriage at any moment, and sometimes the twinges in my abdomen send me spiraling for longer than I’d like to admit. I picture going to my doctor’s appointment and the nurse being unable to find your heartbeat, picture the miserable car ride home, and all the messages I will have to send telling family and friends this tragic news. We have not made a grand announcement of your impending arrival yet, but close family and friends who are supporting and praying for us through this entire journey know about our secret, and it destroys me every time I have to imagine telling them there will not be a joyful ending.

I am so grateful to God that we have made it 6 weeks since our last appointment and my anxiety levels are fairly under control. I know that I could be feeling a lot more fear, that I could be completely paralyzed in this wait. I continue to pray that He will fill me with His peace that surpasses anything I could understand, that in the face of such frightening uncertainty it makes no sense to feel this peaceful. And I trust that, no matter what happens in the next week, He will continue to work all of this into a beautiful picture that will bring me good and Him glory.

Right now, you are the size of a lemon, almost 3 inches long but not even an ounce yet! You have already grown vocal cords, and I can already hear your loud voice blending in with the rest of our noisy family! Your tiny fingers and toes are starting to develop fingernails and you might even start sucking your thumb. You’re starting to develop bones in your hands and feet, too. I pray that God is continuing to keep you safe in my tummy, and that He will start to help my nausea subside and my energy return. I can’t wait to hear that tiny heartbeat next week, little one! Until then, I lay it all in God’s hands and ask him to do His will.

I love you, little Rainbow baby

Love, Mommy

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Replacing Resistance with Waiting

-
Image
Listen to this post here Nobody likes to wait. We’ve gotten to this point in our society where we are so accustomed to everything being instantaneous that even a short wait feels excruciating. I remember being a hostess at a restaurant while I was in college; people would be irate if I told them the wait was 10 to 15 minutes! We want what we want now and if we’re told to wait, we cannot possibly fathom why we should have to. When faced with a wait, our instinct is to rebel, to resist. We look for ways to shorten the wait, to get around the process to access what we want, to take matters into our own hands so we don’t have to endure what we deem to be impossible. It’s the little kid who climbs on the kitchen counter to try to get a bowl down for cereal because mom is taking too long to do it like she promised- inevitably what we’re trying to do to circumvent our situation comes crashing down around us, shattered to pieces, and we’ve made a bigger mess of things than what we started ...
Read more

Replacing Pretense with Honesty

-
Image
            One of the biggest traps of struggling with anxiety, particularly when that anxiety stems from infertility and pregnancy loss, is pretending to be fine . Of all the “taboo” topics in our society today, mental health and troubles having a baby seem to be two of the biggest. The world around us has set us up to push through life feigning a sunshiney attitude when we are struggling with these issues. While mental health awareness is everywhere these days, most people are still one hundred percent uncomfortable talking about their personal struggles with anxiety, depression, and other mental health diagnoses. I’ve shared numerous times that I was ashamed of needing to go on medication to help my own anxiety, and that I kept it a secret for a while because I believed it showed me and my faith to be weak. Most people see therapy as a last-ditch effort; something must be really, really wrong if we need to talk to someone about our problems. So...
Read more

Replacing Distraction with Readiness

-
Image
            We are a distracted society. I have seen this distraction play out in my own life in two ways. The first way is with my tendency to focus on all the negative things that are happening in my life, in the lives of the people I care about, and even just in the world around me. I can get hyper focused on the struggles I’m going through, believing they are the only things that are happening to me. This was particularly true in the early days of infertility. With each month that went by, I was focused too much on the failed cycle that I had endured, the fact that even more time was passing without a baby in sight. I struggled to see anything good happening in my life because of it: good things in my job, good things in my marriage, even just the small daily blessings that God provides. It was this tendency that led me to keeping a gratitude journal, so that I could shift my perspective and see all the wonderful things God was doing in my life...
Read more