Replacing Repression with Lament

 

        I struggled with grieving after my miscarriage.

I had only known I was pregnant for one week.

I was only five weeks along when it happened.

I had friends who had lost pregnancies at further along than I was, and I knew people who had experienced late term losses, stillbirth, and infant loss.

So when I started spotting, when I knew that this pregnancy wasn’t going to stick, I already began a dialogue in my head that was contrary to grieving.

It’s so early.

It’s not even far enough along for there to be a heartbeat yet.

If you hadn’t taken an early test, you wouldn’t have even known you were pregnant.

So many people have had losses much worse than this.

Chemical pregnancies and miscarriage are so common.

It shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

But it was.

We had been trying for almost a year.

We had been through infertility testing for months already.

We had a consult with a fertility specialist.

We had been about to start treatments.

So when that pregnancy test read positivity, it was more than just the excitement of a baby. It was relief that we could actually get pregnant. It was relief that we wouldn’t have to endure the physical and mental struggle of fertility treatments. It was relief that we wouldn’t have to find the money to do it. It was the belief that maybe everything was totally fine and I just overreacted.

But when I saw that first bit of blood, all of that relief that we would just be able to have babies the old-fashioned way crashed down around me. It wasn’t just grief that we were losing our child. It was grief that things wouldn’t be “normal” for us when it came to having a baby.

Although I knew people who had been through fertility treatments, I had never seen anyone grieve that experience, so I wasn’t even sure it was something to grieve. And so that contrary dialogue continued in my head.

At least you know you can get pregnant.

Maybe it will happen again without help.

And even if it doesn’t, taking ovulation drugs isn’t that big of a deal. You know lots of people who have done it.

The doctor said it would only take a few months, so it’s nothing to stress out about.

As you already know if you’ve been reading my posts for a while, that’s not what happened. We walked through almost a year of treatments before we welcomed our Rainbow, and it took us going through IVF to bring him into the world. Every step of the process resulted in more things I had to let go of, more things I had to grieve, but again, I had no idea anyone grieved these things, so I stopped myself from fully doing so.

With our first few rounds, other than taking medication to stimulate egg production and a shot to trigger ovulation, we were still babymaking the natural way. But then we had to switch to IUI, which took the intimacy out of the process completely. Instead of grieving that, I thought, at least your husband can still be in the room when you conceive. 

After a few tries of IUI, we switched to preparing for IVF. My embryo transfer happened in the middle of a pandemic, so then I didn’t even get to have my husband in the room when I conceived. He was on FaceTime from his truck when it happened. Instead of grieving that, I thought, it doesn’t matter how this happens if we are able to have a baby in the end.

And while that last thought is one hundred percent true for me- it really doesn’t matter that my son was conceived in a petri dish and transferred to my womb while my husband watched from his phone in the parking lot- it didn’t change the fact that things were not at all happening like I imagined they would and I was totally within my right to grieve that disappointment.

Everytime I repressed my need to grieve, I pushed my anxiety over our situation even further. But it was my anxiety that was causing me to repress those feelings in the first place. Anxiety can cause us to repress our true grief surrounding the trauma we’ve experienced- we can downpay what has happened to us or we can attempt to push past the emotions our trauma causes in an attempt to move on. Neither is a healthy way to process those experiences, and will only continue the cycle of making our anxiety worse. It did for me.

I think, as Christians, we believe that we’re not supposed to grieve anything because we’re supposed to trust that it’s all part of God’s plan and He’ll work it out for good. All of this is true, but that doesn’t mean we can’t grieve those losses when they happen. Even Jesus wept (John 11:35 NIV).

I searched two words in Scripture to help me explore what God has to say about grieving: “lament” and “mourn.” The first reference of “lament” in Scripture is in Judges 11, in the story of a judge named Jephthah. He was a mighty warrior, the son of the judge Gilead. But his mother was a prostitute, so the sons of Gilead’s wife drove him away when they grew up because they wanted to make sure he didn’t receive an inheritance since he was illegitimate. So Jephthah settled in Tob and eventually had a “group of scoundrels,” as Scripture says, who became his followers.

Years later, Gilead’s elders came to Tob to bring Jephthah back to fight the Ammonites. Jephthah calls them out, asking why they want his help now since they allowed him to be driven out by his brothers. The elders promise that they will put him in charge and follow him if he comes to their aid, so Jephthah goes home.

Jephthah sends a message to the Ammonite king to find out why he’s mad. The king responds, explaining that he wants the land that was taken from the Ammonites when the Israelites left Egypt returned to them peacefully. Jephthah clarifies that this land wasn’t taken from them; God drove the Ammonites out of this land because they wouldn’t allow the Israelites to pass through it on their way to the Promised Land, so they really don’t have a right to it. The King of Ammon ignores Jephthah’s message and prepares for battle to reclaim the land, so Jephthah goes against them. He vows to offer the first thing that comes out of his door when he returns as a burnt offering if God gives him success in the battle.

God grants Jephthah victory and when he returns home, who should greet him but his only child, his daughter! Jephthah is devastated because, in his hastiness to promise God a sacrifice, he has unwittingly promised to kill his own daughter. Surprisingly, his daughter encourages him to do as he promised, but asks for some time to go into the hills to mourn her situation, since she will be dying without being wed. Jephthah allows her to do so, and when she returns two months later, he sacrifices her as he promised God he would.

This chapter of Judges ends by saying, “From this comes the Israelite tradition that each year the young women of Israel go out for four days to commemorate the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite” (Judges 11:39b-40 NIV). The KJV translates “commemorate” as “lament.” The fact that the first mention of this word is an example of yearly lament marking the anniversary of Jephthah’s daughter’s death means so much to me as a loss mama. Not only does God validate all of our losses and encourage us to grieve them, but He does not want us to just “get over it” and never acknowledge the trauma we’ve faced; in fact, he wants us to commemorate it. The Hebrew word used here means, “recount, rehearse, tell again, attributing honor.” Our grief is not expected to be dealt with and forgotten. We are meant to tell it again and again if we need to, attributing honor to the child we’ve lost and the suffering we’ve endured, marking how far we’ve come with Him because of it.

Shockingly, the word “lament” only shows up one time in the book of Lamentations! Most scholars believe this book was written by Jeremiah. Like much of the book, in Lamentations 2, he is lamenting what his people have done to anger God, and the fact that He has allowed destruction and withdrawn His presence from them. The word “lament” is attributed to the walls and gates that God has pulled down, personifying their grief that the people will no longer be protected. But it is Jeremiah’s depiction of his own grief that stands out to me in this passage: “My eyes fail from weeping, I am in torment within; my heart is poured out on the ground because my people are destroyed…” (Lamentations 2:11 NIV). In a situation where God’s people deserved the consequences they are experiencing because they turned their backs on God, Jeremiah is still brought to grief due to their suffering. Imagine what that grief would look like if God’s people were suffering through no fault of their own. God calls us to grieve when there is trauma, regardless of how it has happened. He knows that our human emotions cannot endure loss like this without experiencing the torment Jeremiah describes. He promises to draw alongside us when this happens.

How do I know this? From this passage in Lamentations, it seems as if God has abandoned His people, which He has. But I believe strongly that He has not abandoned Jeremiah. Firstly, Jeremiah is not the one who abandoned God in this story; it is the rest of the people. And secondly, Ecclesiastes 3 says this: 

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens… a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance… What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (verse 1, 4, 9-11 NIV) 

God determined at the creation of the world that there would be a time for weeping and mourning. He knew we would experience seasons of our lives where this would be necessary. He also knew that it would not be in vain, that though He would lay such a burden on us, that He would also be the one to make that grief beautiful in the right time and season. He would not abandon us to just grieve without purpose; He would draw near to us in this mourning so that we would know He was with us through it all, bringing forth His beauty in the end. We might not understand what He is doing in the moment, but we will see it in the end.

The Hebrew word used in this verse is an intense type of grieving: “wail, tear hair, beat breast, with loud cries, especially for the dead, over calamity.” Wail for your lost babies, dear one. Pull your hair out, beat your breast, cry as loud as you want and need to. Their death is a calamity- to you and to God. He weeps with you. He counts your tears. He wants you to grieve, to keep on grieving, however you need to. With yearly commemoration. By sharing your story. Through the comforting of others experiencing the same grief. This is how He will bring about beauty in your story.

God does not want us to repress our grief, no matter what our loss looks like. It is all valid and it is all devastating. So grieve how you need to grieve, Mama. Because when we replace repression with lament, it allows us to fully experience the emotions of what we’ve been through, processing our true grief with God and finding joy in being able to be real with Him. That, in itself, is beautiful.