Hope in the Midst of Miscarriage

The waiting room in the doctor’s office looked like a DMV with carpet. Nothing had changed. The same receptionist sat behind the desk, hiding behind a glass panel. The same maternity and newborn photos littered the office walls, advertising local photographers’ work. And the same tattered parenting magazines were sprawled across the worn coffee table, boasting headlines like “How to Stay Fit While Pregnant.” Personally, I would have been happy to be the size of a Sprinter van if it meant carrying a baby to term.

Maybe this pregnancy will be different.

My legs crossed, I leaned back, squinting out the window and scanning the driveway, hoping to see Jimmy’s car pulling in through the pelting rain. Having just landed at JFK Airport hours before, he wasn’t sure if he would make the appointment. However, I wasn’t sure if I could make it through the appointment without him.

I tried to calm myself by remembering that we had already heard a heartbeat—an improvement from the first time I was pregnant. And while the measurements looked to be a few days off, the doctor had assured us that this was common and gave us no reason to panic yet.

Yet . . .

“Nicole?”

The door to the waiting room flung open, and the ultrasound technician ushered me into the room. I explained that my husband was on his way, and she kindly agreed to wait. While I waited, I dressed in the flimsy robe and placed the paper sheet awkwardly over my lap as she occupied the uncomfortable silence by reviewing my ultrasound images from days before.

The small talk continued as my own heartbeat played double time. I had started to feel nauseous and shaky by the time Jimmy walked through the door, looking just as relieved to be there as I was to see him.

Seconds later, we were looking at the picture of the life I prayed was growing inside of me. And once again, I saw everything I needed to know on the technician’s face. I knew right away she was searching for something that simply was not there.

It was clear she really wanted to give me different news than what her face had already spoken.

“I’m so sorry . . . the baby’s heartbeat has stopped.”

With heaving sobs, I pressed my face into Jimmy’s scratchy cheek, simultaneously comforted by the closeness and worried that a child may never know the comfort of this man’s face. It was difficult to discern which tears belonged to Jimmy and which tears belonged to me. Time loses all weight in moments like this, and it felt like we stayed in that room longer than we should have. Finally, I managed to get dressed and somehow walked out of the office.

Having to leave and walk through a lobby of staring pregnant women is a special brand of torture. Some of the women glanced at me with knowing looks—as though they had been there before and were familiar with this specific sort of pain.

Others squirmed and averted their eyes, as if I were contagious and my situation might infect theirs.

Jimmy and I have since learned that most other fertility and OB-GYN offices have a different exit for these kinds of situations— a special door for sad people like us. But no matter what door you walk through, you’re still leaving feeling as if a necessary part of you is left behind, trapped on the inside. Inaccessible.

The hope and excitement you should be carrying with you is replaced by a dream that has gone cold. Future dates that were supposed to have significance no longer do. Conversations with friends and family that you imagined having no longer make sense. Suddenly, you’re free to go on that vacation or say yes to that speaking engagement, but you wish you weren’t.

You have to carry this cold, lifeless dream; it feels both painful to let go of and painful to hold. As in all grief, walking through the recovery from a miscarriage is excruciating, cathartic, and necessary for healing all at the same time. In moments like these, it feels like an out is what you crave most. But the only sure route to the other side is through the grief. And there is no map for through.

We decided to leave Jimmy’s car in the lot. I was nervous about my ability to focus on the road, and I didn’t want to be alone. Neither of us said much on the way home. Whys were wondered and now whats were asked, but no answers were offered.

Still very much craving a way out, I typed Seattle into our GPS. If we just kept driving, exactly how long would it take to get back to a place that was familiar and comfortable and yet so “other” from where we were? It turns out that the familiar feeling I longed for was at least two days and seven hours away.

It was only ten o’clock in the morning when we arrived home, but I looked and felt like I do at the end of a long day. I put my pajamas on and robotically crawled back into bed. My eyes landed on the sonogram picture—the flimsy, blurry black-and-white photograph I had positioned carefully on my nightstand, poised to be prayed for. That picture had seemed so sure, representing the beginning of a story that would never be finished in this lifetime. I closed my eyes, hoping in vain to wake up to a different kind of day.

As it turns out, my miscarriages were not coincidental. A battery of fertility tests revealed that we have a rare genetic abnormality for which there is no cure. This particular condition significantly reduces our chances of carrying a baby to term.

Suddenly, statistics became our best subject. Questions like: What are the odds of getting pregnant? and How many times do we need to get pregnant to have the number of kids that we want? were the main topics of conversation in our house.

While this diagnosis was not news I would have chosen for us, having a known cause for this pain gave me a strange feeling of comfort and a false sense of control. When you have relied your entire life on grit and hard work to turn dreams into realities, you operate around the lie that you can do everything in order to feel as though you and your dreams are safe. In this case, safety looked like having the family I had always envisioned. I used the information we gathered at appointments to analyze our odds of carrying a baby to term, forcing my will back into our future. The waters may have been rougher than we had foreseen, but I could still steer this ship.

On a gray Sunday in December, I was unloading the dishwasher while my aimless mind settled on a conversation I had with a friend earlier that week. I had explained the information we had recently learned about our diagnosis in unnecessary detail and reported my predictions for what this would mean for us in the future. She listened and encouraged me, and just before we said goodbye, she said, “Well, Nicole, this sounds hopeful . . . especially when we know our hope is in God and not the odds.”

The statement was meant to offer nothing but comfort, but I felt convicted by this truth I had forgotten. This simple encouragement exposed the fact that God had become a mere accessory to the strategy I had constructed in order to feel that my desires were safe in the hands of the future. God was never excluded from my longings or vision for my life, but the sobering reality was that I was more comforted by the supporting evidence than I was by Him.

I had misplaced God. I found myself repeating the prayer: “My hope is in You . . . My hope is in You . . .” as both an acknowledgement of God’s power and as a reminder to myself about where He belonged in the context of my dreams. While I was still doing calculations in an attempt to identify the various possibilities for having the family we had envisioned, my grip on my sense of control had slipped. What I had always known, but was just now seeing clearly, was that if we were going to have a family, God was going to be the one to give it to us—in His way and in His time.

Staring out my kitchen window, I watched the last leaves of fall cling in vain to the naked, spiny branches of winter. The trees were lit by the glow of white lights, celebrating the holiday season—a season that only intensified my longing for what could be and my pain about what was not.

I was halfway through placing our mugs back into the cabinets when I paused and suddenly wondered how I would finish that sentence. My hope is in God . . . for what?

The answer was easy: a baby.

Taken from “From Lost to Found” by Nicole Zasowski. Copyright 2020 by Nicole Zasowski. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson.