My best friend just lost her baby. I feel gutted for her.
She texted me this morning while I was in my reflexology treatment and I forgot to check it until I was in the car driving home. Baby. Lost. Don’t call. Very sad.
It hit me straight in the heart and I bawled, feeling the pain rip through my chest and upper body, as if it were my very own grief. I had been thinking only this morning about her, how I had not made time to see her in the last two weeks and that I would make the effort today to check in with her. I also had thought to myself “apart from all the OTHER reasons why I want her to keep this baby, I just don’t feel like I can go through the whole miscarriage thing again – and although it would not be MY miscarriage, I would feel as though I was going through it all again myself, on some level.” And I do.
I see her in my mind, dancing with joy at her own party a couple of weeks ago, 7 weeks pregnant, alive with the possibility that THIS MIGHT ACTUALLY WORK. Struggling to quell the fears that it wouldn’t, and to dismiss doubt from her mind, all the better to enjoy what was, being present in every moment- because we all know we don’t get to change the outcome, so enjoy it while we have it right? I know so many of you reading this know exactly what I’m talking about.
But the flipside to that positivity is the pain when you lose that baby. It hurts so much more than when you didn’t invest any joy and wonder and hope. But you feel you have to invest that hope, because to start out with a negative or neutral attitude may doom that baby, and then it would be ALL YOUR FAULT because you didn’t believe hard enough. So you can’t win. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. All you can do is leave your heart wide open and take the hit when it comes. And the danger is that the more times you take the hit, the harder it becomes to open your heart the next time. Perhaps that is what people mean when they say “you’re so strong.” It isn’t so much about coping or getting through it. I think they really mean ‘brave’ because what it takes is more and more courage to keep opening yourself up to the possibility of another round of soul-shattering grief.
Don’t ask me how we do it. I don’t know.
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