There's a blog I keep up with. It's a personal blog, like mine - no ads, no big readership. She hasn't written in several months, and I keep checking in to see if she's posted anything new.
This girl and I have kids about the same age, only my baby is alive, and hers is not.
I remember when she announced her second pregnancy on her blog. She was expecting a December baby, and I had just lost mine. She posted a picture of her little girl, who was about Will's age, with a sign saying she was going to be a big sister.
I was so sad for me, and so envious of her. I stopped checking in at her blog. I couldn't bring myself to follow along with her pregnancy when mine had been cut short.
Then I got pregnant with our February baby, and we moved, and life got busy, and I didn't check back in at her blog for almost a year.
The next time I clicked over there, I was nursing Barrett and looking for something to read. I couldn't believe what I saw.
She lost her December baby, too. She'd lost her at 37 weeks.
Her posts about the loss were heartbreaking. She wrote everything I'd imagine myself feeling. She would have had two little girls, just as I now had two little boys. Only now, instead, she was desperately hoping to become pregnant again, even after her body had already traveled almost the entire distance, with no child at the end.
Everything I felt, everything I grieved when I lost our December baby, pales in comparison to that grief.
I don't know if she's pregnant again yet. It's been about ten months since she lost her little one. But I think of this woman almost every day. When Barrett wakes up from his nap too early, when it seems I just put him down, or when he wakes in the night for the second time, I think of her. If life had given her the choice, she would have been getting up in the night, too. If life asked her: would you take your baby back, if you have to get up with her in the night? she would say YES. In a flicker of a heartbeat she would cry, YES! She would wake up with joy at the sound of her baby crying out for her in the night.
So in honor of her, in honor of all those women who bear the grief of a lost child, I will say thank you, Lord for all the challenging, inconvenient moments that my babies bring me. I will say, thank you that they are alive.
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