There’s still a few areas, of our life, that I have not been able to deal with or share. Even now, certain events and circumstances are too much to write about. Until now, I haven’t been ready to subject myself to those memories. Since October is “Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month” I decided to open one of the tough ones.
Around Mother’s Day of 2009, we were expecting a baby.
After a few weeks of extreme mood swings, I suggested my wife get a pregnancy test. She wasn’t amused at the thought. We already had kids. 18, 10 and 7. We figured we had removed ourselves from the gene pool. The test was positive. Yeah. It was a surprise.
Getting pregnant at about 40 years old is pretty much a guaranteed emotional roller coaster.
You can also figure all this into the emotional equation of my wife’s stress load. Our oldest daughter was planning her wedding. We were months into a home purchase that kept falling apart. A home she desperately wanted. And me. The classic knucklehead husband. Full of myself. Arrogant. Angry. Oblivious to her real needs. Detached from reality and abusive.
My wife had been fighting to keep our family together for almost 20 years at that point. Reduced to a servant by our church counselors. Told to submit to whatever ridiculous ideas I had. Ignored when she truly needed support. And then pregnant.
Any court in the land would have graciously pardoned her for homicide, once they understood what she was dealing with.
At one point, I ended up in a conversation at church, with a friend that I didn’t get to talk to very often.
We talked about the pregnancy. His wife had lost several to miscarriages. They finally had a child, but the last miscarriage almost killed her.He told me how she had started bleeding and how he rushed her to the hospital. That trip ended up with them in an ambulance after an awful series of events. She nearly died from blood loss.
A week or so, after hearing that story, I came home from work to find that my wife had started bleeding. We called the hospital and they casually told her to rest and put her feet up. Advice I would have taken if not for that conversation with my friend. She insisted it was nothing. The doctor said it was nothing. I threw a tantrum and made her get int the car.
Halfway to the hospital, the unthinkable happened. She turned pale and lost more blood than I would have believed. By the time we got there, she couldn’t walk. We got a wheelchair and a lot of towels for her. They raced her through pretty fast. The next few hours are a blur in my mind. Except for one part.
Once she was stable, we took her back for a sonogram. We already knew the baby was gone. They had to confirm it and play dumb so she didn’t get any more upset. While she was on the table, for the sonogram, the bleeding started again. She was in a puddle by the time we realized it.
I helped her off the table and back into the wheelchair to move her. As soon as we got moving, she blacked out. I moved in front of her and she went gray and limp, falling out of the chair. I caught her before she hit the floor and screamed her name. Lifting her up to me, I kept calling her. After a few seconds, she looked up at me. The same way someone would if you woke them suddenly from a good nap. Slight glare. Completely disoriented.
We spent the night in the hospital. Finally feeling like she was ok, I took her home. But she wasn’t ok. She had a near death experience. She believes she was gone and I made her come back. It sounds miraculous, but it wasn’t. Not for her.
The whole experience sent her into a depression. It made her consider the life she had and how trapped she felt. She began to look at me differently. She became more critical of me. Her eyes were open to what kind of life I had given her and how I really treated her. The thought of getting a second chance at life, and spending it with me, became a horrible idea to her.
That was where it started. Within three months, she wanted a divorce. Five years ago, my world was shattered.
The miscarriage didn’t cause my marriage to fail. It shook her up and made her realize how short and fragile life is. It made her reconsider her world and how she lived. It made her consider new options. It made her see how pathetic I really was as a husband. It forced me into counseling and created the foundation for my blog.
The good news is how things ended up.
We lost a child, but gained another one. As a teen, my wife had to give up a baby for adoption. A month after the miscarriage, we were tracked down by a beautiful young lady who looks just like my wife. We got a new oldest daughter. Our kids got a new big sister. Our family still grew by one that year.
The entire experience forced me to change. I wanted to save my family. It took the next four years to win her back, but worth every minute. We are better than ever now. It’s always amazing when any good comes out of tragedy. We lost a child. We almost lost each other. We had completely lostour way in life.
My wife is happy again. I am substantially less of a knucklehead. The kids are happy. We are in love again like never before. It’s a tragic story with a happy ending.
Life is good.