Sunday November 26th was the beginning of the nightmare for us. That morning I went to the gym and came home and started breakfast and cleaning up to put Christmas decorations up. I went to the bathroom and saw the worse thing possible. Blood. I was eight weeks pregnant and two days. My heart dropped to my stomach, I became light headed, and my mind started running as fast as it could. Short of breathe I told Tim that I was going to Walgreen’s to get another pregnancy test to see what it said. It still said positive. I called the on call OBGYN and told them what was happening. The blood lightened and stopped for the day. I was told to take it easy. No exercise. No lots of physical exertion. No stressing. I found the last one to be impossible.

I had taken a pregnancy test about four weeks earlier. I was excited at the idea of expanding our family, giving Eva a brother or sister, and bringing another kick ass baby human into this world. We wanted this since we had gotten married. We wanted multiple kids. We wanted. Excitedly we told family and gushed over the possibility of another set of feet to pitter patter through our lives and hearts. The truth was I knew it wasn’t right. I told my parents and broke down crying because I was so worried that something was going to happen. I told Tim almost every other day that something didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel pregnant enough. It took until Sunday November 26th for my body to catch up with what my mind and soul already knew.

Monday the bleeding got worse and I started having some light cramping. I was told by many people including the OBGYN that bleeding was common and mothers go on to have very healthy pregnancies and labors. I knew I wasn’t going to be one of these mothers. I knew my body was going through the M word. The Voldemort of the pregnancy world. The word that must not be named. I was going through a miscarriage. I spent the day going from trying to pep talk myself through it to crying a lot while holding Eva because I couldn’t give her the sibling I promised. We were scheduled to have an ultrasound on Tuesday and between Monday morning and Tuesday morning it felt about six years in time.

Tuesday November 28th our nightmare came to life and it wasn’t this thought bubble looming over us anymore. They couldn’t find a heart beat. They couldn’t find a cell sac. They couldn’t find…anything. Needless to say the next hour of our lives was pretty awful. I spoke with my doctor who reminded me that this wasn’t my fault even though I went through every movement and food I ate over the last eight weeks. I had started going to the gym again. Maybe I worked out too hard. I ate lunch meat. Maybe I didn’t heat it long enough before eating it. I helped with yard work. Maybe I helped too much. I had to find the reason that I was having a miscarriage and I had to find how it was my fault.

The next few days were quick and also painfully slow. I was going through waves, tidal waves, tsunamis of emotions. I knew logically that my body knew there was something not right with the baby and that’s why this was happening. I would be perfectly fine and the next minute would be in tears devastated. I was a mother going through the M word. I was mourning the loss and trying to figure out how to function. I then got the call that I was technically still pregnant. My body was not shedding the pregnancy the way it should. On Friday December 1st our nightmare became never ending.

I went to the doctor’s and was given medical options to shed the pregnancy. I decided on a D&C and was told I could have it within the hour. We went down to the surgery center of the hospital. Tim dropped Eva off with a friend and we had to mourn the loss again. Before the surgery I started passing large blood clots and was told that it was good I was going into surgery because I was going to end up in the hospital that night anyway from loosing too much blood too quickly. Someone somewhere in the universe was watching over me and my family and we were in the hospital at that time for a reason.

Sunday November 26th was possibly one of the worse days of my life, if not the worse. The next couple of weeks were just me trying to figure out how to function again. I didn’t want to leave my bed or the couch during the day. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want…anything. The most I could do was be a mother to Eva but I wasn’t her mom 100%. I was a shell of a mom that did the bare minimum. We were lucky that my parents came and helped with Eva for a couple of days. I got amazing support from friends and family. The more people we told the more we heard, “That happened to us too.” We couldn’t comprehend how common this was and how often it happened.

This was truly the word that was not to be named. There is heart break and then there is loosing a baby or child. I didn’t think my heart could suffer that much heart ache. At some points I thought I would die from the heart ache. There is heart break. There is sadness. There is loss. Through it though there is help around you. There is love around you. There is support around you. There is life around you. We all go through the grieving process differently. For some keeping it bottled in is how they deal with it. For others talking about it helps them. For me talking always helps, but I felt like I couldn’t. I felt like because I was talking about the M word I was giving into it. I was admitting that I was sad and couldn’t function at full speed. Mothers went through this all the time, why was I so different? Why couldn’t I win over it.

I joined a support group on Facebook and learned that I wasn’t doing any of that. I was being a mother going through a miscarriage and a D&C. It was okay to be sad. It was okay to be angry. It was okay to be whatever it is I was because that’s what I needed to be. The M word of pregnancy carries so much weight because it’s clouded in so much secrecy. No one failed for having a miscarriage. No one did anything wrong. No one was being punished for something they did in their youth or childhood. No one deserves to know this heart ache.

There are still some points during the day that I am sad. I try to focus on the amazing aspects of my life. I am part of an amazing group of women whom I call the baby gang and their babies have turned into my babies. My best friend and I were two weeks a part in our pregnancies, in the end I still get a kick ass baby human. My parents came down without thought to do whatever they could to make the load a little lighter. I have a wonderful, hilarious, smart as a whip, sassy, heart bigger than her body, little girl who dropped whatever she was doing to hug me when I was sad. I have a husband who held me while I sobbed and never once made me feel like this was my fault and who just wanted to take the pain for me.

I learned that the human spirit is incredibly resilient. You keep going through it all because you have to. There are times you want to give up and throw it all in. And if you do for however long, that’s okay too. Sunday November 26th the word that shall not be named came crashing into our lives and took from us something that we already loved more than ourselves. Sunday November 26th our strength was tested, our marriage was tested, and our family was tested. Sunday November 26th was the start of a nightmare come alive. Sunday November 26th I became heart broken. Sunday November 26th I found out how strong of a person, wife, and mother I was.