Waiting.

The last couple months have been so full of cascading and completely opposite emotions. I have been so scared and have honestly had a hard time even acknowledging that I am still pregnant. I try not to think about it, try not to talk about it with my husband, and just plain ignore it. Though, it is hard to ignore being sick 24/7. Every once in a while I get a brief flash of joy about possibly being a mom again. But I just can't let it last. I can't let myself get caught up in that. Because it's just too hard to lose. The last few days have been a little tense because this was the point my last baby died. This will be the furthest I have gotten since my son. It is so scary for me, so I just try to live in a mind set like I am not. I am trying to just trust in the Lord and have faith that everything will be ok. I feel assured most of the time, and I feel peaceful most of the time. But it is hard to keep the fear at bay. And, as horrible as it is to say, it is hard for me to trust right now. I KNOW that anything is possible with the Lord, and I KNOW that if He wills it, it will happen. My problem is trusting that He wills it right now. It is hard to let go and to fully trust, but I'm working on it. It is something I never thought I would struggle with.

MORE news :(

Is it always going to be this way? I am soo soooooo tired of hearing about PREGNANCIES!!! 3 more announcements today, and 2 genders. Each one is still such a shock. And is still so depressing to me! I just need to stop reading blogs and facebook. It hasn't been doing me ANY good this WHOLE year.

Peace

I have been trying so hard to be patient and not use a pregnancy test this last week. Which is really funny because I was testing 10-12 days early. I know, I said I was trying. Not succeeding. And on Thursday I told myself I could wait until Monday. Well, Sunday morning I couldn't help myself, and I tested. And it was blue! I was so unsure how I would react to good or bad news, and I didn't cry. I didn't scream, I just had the peaceful feeling of "I knew it." Like I really had known all along. So today has been a really really good day. The sweet relief and peace I feel at church was just SO intense. I felt so blessed. But I guess it's a bad habit I've made, because now that it's dark, I can feel the anxiety creep in. Will I lose this one too? Will I get that beautifully swollen belly I see so many of my friends with? Will I get to announce the gender or birth? Will I get to keep my baby? Since the beginning of this month, I have had this feeling that this month will be the one. And I will be blessed with a healthy baby. I felt that before I even started my period that week. Then when I started testing for ovulation, I just knew when it would happen, and knew that it would be successful. I can't even tell you the assurance I had before I used the pregnancy test. I already knew. I just did. I have not had the paralyzing anxiety I thought I would have, or the horrible fear either. But I guess I have just felt so saddened by my friends' pregnancies for so long that it is habit now. Or is it the dark? I don't know. But right now, I just praise Heavenly Father, and thank Him with all that I have that I am pregnant right now. I am so happy to just have this unity.

New year.

I have come into December with bittersweet feelings, that for the most part have melted away. I can confidently say that my bout with depression is over. I am so intensely relieved and thank Heavenly Father EVERY time I pray that I can feel joy again. That I can be happy just "being" again. That I can just swell with love for my son like I did before. I know by the way it ended and how quickly my emotions changed that it was a not just something that happened, but a very precisely picked trial. It was planned out from the beginning down to the number of days it would last. I had tried so many things that just didn't help at all. Even the antidepressant I tried made me so sick I couldn't stand it. I was MEANT to feel every little tiny bit of hopelessness, depression, darkness, and misery I did. I got to the point that I was so entirely fatigued and beaten by it, that I just needed some reprieve. Some kind of release from the horror even if only for a few minutes. That is how it affected me so completely every moment. I just so desperately needed a break. I was losing my grip and fight so quickly I was willing to turn to meds to get my small release. Just anything to stop the pain and even of only marginally re cooperate. Then, I can remember that I just woke up one morning, and felt good. It really was over that quickly. As soon as I really did hit my breaking point, it was over. I had felt I'd reached it sooo long ago, but I really hadn't. How do you know how strong a tree limb is until you've broken it? It's been a couple of weeks now, and those torturous months I spent in despair, that seemed to simply never, end seem so small now. I still can feel the sharpness of my loss, but I don't feel so lost anymore. I came into December with inescapable pain, and I am approaching Christmas with so much less burden. It has been exactly one year now since we started trying to have a baby. Just a few weeks ago, I would have come upon this anniversary with such excruciating heartbreak. I would have cried from pain for hours. But, I'm not. I am so sad to know that I don't have my baby that should be a month old now, but I'm not broken from it like I was before. My trial is over, and I can only pray I passed the test. Sometimes I don't feel like it gave me any benefit at all. Don't trials make us better people? I didn't feel better, just broken. Even after the pain subsided. Then I got some revelation that I will never forget.

1. Back in our pre-mortal existence, we looked upon our Heavenly Father and Mother, and could see something different. And it was so desirable that we VOLUNTEERED to come to earth, endure pain, heartache, despair, darkness, and every horrible thing to obtain what they had. Of course we didn't completely understand what it was we were signing up for. How could we? We had never experienced anything before. But what they had must have been so beautiful, we would make that tremendously hard journey.

2. This life is the TEST not the REWARD. This life is designed to be hard. To tempt us, to hurt us, to tear us apart. It has to be hard to get the great reward. Even the most valuable rewards mean little if only little is needed to obtain them. Our reward is THE greatest reward. Nothing is more precious. So shouldn't it be the most difficult to achieve? Shouldn't it cost us the most?

3. The atonement is beyond my capacity to describe as precious. It was so perfectly designed with such perfect love. Christ paid the price for not only our darkest sins, but for our pain as well. All our pain we experience innocently at the hands of others, or because of nature, or because of health, was also endured by Christ. He knows how you feel. He does because he felt it, too. So he is the perfect comforter. Let him. Because he knows you and your pain.

4. Trials will come. And you should be grateful they are long and hard, and that Heavenly Father lets you struggle. We can only gain experience in opposites. We can only experience joy at the same degree as pain you experience. You can only feel the highest highs if you know the lowest lows. You must know the dark to know the light. So, while journeying through the valley of death, just remember that joy, just as exquisitely good as this is bad, will come. This hardship will allow you to see the beauty in your life with much deeper understanding. And you will cherish it all the more.

5. Keep an eternal perspective. We have heard it so many times: it will be a small moment. And it will! It will. You all know that because you can look back now and see the hard times in your lives, and they are small now. Keep your eye on your reward. Keep your eye on that characteristic that Heavenly Father and Mother had that we saw in the pre-existence. We trusted them to send us here. Don't lose that faith and trust now. Consider this. A bee stuck in a bus couldn't get out no matter how hard it tried. The bus driver opened a window and tried to usher it out. The bee wouldn't be guided. Trust in someone who has a greater perspective than you to guide you. It may not make sense to you, but it would if you had a different perspective. Keep your eternal perspective.

6. YOU are the one who decides what happens to you because of your trials. MAKE them mean something. Don't endure the trial just to be the same afterward. You paid for something. Don't let it slip away. Make the trial work for you. Use it!

Things I have learned:

1. I have never had the opportunity to become so close and dependent on my Father in Heaven and my Savior Jesus Christ.

2. I have learned how to thirst and hunger for the gospel. How precious and priceless the sacrament is, and how I simply need the rest I get when I am in the presence of the Spirit.

3. I have learned how to need to pray always.

4. I know the meaning of "I need thee every hour"

5. I can so clearly understand some truths about the atonement I didn't before.

6. Faith does not make a trial end. Faith is still going to church, still serving, and still having hope through it.

7. I can do hard things.

8. All things are possible with Christ. No matter what it is.

9. So very few of the things I "care" about day to day don't matter at all.

10. The greatest characters are the most scarred.

My Father in Heaven loves me enough to turn me into something of great beauty like pressure does to coal. So here I am at the 1 year mark with a whole new perspective. And I am making this trial mean something. It will not be just a hard time for me to forget. Rather, it will be a hard time that taught me some of the most sweet truths of my life. So, here I go with this new year.

I hate news.

So I know I have posted that I have been feeling soo much better lately, and I have, but it still doesn't do me any good to keep hearing about people getting pregnant or having babies. I swear there is someone new with news EVERY TIME I log into facebook. Totally ruined my night. I still want a baby so badly. I still miss my two babies so much. It STILL HURTS TO HEAR ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE'S PREGNANCIES!!!

So I have been reading through my previous posts today. I probably shouldn't have because it brought back just how sharp and deep the pain was. And sometimes is. At first it was always bad, but then it was only bad most of the time, then only sometimes, and now not very often. But all my posts have had the worst of times. So, though it seems like I've been lying in a ditch for 3 straight months, I really haven't been all of the time. I really do think I have been getting a lot better. Why do you ask? Because some people have said some things to me recently that I know would have sent me reeling or made me pulsate with anger before. But I didn't react that way, and I'm glad. I feel I am gaining control again. One of my friends whom I had confided in before spoke with me after I hadn't talked to her for almost a month. When I told her about my anxiety I was still experiencing, she said, "Still?" I was so shocked for a moment, I actually think my jaw dropped. Is there a time limit? I wasn't filled in if there was one. But I didn't get mad like I know I would have before. And out bishop called us in to talk to us one Sunday after church, for reasons I still don't know. He asked how we were doing and asked about the day he saw me crying. LDS family services contacted him and told him I called looking for a therapist. I didn't know they would call him, and I was caught off guard. It's not that I didn't want him to know. He is my friend and I would have told him anyway. I guess I just expected some patient privacy. But anyway, he asked me about what was going on that day. So I told him through lots of tears the basics of the story. And he said, "It's out of my hands." "All things happen for a reason." And "Things will happen when they happen." Even a week ago I would have been so filled with rage at what he had said. But I was mostly let down and a little angry. I had been looking so hard for a "message," I guess, from Heavenly Father. I had asked my husband to give me a blessing hoping for a little glimmer of hope or a promise or something. Nothing. Then I waited for a week to see the bishop hoping he might offer to give me a blessing or something. Or feel impressed to tell me something. Nothing. I feel so ungrateful saying it, but I feel so abandoned. Not only can I not get pregnant, I don't even get a "good job" or "you're almost done" let alone a "you will bear another child." Pretty much how I've felt my whole life: forgotten. At least I have my son.

I love the internet.

This is an article I found online today. It really helps so much to know that someone else feels EXACTLY how I do. Down to the hate and jealousy and everything.

The doctor's silence tells me everything I need to know. Eventually, he clears his throat, and says in a voice deliberately gentled, "I'm very sorry". And so am I. There on the screen before us, I can make out the form of a tiny curled foetus and, where a few weeks earlier, its heart was thumping with life, it now lies still in the cavernous vacancy of my womb. This is no longer a baby. It is a miscarriage.

It surprises me how surprised I am. This is the sixth baby we will have lost; you would think that I would be used to it by now. But maybe it's not surprising that I had to believe in this baby, as though by investing in it some hope, and some love, I could will it into being.

They have run all the tests. Like the majority of women with recurrent miscarriage, they have found nothing wrong with me. They don't know why this is happening.

In my mother's generation, there were no early pregnancytests, and you weren't officially pregnant until you had missed three periods. These days, it's different. The very first day of absent menstruation can find you racing to the chemist, and then fumbling with instructions and collection pots and testing sticks until that tell-tale blue line makes its announcement.

The next step is a visit to your GP, where you are told the day your baby is due. You are handed a free book on pregnancy containing photographs and descriptions of your developing baby. It confidently states that, by 12 weeks, the foetus is fully formed. (It doesn't warn you here that only five out of six pregnancies make it this far). The book suggests that you make an early appointment with your midwife and begin thinking about where you want your baby to be born. So you do.

And you discover the unmistakable differences that pregnancy brings – the signs that women have never needed testing kits to tell them. A visit from the tit-fairy brings you newly enlarged and extra-sensitive bosoms. You have a vastly increased need for food and for sleep. You feel more squeamish, more nauseous, more emotional and more hygienic. The hormone rushes make you feel like you're stoned. Lack of food makes you violent. You feel the glow of life inside you. You begin to plan and to dream. You probably chat to your baby. You consider its sex and its name.

And then you begin to bleed.

So you've lost your baby. And it's such a massive thing to lose. You, me, everyone reading this, we all started out as a little smudge of amniotic cells. My children would be 18 months old, or four months old, or I would be five months pregnant. I've lost a good friend because her baby was born on the day that mine was due and I have never been to see him. It hurts too much.

I have never known depression like the cloud that descends every time I lose a baby. I can compare it with the death of a close friend and I can honestly say that it's worse. When a friend of mine died suddenly, we viewed the body, we buried him and we were able to say goodbye. I had the company of others who were as grief-stricken as I was. My mind replayed moments with him – a ceaseless video stream of memories, which was part of the way that my brain processed the loss.

With a miscarriage, I'm left battling through the layers of euphemism to even recognise that I have been bereaved. What is this that has happened? "Pregnancy loss"? The word "baby" was never mentioned by the staff in the Early Pregnancy Advisory Unit. When the scan revealed that my baby was no longer viable, I was referred for an operation with the horrendous name of "Evacuation of Retained Products of Conception". My child, described as clinical waste.

If there's no body, how can I grieve? I feel as though I must be kidding myself, wallowing in a morass of grief over a person who never even lived. Every time my mind trips back to this death, this loss, it strikes on empty, because there's nothing there to miss. This jellybean, lying forlornly on some toilet tissue – how can that sum up all my hopes and dreams for this child? How can it contain all my love?

I almost welcome the pain and blood that happens when I miscarry. It seems more real to me than opting for an operation under general anaesthetic. There is pain involved. I want to feel it.

When a friend dies, you can seek solace in the company of other mourners. Miscarriage, by contrast is an entirely private grief. There's me and my partner, and he's generally so intent on protecting and comforting me that it's hard for him to make space for his emotions. "How are you?" a friend will ask, in a conversational tone, and I wonder, do they really want to know the blackness of my mood? Every time it happens, I find it harder to struggle through, and yet I fear that, for my friends, this drama has become repetitive and boring. With each miscarriage I need help more, yet I feel I can ask for it less.

I am a mother. I have a child, conceived after my third miscarriage. In an earnest attempt at consolation, I am repeatedly told "Well, at least you have got him". And it's true, and I love my son dearly: he is perfect, wonderful and amazing. I am aware that the pain of other women who never carry a child must be greater than mine. But that doesn't mean that I'm not hurting. Having had a baby, I know exactly what it is I've lost. I know what it feels like to give birth, to breast-feed and to raise a child. The stack of baby clothes that I have in the attic is slowly diminishing, pragmatically distributed to women who are actually having babies, not ghosts.

And alongside the helplessness and hopelessness there is another, even darker emotion. It could be politely described as bitterness. How it actually feels to me is hatred. I hate pregnant women. This is nuts. I have been heavily pregnant myself and I know it's no fun. What I should feel is sympathy. Envy would be understandable, but hatred? What's going on here?

There's generally no point trying to bury your emotions. It's only by feeling them and naming them that you can get through them. And if you try to run away from them, they have a habit of catching up with you. Jealousy and hatred are impolite, socially unacceptable emotions, but they could serve a purpose. Throughout the animal kingdom, there are examples of bereaved mothers attempting to steal babies. Maybe I'm just part of a bigger picture here. The survival of the species is best achieved if there is a mechanism for matching up thwarted parents with unwanted babies. And I have reached the point where I've thought, "She's got my baby. That's my baby that she's growing." Insanity, I know, but possibly evolutionarily useful insanity.

So where does this leave me now?

The stakes keep rising but we have to keep playing the game. Maybe another baby will arrive to heal the hole in my heart. Or maybe my life will continue, trapped into this loop, like a needle that lands on a record but hits a scratch and lifts off again before the song even starts playing.

On a practical level, we don't seem to have much problem conceiving, which isn't entirely a blessing. I am sincerely grateful that we haven't spent thousands of pounds on IVF to walk this difficult road. But it does mean that any time we want to step off the roller-coaster, to gather our energies for the next ride, we have to avoid trying to conceive a baby that we desperately want. Which makes our lovemaking very poignant. The only fixed point that I can see ahead is the eventual end of my child-bearing years. Either we will have had another baby, or we will have tried. I won't be so sentimental as to say that these unborn babies will stay with me, because they never really lived, but these scars will have made me part of who I am. And I am proud of that.

Our society conspires to render miscarriage invisible. There is an unwritten rule that a woman should never announce her pregnancy until she reaches three months "just in case". Just who is this helping? The first trimester is when a woman does the work of creating the baby. Every organ in the baby's body is formed, and the mother experiences worse fatigue andnausea than at any other point of gestation. Women need to be supported through this vulnerable period and, with no outward sign that they are pregnant, how are they going to access that help if they can't ask for it?

And if they miscarry, as one in six early babies will, women need even more support through their trauma. "Not telling" leaves women stranded with their grief. How can they begin to explain that they are mourning the loss of something whose existence was kept secret in the first place?

Pregnancy is a superstitious time and I can see why women don't want to tempt fate by announcing their news too soon. But fate has dealt me that blow, the one people don't talk about, and I can tell you that the fact that people don't talk about it makes it a whole lot worse.

So talk. Tell. We can be proud of our pregnancies, no matter how "successful" they are. A hurting heart is a sign of a loving heart. The only thing that has really helped me through this is knowing other women who have been through the same thing. Miscarriage is such a common trauma – there is no reason for us to be alone in our grief.

Kate Evans's book on breast-feeding, 'The Food of Love', is published by Myriad Editions (£12.99). Her email is kate@cartoonkate.co.uk