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When I began to consider how to tell the story of our family’s restoration, I knew I needed a voice better than my own. My voice today--in February of 2017--is a voice filled with joy and gratitude, a voice full of hope and exuberance. But that is not the voice that tells our story.
Rather, the voice that tells that story--a voice of grief and regret, a voice of terror and loss--is the voice of Tory in 2012 and 2013. And that voice exists in our family’s blog, Inch by Inch, Row by Row, that we began on January 7, 2012.
January 7, 2012: It's been so hard to keep this a secret! We've been bursting with the news but forcing ourselves to wait until at least the first appointment (which is this Wednesday, January 11).
After three years of marriage, Jeff and I had decided to begin our family, and our Baby Blueberry was conceived just 5 months later. It seemed like a miracle.
January 13, 2012: On January 11, we arrived at the doctor's office and immediately had a sonogram. From the moment the fetus appeared on the screen, I knew it wasn't moving the way it should be. As I gripped Jeff's hands tighter and tighter, we listened to the doctor say that she couldn't find the tiny flicker that should indicate a heartbeat, that the fetus was measuring smaller than expected, and, finally, that it was a miscarriage.
In the ensuing six months, we cried and grieved, we screamed and got angry, we leaned on each other and pushed each other away. Every moment--every morning--felt like I had to drag my feet out of the kind of mud that sucks off your boots and force myself to trudge onward. At best, hope was small and distant.
June 12, 2012: If I could just grab myself some hope or faith or patience today, I would--abundantly. But I can't. I don't know how to anymore. I have tried to look at the positives, tried to find the silver lining, tried to discover what God's teaching me in five of the saddest months of my life. But I can't do it anymore. It hurts too much to risk hope over and over and keep having it slip out of my grasp.
July 26, 2012: I need another surgery. The absolute and incredible lack of fairness of where we are today is drowning me. I'm suffocated by the knowledge that we started trying a year ago now, by the reminder that we should have spent our anniversary yesterday with our own little one.
Finally, a full 8 months after our miscarriage, things seemed to be moving along in the direction of the family we so desperately desired. I had found a specialist I trusted; my condition had been diagnosed; Jeff and I were cleared to begin our first medicated infertility cycle. In spite of the nightly injections, I rejoiced.
December 6, 2012: When our doctor and ultrasound tech walked into the room to greet us, both said "Congratulations!" For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why. There was nothing to congratulate, as far as I could tell. With a quick assessment, they started right in on the ultrasound, gently explaining what they were seeing. The only word I cared about was "heartbeat," though, so it took me a moment when our tech said "and there's the cardiac activity!" A second of comprehension later, the tears started.
Cardiac Activity.
Heartbeat.
Little Life.
We were blessed with 13 sweet days of joy. Thirteen days of excitement, of planning, of celebrating. Thirteen days.
December 19, 2012: Turns out that 2012 wasn't our year after all. It's been bookended by the losses of our two sweet July babies, Blueberry and Beanster. Today feels both eerily similar to and strangely different from January 13, 2012. We've now lost two sweet angels, both in the seventh week of their brief lives inside me. We know, with this one, that a tiny heart actually stopped beating, which puts our type of miscarriage in a very small minority. It seems the issue isn't just getting me pregnant (as we thought) but keeping me pregnant. And so I am overwhelmed with fear and guilt and doubt. Why can't my body keep my babies alive? What if all the testing reveals nothing we can fix? How do I watch the man I adore and would do anything for grieve again for a lost opportunity at fatherhood?
And with this new heartbreak we stopped. In spite of my age, in spite of our physical struggles, we hit the “pause” button on building our family and began to work on restoring each other. I auditioned for community theatre again. Jeff threw himself into a group of teens who he taught improv theatre. We boarded a ship to the Panama Canal and spent fourteen days desperately trying to remember who we were before all of THIS defined us.
April 6, 2013: We've been to the Panama Canal and back, making new friends, dancing the jive, and generally remembering what it means to live our lives as the joyful, fulfilled, insanely blessed couple that we are. There will be plenty more posts about the wonders of our physical journey, but I just wanted you all to know that our emotional journey has left us, well, just plain happy again! It's remarkable what happens when you stop trying to live joyfully and just start doing it, isn't it?
So we arrived at a weekend in May 2013--the weekend when I was opening as Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the weekend of Mother’s Day, the weekend when we began those nightly injections again. And then came June.
June 6, 2013:
Two lines.
Two.
Twice--once yesterday afternoon, once this morning.
Two.
Jeff saw them, too.
Two lines, saying a little lovebug just might be growing in my belly.
Jeff and I aren't excited--yet. We still believe it might just be a trick, a blip in hormones caused by something other than pregnancy that turned that second line pink. Jeff says he's holding out for the bloodwork Friday--but I'm holding out for August, when I'd be out of the first trimester. Last night, my brain started running wild, thinking about what time I'd take off at school and when I'd be able to tell colleagues, friends, and family, but I quickly reigned it back in. I've gone down that rabbit hole twice and had to crawl back out when it all fell apart. I'm not ready to do that again.
Those of you at Restoration who have seen our rambunctious, energetic, ever-grinning little girl know how this story continues. It travels through 9 months of worry, through 18 hours of non-progressive labor, through an emergency c-section, to a healthy, squirmy little Lily who was placed in our arms on the afternoon of February 8, 2014.
But the story doesn’t end there. For it to end there would mean that Lily restored us as a couple, restored broken relationships with friends and family, restored our faith in God. And that’s just not true. So here is my voice--my voice today.
February 26, 2017: It’s naptime. Well, it was naptime--now I can hear increasingly louder thuds and thumps over my head. Jeff just returned from driving a neighbor to the airport. Our living room is a mess; from where I sit, I can see two Little People buses on the floor, a cat sprawled across the dining room table, and the art project Jeff’s been working on for our church for the past couple of weeks. For someone who likes order, nothing about my world is orderly. But that’s okay. It’s okay that the restoration of my marriage, my family, my faith isn’t neat and clean. It’s okay that some days are still hard and that we often have to lean on others for support and encouragement.
Here’s what I need you to know: We are restored not because of who we are but because of who God believes we can be.
How beautiful is that?
