*TW – pregnancy loss*

At first I felt a lot of guilt. What if it was something I did?, what was wrong with my body?, etc. I got over that in time; I no longer feel like it was my fault. It just happens. 1 in 4 pregnancies, in fact.

But now, five years and eight months on, I still have guilt, just of a different kind. Two different kinds, really:

I’m no longer sad about it on the day-to-day. So I feel guilty for not feeling sadder. And also, I feel guilty for feeling sad at all: for grieving the baby that I lost – because if that baby had survived, I wouldn’t have my living daughter.

Three long, agonizing months after the miscarriage, three months of grieving inconsolably and waiting impatiently, I finally became pregnant again, this time with a baby that stuck. That “rainbow baby” went on to be born in June: three months after what would have been the lost baby’s due date.

March 14, 2021 was their due date, in fact (pi day baby). So if they’d lived, they’d be turning five right about now. – But as it is, I have my bean, my beautiful, funny, mischievous 4.5 year old bean who will turn five in June, and I wouldn’t trade her for anything.

There’s no possible universe in which they both exist.

So like how do I do this? I can’t be sad that pi died, because that implies wishing that pi had lived, which implies wishing that bean had never existed. Which I do not and could never.

But – do those implications really necessarily follow? It seems so to me, logically… but maybe not all things are subject to this kind of logic. Things can be both bad and good. It can be hard to see things that way, especially tragedies; but this whole miscarriage conundrum really shows me how true it is: our little labels of “good” and “bad,” which we are so quick to slap onto our perceptions of events and occurrences – the stories we make up to make sense of things – are really so inadequate, so futile. Maybe in the grand scheme they’re actually even kinda meaningless.

The tragedy of a thing doesn’t make the joy that it made space for any less joyful. Nor does the joy really alleviate the sadness. They don’t cancel each other out. They coexist. Both are true at once. It’s weird. Human brains aren’t really capable of seeing things from God’s perspective, but situations like this kind of give us a hint, I think. In the mind of God, there are none of our human limitations. Both can exist there, both siblings side by side, equally, eternally alive.