The Shofar Is Silent, Remember to Breathe
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This baby boy who we lost before we met, who was never supposed to come into this world… I hope he is now in peace.
No one ever told me how hard it was. Why don’t women who have had miscarriages go running around telling everyone how hard it is? They should make sure that the rest of us are forewarned. Not that I would have understood.
There I was, July 18, at my 16-week checkup for my seemingly easy pregnancy, when the doctor was using her doppler to find the baby’s heartbeat.
“Hmmm,” she said as she kept moving around the doppler trying to find the heartbeat.
I thought it was a little strange, because at 16 weeks they should be able to find the baby’s heartbeat with no problem. But my mind was on a million other things. I had a whole list of things to do that day and I wanted to get out of there already. Plus, my regular OB-GYN was off for the entire month of July and I was seeing some other doctor who I had never met, so all I wanted to do was get this appointment done with as fast as possible.
“Let’s take you into the ultrasound room,” the doctor told me.
I started to get a little nervous, but I asked her if everything was okay and she said ‘yes’ very confidently so I wasn’t that concerned. I never imagined anything could possibly be wrong. I was still blissfully unaware.
The baby should be moving, shouldn’t it? The doctor looked at me and said, “Oh, Abby, I’m so sorry.”
We went into the ultrasound room and up on a huge 40″ monitor I see my baby, curled up in fetal position laying at the bottom of the sack in my belly. It wasn’t moving. The baby should be moving, shouldn’t it? Before I had too much time to think, I see the ultrasound tech and the doctor making eyes at each other. Then the doctor looked at me and said, “Oh, Abby, I’m so sorry.”
I remember crying and shrieking at them to take the baby off the screen. I turned my head away and covered my eyes while they took measurements of the baby. They said the baby stopped growing at 13 1/2 weeks. There were no obvious signs of why the baby had died. The doctor comforted me for a few minutes, then suggested we walk back to the other room where I could call my husband and tell him what happened.
The rest of that day is a blur in my memory. We scheduled a D&E for Thursday. This was a Monday. What was I supposed to do between Monday and Thursday with a dead baby in my stomach?
We told our kids the following night that there wasn’t going to be a baby. It was excruciating. My 6-year-old son bawled his eyes out. My 7-year-old daughter seemed okay that first day, but then had a hard time the next few days. She recently told me that we’ll never have a baby. My son still says from time to time that it’s not fair that we didn’t get a baby when everyone else does.
The procedure to have the baby removed was horrible. It didn’t hurt that much, but I was under general anesthesia at the time. The physical pain healed shortly after. But the emotional pain took much longer. We found out that we had lost a baby boy. As in Jewish tradition, we had the baby buried in a special place in the Jewish cemetery where they bury “miscarriage babies”.
The whole thing was painful and terrible, and the emotional pain didn’t get better. It took me a long time to go out with a friend, or take the kids somewhere, or even see other people. I avoided public places and only spent time with people who I felt truly comfortable talking to about the miscarriage, because at any given moment something would remind me of it, or I just felt like talking about it, and I needed to be with people who I was comfortable talking to about it.
It’s over a year later now. My body is still not back to normal, meaning I haven’t lost the weight I gained and certain parts of my body have changed. I have gone back to regular life, for the most part. But every time something happens that reminds me of it, I remember the pain all over again. The pain of losing a child that I never knew. The excitement and anticipation that we all had. My husband and I, our children, and our extended family. Even my friends who knew I was pregnant were so happy and excited for us. I was happy and excited. And it was all taken away from us in an instant, with those words, “Oh, Abby, I am so sorry.”
I have wondered why. I have gone through every possible minute of those last days, of the 13th week of my pregnancy, of everything, just searching and searching for why did this happen? Why did this baby get taken from us?
For a long time the guilt was killing me. I did this, I ate that, I should have done this or not done that. The guilt has somewhat gone away, but I still feel it. In my most depressed state, I will think about it and let it get me down. But then there are times when I’m feeling good and I tell myself, God has a plan. This happened for a reason. This baby was not supposed to live. It never was. On Rosh Hashanah, the day of judgment, it is determined who will live and who will die. And last year, it was determined that this child of mine would be conceived and then die, before it ever came into the world. Maybe he was being spared some awful pain. Maybe we were all being spared a sick child that wouldn’t live very long.
People seemed to question me why I used the words, “the baby died” to my kids when I explained to them what happened. But yes, that is exactly what happened.
And, yes, the baby died. People seemed to question me why I used the words, “the baby died” to my kids when I explained to them what happened. But yes, that is exactly what happened. The baby was conceived and started to grow. And then it died. There is no other way to explain it. And telling my kids that the baby went up to heaven, or the baby is sleeping would only confuse them.
This baby boy who we lost before we met… I hope he is now in peace. And we won’t cry anymore that it never came into this world, because it was never supposed to come into this world. God had a plan for the baby.
As it got closer to my due date, and everyone I knew was having healthy baby boys, it got even harder. It’s still hard to go to a bris and hold someone else’s baby. It is hard when I hear of women talking carelessly about their pregnancies, or about their babies. And a million things remind me of the baby we lost, or the pregnancy that I held for such a short time.
I hear of miracle babies delivered at 28 weeks, mothers who have medical conditions, and I am happy to hear of the babies that lived. I appreciate the miracle that is pregnancy and childbirth. Every baby born that is healthy and living is a true miracle. I will never take another healthy pregnancy for granted.
A version of this article originally appeared on Hevria.com
I am 80 years old now, and 50 years ago I went through 10 grueling years of 7 miscarriages before I ever had children. I felt like God was punishing me for some unknown reason. Turns out I had PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, a condition that was poorly understood in the 1970’s. When I was 36 I gave birth to my beautiful son, who is now 44, perfectly fine, and I had two daughters, also healthy and wonderful, in the next 3 years. You need to keep trying, no matter how dismal things seem at the time. There is some kind of stigma about miscarriages. I remember how lonely I felt, nobody wanted to listen to my emotional pain. I kept it all inside, and endured the grief alone. I hope this will change, and pregnancy loss will be more understood.
So sorry for you loss. God plans for healthy babies and when things are not developing just so and there are many, many reasons, miscarriages happen. Many women have miscarriages and think it is just a bad period. The laws of nature take over and it is not God taking away a baby; it is God wanting a healthy baby. It is God's blessing when things are developing naturally and also God's blessing's when his laws of nature take over in the cases where circumstances cause loss. God works in mysterious way. Bless you as God keeps you in his love.
I think the answer is very simple. When things are not going just so and when things are not just right then it is very natural to miscarry. Healthy women's bodies do that all the time. Often they do not even realize they are pregnant and think it just a heavy period. Steps in development can be missed for many different reasons. This is where God perhaps comes into the picture - NOT on an individual basis, but because of the original laws of nature. I know it is heart breaking but one cannot take it personally as if chosen not to have a baby, it is to have only a healthy baby. Bless you.
I was told that about one third of all pregnancies end in miscarriage (or worse a tubel pregnancy which almost killed me because my doctor failed to diagnose it). My mother had 4 children and 5 misscarriages. That was because there was something wrong with the linning of her utereus and the babies would not "stick". Now the doctors can give you something for this problem, but back then such a medicine was not available. Thus if my mother wanted children, she knew she would have to go more than one miscarriage to have a baby that "stuck". Horrible but she did it. She had four healthy beautiful and smart daughters. She never had a son, but my first child (I am her oldest daughter) was a boy. Since then she got 7 grandchildren. 3 boys and four girls. She also has a great grandson.
So sorry for your loss.
I often recommend this book written by a woman who lost a number of pregnancies & BH has a few children & now grandchildren..
I have recommended this book to frum women as well as gentiles. They all benefited from it!
“ Infertility In The Bible- how the matriarchs changed their fate
How you can too”
By Jessie Fischbein
Unfortunately, I know what you went through, having gone through it myself. We cannot understand why it happened to us & not someone else, if we did something wrong etc. It was in G-d's hands & something that we will probably never understand. I hope that one day you will give birth and have another child to love & take care of.
I lost a baby girl at 5 months. I have theories that relate to my life story but in reality I don't know why. It truly is in God's hands as to the plan. I can say it has taught me greater compassion for others and forced me to go deeper into my need to let God's will be done and not my own. That is very hard to do. It isn't just lip service to the words once you have lived through this type of grief. A year later I was still crying every night. I also had 2 healthy children and friends would say you have 2 children be thankful! I am. I was. But I couldn't stop grieving. I finally one night said, Lord, I can't do this. I can't will myself to heal. Lord you are going to have to take this pain away. He has comforted me greatly. I won't say I never have a moment of grief, but so much better!
Thank you Carol for the above post. Though my story is different and at times im in agony from it , I really like what you wrote about asking Hashem to take away the pain. You have helped me. May we know no more pain