Aisles of Remembering

We’ve all seen those movie montages that illustrate the passing of time—showing the same street with changing leaves, or a front porch with a baby stroller, then a tricycle, and then a bike, and so on and so forth. If my motherhood journey were to be portrayed in a similar way, it would take place in the aisle of my local Kohl’s department store. Hear me out! As a frugal shopper, who can resist their coupons and one–stop shopping for items for the whole family? 

Our scene opens with me as an optimistic, barely pregnant young(ish) woman of 30. I am embarking on my first pregnancy with excitement and careful research about everything. My first stops at Kohl's are for the (pathetically small) maternity department, to find work clothes to cover my changing frame. Soon, my trips included forays into the neighboring baby department. Consistent with my idealistic ways, my husband and I have chosen not to find out the gender of our baby, but to be surprised at birth.  So though I browsed, I didn't buy much. The months go by; my frame grows.  Eventually,  in late summer, I appear again. This time, pushing a stroller with a beautiful healthy baby boy in it!  As you might guess, I make a beeline to the baby boy department to choose adorable plaid outfits for my bundle of joy.   

Months pass. Once again, our sequence opens in the maternity department. This time, I am shopping with an energetic toddler in tow for casual maternity clothes to suit my new stay-at-home mom lifestyle.  I again glance over to the newborn department, wondering if this baby is another boy or perhaps a girl?  Despite the tiredness of the combination of pregnancy and motherhood, I am excited at the prospect of welcoming another life into our family.  I assume that everything would go according to plan (as it generally has to this point in my life) and I would soon have my hands full with a two-year-old and a newborn.
It is apparent during my next trip that something significant has changed. I only venture to the store when necessary to outfit my toddler. I can barely cast a glance toward the baby clothes.  You see, behind the scenes, we have received life-altering news. The baby I am carrying has a fatal neural tube defect called anencephaly and is not expected to live very long, if at all, past birth. My husband and I immediately decided that we would do nothing to cut short that baby’s life—as long as she has a heartbeat, I would treasure and protect her.  And we knew it is a “she” because with this shattering news, my idealism had quickly gone out the window and I do not want any more surprises about gender or anything else.  So along with the terrifying diagnoses, we have found out that our second child is a daughter. 

As the summer progressed and my midsection grew larger still, I set out on a mission no mother should face—to buy a burial outfit for my still-growing baby. I make two careful selections: my first choice is a fancy pleated dress in white, green and pink, my favorite colors. I have a nagging suspicion this newborn outfit will be much too large on my daughter, who is expected to be very small.  The second is a soft knit white two piece set. I purchased it in two sizes - preemie and newborn—one to keep and one for burial. As the cashier checked me out and cheerfully made small talk about my baby, she must think that I am the glummest pregnant woman to have ever entered her store. It is all I can do not to burst into tears at the checkout. 

Offscreen, my baby is born and lives for 15 minutes. She is named Joy and is loved and cherished and mourned deeply.  Her small life made a big impression on many.  We had a beautiful funeral, and she was laid to rest in that tiny white preemie outfit in a park-like cemetery.  Months pass. I eventually return to the store, with an ornery preschooler in tow, and once again, a growing middle. This is my third pregnancy, and I have changed so much from that wide-eyed, optimistic, first-time mother-to-be.  I have now been on the wrong side of the statistics. I know firsthand the weight of loss and possibility and that all pregnancies do not, in fact, end in healthy babies. I feel like my innocence has been taken.  I see other moms shopping in the maternity and newborn sections and think how blissfully unaware they are of all that can go tragically wrong. 

But praise be to God, after extreme anxiety at my early and mid-pregnancy ultrasounds, I find out that I am carrying another healthy boy. Back to the newborn boy department we go.  But this time, I cannot enter those aisles without a sideways glance at the pink dresses and flowered pajamas nearby. I have to steel myself not to tear up at the thought  that, just over a year before, I was heavily pregnant with a precious baby I could not ultimately keep. The sweet bliss of the infant clothing department—of the anticipation of motherhood in general—has been shattered. I now know too intimately the things that could go awry. 

As my son’s birth approaches, I am filled with anxiety.  I remember vividly not only the physical pain of my past two labors and deliveries, but now I have the additional emotional toll of knowing it could go wrong. After a loss, the statistics of the “low” rates of various maternal and fetal problems have become not distant impossibilities, but distinct possibilities.  Though I could never replace my dear daughter, all I want is to bring home a healthy baby.  Although I have to be induced early due to high blood pressure, I have a smooth and relatively easy (as these things go) natural delivery. In a beautiful picture of redemption for everyone, the amazing midwife who delivered Joy was on call and there to deliver our second son.  But a few hours after birth, my newborn’s temperature drops, which can be a sign of infection in a baby.  Before I know it, he is whisked away to the NICU.  

No parent ever wants to have a child in the NICU, but my perspective as a Loss Mom was perhaps different. I could see both sides of the coin. On one hand, I was just relieved that his problems seemed to be relatively minor and that he was, at the very least, alive!  On the other hand, I kept thinking “why is this happening to us?” I had already walked out of that hospital without a baby in my arms, and I was determined that I would not do it again. The hospital has a few tiny rooms that they let NICU moms stay in. I don’t think they normally let moms stay for as long as they let me, but I must have been desperate, because they let me stay in that closet-with-a-bed for a week. That week passed in an exhausted delirium…getting up at all hours to nurse and pump and keep my hands on that baby. I think I left the hospital only once, to walk to get some lunch at a place other than the cafeteria. I was resolute that I would NOT get into a car and drive away from that building without my baby in his carseat. I had done that once and I would not do it again. Finally, after a draining week, in the middle of a snow and ice storm, he was deemed healthy and ready to go home. I praise God that nothing was seriously wrong with him and that our life as a family of four could begin.
(Side note…that’s one other thing they never warn you about after losing a child.  Were we a family of four? Well yes, on earth we were. But in our hearts, we were a family of five. Neither answer sounds correct when answering the question “how many children do you have?” I have come to adjust my answer depending on the circumstances, namely if I will ever see the person again and what kind of relationship I foresee developing. I know in my heart that even if I only answer about my living children, I will never forget Joy.)

Back to Kohl’s the montage goes, over and over. The redheaded children grow. My firstborn makes the big leap from the baby section to the toddler section. My cart is filled with graphic t-shirts of construction vehicles and adorable matching plaid shirts.  Though the sting of the baby girl section is somewhat less, I still avoid it like the plague.  I had the sense that our family was not complete, but yet my body and my brain needed a break from three full-term pregnancies in four years.  

Around two years after our second son was born, I again disappeared from the department store aisles.  I was grateful to be pregnant again, even if not altogether ready.  Are you ever truly prepared for pregnancy after a loss?  I struggle more with morning sickness this time, which I think is a good sign.  Unfortunately it is not.  I will spare you the gory details, but I am grateful that at my husband’s urging, I let him take me to the ER of the local women’s hospital.  At 12 weeks pregnant, I had my first miscarriage.  It is everything my first loss was not—it was brutally fast and private; the pregnancy was over before it had been shared with many.  Where I had so much time to appreciate Joy’s life and prepare for her death (and was forced to do so publicly), this baby was gone so soon and so suddenly and so graphically. I felt betrayed by my body and by the pregnancy odds. Hadn’t I paid my dues in the baby loss department already? I look back at pictures of myself during that time and see such sadness—I am puffy from early pregnancy, tired from a difficult few months, and once again grieving a life we had eagerly anticipated.  

Thankfully, as the boys were getting older, it was easier and easier to circumnavigate the baby department—after this most recent betrayal, I had no interest in being near anything related to babies.  I enjoyed the summer and tried to tell myself it was good to be doing all the things I couldn’t comfortably do if I had been enormously pregnant. There was some truth to that, I suppose, but also a large piece of sanity-saving self-deception.  

However, time marches quickly on. I wasn’t getting any younger, and the age gap between any potential siblings was growing.  Ready or not, I again found myself pregnant. In a very poor execution of family planning, I was pregnant at almost the exact same time as I had been the previous year. In fact, my early ultrasound was scheduled for the exact date of my miscarriage, in the same building. A nurse who didn’t know my history took my blood pressure and almost keeled over when it read something astronomically high, like 160 over who knows what. The midwife, who did know me, reassured her that it was “just” extreme pregnancy/white coat anxiety causing those alarming numbers. To this day, I struggle with high blood pressure in any medical setting.  To my extreme relief, our baby looked to be developing perfectly, with no sign of a neural tube defect.  

Thanks to my “advanced age” (I hate that phrase but it’s better than “geriatric pregnancy,” I suppose) we had early genetic screening that told us that our baby was a little girl!  Like so many things about pregnancy after a loss, this was so very bittersweet. I am thankful that I could tackle this part of pregnancy in stages as I tiptoed closer to our daughter’s loss. First, having a healthy child. Then carrying another girl.  All of a sudden I found myself cautiously eyeing those aisles of all pink sleepers and tiny ruffled outfits. It was hard to believe that I would ever actually be buying them, but as my pregnancy progressed well, I couldn’t help but buy a few. The months passed in a blur of excitement and anxiety. Having already completed two categories on the “terrible things that can happen in pregnancy” bingo card, I was all too aware of how many more things there were that COULD go wrong. Any story of pregnancy or infant loss hit me so deeply. 

After an eternity of being pregnant, I safely delivered a daughter. Though she can never replace Joy or fill the space that Joy’s loss had created, our family felt a certain completeness that it previously hadn’t.  Every step of her pregnancy and birth had been bittersweet. Even her name is not an exception—we had always planned to name our firstborn daughter after our two maternal grandmothers. When we found out about Joy’s condition, we decided that she needed a special name all her own. Five years later, our second daughter bore her great-grandmothers’ names instead. I was beyond grateful to head out of that hospital 24 hours after giving birth with my little treasure safely beside me.

Now that this little girl was a reality, you know where I went! Shopping! I have never been one to really splurge on clothes, and am not a person who grew up dreaming of how I would dress a future daughter, but I couldn't resist shopping in those aisles that had caused me so much tangible grief in the previous years. It was a strangely satisfying, if shallow, form of resolution to a painful situation. Eight years later, I can still picture some of those tiny outfits that I proudly purchased in those early days. 

Sixteen years have passed since those first starry-eyed walks down the maternity aisle.  In a strange way, that department store has continued to be a testament to my life stages. My boys moved from “little boys” to the “big boy” department, and now one is firmly in men’s sizes!  My daughter outgrew that emotionally fraught baby section, cruised through Daniel Tiger and Bluey covered clothes and has recently graduated to the “big girls” department herself. I take none of this for granted. There were many days when I had no hope that I would ever have need for the sparkly pants and sequined sweatshirts I often passed by. In the same way, the store has witnessed other surprising turns in our family’s life. I never would have guessed I’d be buying base layers for not one but three youth hockey players. Nor would I have dreamed that for several months or a year, my only interaction with Kohl’s would be online shopping or curbside pickup, due to a global pandemic (cue a sad shot of me doing online shopping in my pajamas). 

Looking back, I am grateful for all the previous versions of myself that have walked those aisles. 30-year-old Beth had no idea what great joys and sorrows and mundane moments in- between were to come in the next decade and a half. I had no idea on that first foray into the maternity department that I would be shopping for baby-sized burial clothes. And though I certainly hoped that I would continue to shop for my growing children, I also couldn’t imagine how quickly I would be jumping to the men’s department to buy clothes for my handsome teenaged firstborn. I had no inkling of the highs and lows ahead, but I weathered them all, sometimes more gracefully than others. 

  This all serves to remind 40-something Beth that likewise, she has no idea what the next decades will hold. Of course I have some hopes and expectations of what the next years will look like—surviving the teenage years, many more hours in hockey rinks, launching children (hopefully, successfully, please God!), travel, time with family and friends. I know that there will be lows mixed in there as well—aging parents, illness, hardships of any possible variety that I don’t want to contemplate. My department store montage may move out of the kids department to the junior and women’s department, to clothes for dances and funerals and weddings (okay, even I draw the line at wedding apparel from Kohl’s…but maybe wedding gifts?), perhaps even someday coming full circle back to buy clothing for a future grandchild. I will hopefully shop with excitement for events not yet planned, and unfortunately will most likely walk through the aisles with a heavy heart on occasion. And that is life in a nutshell, isn’t it? The highs and the lows all mixed together in unpredictable, bittersweet ways. 

I sometimes look at younger parents and feel so jaded and tired compared to them; less optimistic and more realistic. Part of me mourns for the naive, idealistic version of myself that existed before loss and other hardships, but what is life if we are not learning and growing and changing? I have discovered through time and circumstances that we can control far less than we wish. Pregnancy and infant loss is a club no one ever wants to join. I have heard many times “You were so brave” to carry Joy, and love her as we did. I always reply that I would only classify it as bravery if we chose to be in that circumstance. I merely count it as being as faithful as we could in a very difficult situation. Though I would not have chosen this path willingly, I have gained so much and grown through my losses and pregnancies after loss. I have deepened respect for life and for good health. I have seen the power of community in action and the indispensability of the support of close friends. I have experienced the power of prayer when I could barely pray for myself. I have been able to walk with many others as they have faced pregnancy loss in all its brutal varieties. The list could go on and on. But if pregnancy after loss has taught me one thing, it’s to try to take the hand I am dealt and make the most of it—to graciously accept difficult circumstances and to wonder at the unexpected blessings and to (attempt) to be grateful to God for both. I am learning to hold both hard circumstances and dreams loosely because you truly never know what each new season will bring.

And as for our Kohl’s movie montage? These days you might still catch me tearing up as I pass that baby aisle—with sadness over what I have lost, with amazement at how fast it all has gone, but mostly out of gratitude at God’s faithfulness all along the way. So, the next time you’re in a department store, I encourage you to take stock (pun totally intended) of the road (aisles?) you have walked…to look back and mourn and rejoice at all that you’ve endured and overcome.  And then, to look ahead with anticipation, ready to embrace the highs and lows that await.