I often joke that I get pregnant every five months. Except it isn’t really a joke because it’s also a fact.

I first found out I was a mother five months after I said, “I do.” I got to cherish that title for a mere twelve days before that dream ended in blood and tears.

Five months later, I found myself unexpectedly pregnant again.

Five months after I gave birth to my daughter, yet another pregnancy was waiting to be realized. Yet another pregnancy that ended all too soon.

After doing the math, I realized I would be devastated if November didn’t bring me another baby. So I did the only thing I could. I started praying.

“I want a baby,” I told God on November 23rd. “I want a baby who arrives in this, my fifth month. I want a baby who will remain in my womb until August. A full-term baby. Any baby will do, but if I’m requesting specifics, I think I’d like my Justice now.”

The next few weeks were littered with such prayers. I hope… I ache… I yearn… for Justice.

Sometimes the prayers were just one word. A hand pressed to my aching, empty, yet endlessly hopeful womb. Justice. Justice, God, Justice.

The longest four weeks. The crushing weight of anticipation. The constant battle of hope and doubt.

That pink line grew solid while it’s counterpart stayed blank.

Negative.

I crawled back into bed and sobbed my grief.

I ache, I ache, I ache…

For the child I was thirty-one weeks un-full with. For the child I had spoken to in whispers—the one I imagined waited within my womb like a promise.

Broken, broken, broken.

I spiraled again.

I went home for the holidays where I spent Christmas Eve cradling my newborn niece and crying silent tears onto her head as her presence amplified the emptiness in me.

Between the travel and the stress and the fact that I already knew for certain, I didn’t think much of the cycle that wasn’t present… until it still wasn’t present. Until it kept eluding me like some sort of cruel joke, dangling hope just out of reach. So even though I already knew, I had to know.

A quick trip to Walmart would confirm the awful truth. I walked into my childhood bathroom with a cycle that was nine days late and a womb that had never felt more empty.

I saw the telltale signs of all my other children at five weeks. This would have been nearly seven weeks. There was no way, I told myself. No way I was pregnant.

I waited for a negative. I hoped for a positive.

Eternity itself is not so long as waiting for those two lines.

Justice.

What relief! What joy! What celebration!

…and then the bleeding began.

Standing in the shower a mere two weeks after that positive test, sobbing, praying, reasoning with God: “If you didn’t want me to be pregnant, that test could have stayed negative. I had already come to terms with that. But You started answering this prayer and now You have to see it through. I asked You for Justice, and Justice doesn’t die in the first trimester.”

I texted my midwife and she recommended a sonogram to confirm status of Baby. After waiting five days to “officially” lose our last child, Levi and I were both anxious for the peace of mind.

Despair crept in alongside all the familiar symptoms of loss, but that persistent, impossible hope managed to follow me into the exam room.

An image appeared on the screen.

“I see a heartbeat,” the tech said, and the entire room exhaled in relief.

The bleeding remained unexplained, but I was assured that all other evidence pointed to a healthy pregnancy.

Justice didn’t die in the first trimester. Nor did he die in the second trimester when I got kicked by a horse. Nor the third trimester when my labs came back with what appeared to be signs of Cholestasis. (Goodness, did that child keep us on our toes!)

My due date was a mere five days after my sister-in-law’s wedding, and my new prayer was that the baby would be obedient enough to stay in there until the party was over. I guess I should have asked for longer than 26 hours after the party was over because when I woke up the next morning after tossing and turning with contractions that night, I turned my face heavenward and moaned, “Why today?”

Everyone assured me that I had Elise “the hard way” and I suppose when it came to the actual pushing it was wonderful to have a baby in perfect position and without the “now or never” urgency of making sure said baby was delivered alive. But I expected a labor sans castor oil induction smoothie would be easier as well. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. (Although, in defense of the woman who promised me “a cakewalk in comparison,” she probably wasn’t expecting me to go into labor on the tail end of such an exhausting event when she made said promise.)

Contractions seemed agonizing and “working with them” felt foreign (had I done that with Elise or had I simply been too tired to fight them? Because I thought they worked on their own). We called the midwife too late for my preference, but labor had been steady until it suddenly wasn’t. Despite my husband’s assurance that “nothing bad was happening,” the birth trauma hit hard when things started rapidly progressing before Rebecca arrived. I was not going to push that baby out without her capable hands there to guide him.

I probably prolonged labor by working myself up like that because the baby didn’t come the moment Rebecca arrived or anything. (Or perhaps it was the fault of my sister-in-law, who wanted a birthday buddy for her daughter and asked me to wait until midnight, please. Thanks, Devki, whom the Lord loves more than me.)

I labored in the bathroom for awhile. My midwife tried to make me walk the hall (the bully), but finally told me I could go to bed and get some rest if I preferred. To bed I went, but I don’t know if one can call it “rest” when, four contractions later I was grabbing Levi’s arm and saying, “Something’s happening.”

While I didn’t have that moment of “I am woman, hear me roar” triumph after delivering a breech baby in ten minutes this time around, and I just wanted to sleep immediately after birth rather than stare at my child’s precious face for hours, I had my share of sacred moments.

There was that moment standing in the shower as contractions raged, staring down at my belly that was bursting full with the child I thought I was losing seven months earlier, remembering how I stood at God’s doorstep that day and demanded Justice.

There was that moment of looking into my husband’s eyes as I slowly (with controlled, spontaneous pushes! Who knew?) eased our child into the world.

And there was that faith-assuring moment when I sat up in bed to confirm what I already knew. That tiny, squirming infant between my legs—a miracle if I have ever seen one—was the answer to a thousand desperate prayers.

While my husband’s reaction was a, “Haha. Yes! We were right!” accompanied by a fist pump, I smiled. I sighed. And then I said the name I’d been whispering to my womb all along.

“Hello, Justice.”