Trigger Warning: Miscarriage–specifically the loss of a first child.

(October is Pregnancy Loss Awareness Month, so it seems a good time to pen a tribute to the children I and my loved ones have lost)

I stare at the words on the screen until they blur beneath my tears: miscarriage confirmed.

Oh friend, I’m so sorry.

It has been five years since I, too, was welcomed into motherhood in a flood of blood and tears, but it comes rushing back to me right now. I know all too well what my friend is feeling. What she has yet to experience.

Because it doesn’t end when the tests come back confirming that your beloved child is no longer with you. Oh no. The real grief is only beginning.

Feeling betrayed by your body. Cursing your brokenness. The lingering emptiness where something was but is no longer. Time marching on while your belly stays flat and lifeless.

Wrong. Everything feels so wrong.

And the fear. The fear of a lifelong dream being ripped away. To add insult to injury, you cannot simply grieve what is, but what you fear will always be. The whisper in your mind saying, “What if I never…?”

You were foolish once. A little girl in her mother’s living room, rocking a baby. You’re a mother too–at three years old–of course you’re a mother. One day you’ll be a real mother with a husband of your own, but right now your brother will do.

You’ll entertain many possible career paths as you grow, but on this you’ll never waver. A husband and kids are a given. As you get older, and maybe you don’t meet him as soon as you’d like, the husband feels like the hard part. Then you finally find him–the man whose children you want to bear. Now you can get on with real life.

You’ve named your babies in your mind–assigned his last name to them. Perhaps abandoned a name or two because they don’t quite work with your new last name, or because your husband declared that the name reminds him of an old, bald, fat man (honestly, the nerve).

And then it happens.

Those two beautiful lines.

You’re a mother!

But then…

Oh, but then…

Bleeding. Why are you bleeding?

Cramping. Why are you cramping?

Wrong, wrong, wrong, your mind screams, even as you hope against hope that maybe, just maybe, there’s a perfectly normal and acceptable explanation for this. Maybe it doesn’t mean what you’re afraid it means.

But it does.

This time, it does.

The deepest, darkest grief.

A life you measure in days. Weeks.

Here and gone before you’ve even had time to properly celebrate.

But you’re a mother.

Sort of.

Are you?

It hardly feels like it counts. How can you be a mother when you’ve nothing to show for it but this broken heart of yours? When your motherhood is invisible?

Some children get funerals, but not yours. You grieve, but no one knows. And those who do know don’t remember.

In all my life, I’ve never experienced a pain so deep as that of Invisible Motherhood.

You’re a mother, but you’re not counted as one. Even among those who claim to be pro-life, you’re something of a would-be. Almost a mother, but not quite. They think you don’t know what it is to love a child with every fiber of your being, but it is they who do not know. Foolish women taking their motherhood for granted. Because of course they’re mothers. They always knew they would be.

Even my second loss could not compare–much to the surprise of my own mother. It was harder for her, she said, to think of my loss as recurrent.

While I understand where the thought came from, I knew she was as misguided as the author who wrote of the grief of losing her third child and thinking her grief was deeper than that of women who had no living children because she knew exactly what she was missing in a way those other women didn’t. (She did concede that this was her grief speaking and that those other women–ahem, me–surely had unique struggles of their own.)

You think??? Dear woman whose body had not always betrayed her, you think maybe my struggle differs from your own?

I hated watching my baby bang her blocks against her bedroom floor while thinking she may very well be my only one, but Only was a far more welcome word than Never, let me tell you. As much as it stung, I had consolation in that, at least.

In the depths of grief, it’s hard to keep the nevers out. To fear this tragedy stretches far beyond the moment you are in. To fear your body is damaged beyond repair and that you will never have a baby to hold in your arms the way you hold this one in your heart. To think that your motherhood will always be invisible. That the children you have hoped for–dreamed of–will never fill your home and weave their way into your story.

I know, I know.

I see you.

Your motherhood is not invisible to me.

And I wish to offer you hope. To make promises I cannot keep. To tell you the nevers are silly. Because of course you’ll be a mother–a “real” mother of a real live baby. To guarantee that you won’t always be invisible in this.

Oh, how I wish I could promise you all of these things. I wish I could give back the baby you’ve just lost. I wish I didn’t have to welcome you to The Invisible Motherhood Club.

I wish I didn’t know that your membership in this club will reshape the way motherhood will look for you. Even if you do get to keep your future babies, gone is the blind belief that making a baby means you get to keep it. Now each pregnancy is fraught with worry. With hopes and prayers and trepidation plaguing each trip to the bathroom.

Perhaps you’ll get lucky and the fear will dissipate after the first trimester, or perhaps you’ll breathe easier once you’ve passed the point of loss. But perhaps you’ll worry daily over an absence of movement, obsessively counting kicks and wondering why the baby has been still for so long. Perhaps you will–like me–have to endure a tumultuous birth and fear you’ve carried that baby for nine months only to lose her in the end. (A limp body between your legs. A tiny oxygen mask. Four long minutes until that first cry.)

You’ll have your good days, I’m sure–full of hope and certainty. And then you’ll have your days where you fear God will change His mind and take this one back too. (That’s what you get for making the very best babies–God doesn’t want to part with them.)

I cannot promise you the happy ending you dream of. Oh how I wish I could. I can only pray that, one day, in the not-too-distant future, you will be so overwhelmed by the messy reality of motherhood that you forget, for a moment, what it was like when you were invisible. And then… that you remember, if only so you can appreciate the gift of those overwhelming little humans that much more.

But for now, as the grief rages real and raw, all I can offer is this:

I see you. I see the way you love and grieve that baby with every fiber of your being.

It counts.

Today and forever, it counts.

Welcome to Motherhood, you beautiful soul. No matter what happens after this, you’ll always have a place at this table.