How many times can your heart break?

Salty tears

Will they stop?

My face is tight,

Eyes swollen

Nose stuffed up 

How many times can your heart break? How can it it love so much and lose so much and still go on? And still find love? Can you pick up the pieces? Can you find them at all? Any? Some? Just one?

Many of you know I found myself unexpectedly pregnant in early December. I was elated. I love both being pregnant and being a mother - adding to our family of three living children who would most lovingly welcome another baby was nothing short of a miracle, to me. Emilia (7) has be ardently praying for a baby sister for the last 4 years- to be disappointed with Edmund’s sex three years ago, and onward prayed nightly for a sister…

We felt her prayers answered. 

I have yet to deliver a living baby not conceived in February. I have had an early miscarriage from an October pregnancy, a stillborn from an August pregnancy and now a 9 week miscarriage from a December pregnancy. 

Here I am, February 9, just after my 38th birthday. 

Weary. 

Drunk. 

And in my bed in total darkness, praying sleep finds me. 

I cannot do this again.

From the moment I found myself staring at that faint line 9 weeks ago, I started exercising, making sure I took my prenatals, eating enough protein, taking time to rest, and honoring my body with all its needs and cravings and fatigue…

But this was not enough….

Sweet Baby did not stay within me, but gave me such hope and joy that my tired, crusty old and pudgey body was good for something more than bread and cookies - I had a new life within that I loved so much…

But heartbreak remains…

Will I find a piece to glue to another? I dare not. The fear of delivering a dead baby - yet again- the strength within me fails. 

How can I go on? My three beautiful children await my recovery, while I make plans to deliver their dead sibling - so loved, so wanted, so much a miracle of life.

Pieces of My Heart - where do you rest? For rest is not found, not in my heart, and I am not okay…

Baby H#5 - I loved you with my whole soul and heart and couldn’t wait to meet you…to see the joy on your siblings’ faces, your father’s face, as you rest in their arms, his arms…to hold your sweet hands as you learn to walk, to nurse you in your hunger, to love you heart and soul…I’m beyond wrecked and I am not okay…

Give me grace, friends….I will not be okay for some time…

The only things I have of my baby H#5…a photo of its sweet little self, resting within me…

We named this baby Carwen Bay - Carwen means blessed love, and Bay after the fragrant tree…