Friday Blog Roundup - Why?

In those moments when I can't bear to be strong - when I just need to be honest and feel sad, scared and helpless - I let myself wonder why life dealt me the hand it did. I wonder, why us? Why did we lose our son? Why did I have two miscarriages before him? Why can't I get pregnant now? Why? Why? WHY?

Sometimes it feels like the most logical thing to do is stand on a mountaintop and scream obscenities into the wind, tear out my hair in great angry clumps and pound my fists into the ground. But instead, I simply carry on.

We all just carry on, living lives that are unspeakably difficult in so many ways, and being unable to answer that one simple question - why?.

Everyone has sorrow. Everyone suffers. Everyone struggles. But not like this. Losing babies is a special kind of hell. And it makes so many things so very, very difficult. It makes us work harder than we ever thought we could - until we're so tired we can barely see straight.

This week Caro, who has had two miscarriages, talks about a friend who asked her if she thought her husband would leave her because of their losses. Just asked it outright. Later in the week that same friend announced she was 15 weeks pregnant. Caro went home to cry.

Were it not for Caro's struggle - for the sorrow in her heart that she feels every moment of every day - the friend would never have questioned her marriage. And a pregnancy announcement wouldn't have made her cry.

Why?

Rosepetal, who lost her darling boy less than a year ago, is now facing the possibility of having to terminate her pregnancy at 17 weeks. They're in the midst of the agonizing wait for amnio results, and in the meantime they're trying to schedule life around the possibility of losing a second child. They're trying to figure out if they can get an oil change or if they'll need to be at the hospital that day instead.

The incomprehensible horror of this is beyond words.

Why?

In a heartbreaking post about fear, Mother in Mourning talks about what it was like being pregnant again after losing her daughter, Isabel. She was riddled with fear - fear that lasted long after her healthy baby boy was born safe and sound.

"I thanked God for allowing me to see him healthy and crying and I just knew he wouldn't make it through the night. When morning came and he was still fine I felt like I had just won the lottery. Now not only do I get to have him one more day but I didn't have to be whisked away and hidden from all the others new mothers so I didn't have to hear their babies cry. Again.

For about the first year of his life I just knew that every sound was him choking, every sigh his last breath and every goodnight kiss a final farewell."

As she says, it's never over, it's just better.

Why?

Why should any of us have to suffer like this? Why can't it be easy, as this waiting mother laments?

Why?

I don't know. I will never know. And for the rest of my life I will have days that I wish I could find that perfect mountaintop from which to vent my rage at the ungodly unfairness of it all.

But I do know this - we are stronger than we think, my friends. Stronger than the sorrow and anger and pain that makes our lives so different than we wanted - so different than we ever dreamed. And so very, very difficult.

The question may plague us until the day we die, but we have already proven - in so many ways - that somehow we can live without the answer.