Strange grace

Warning: melancholyish musings. Recently came across this, which I wrote shortly after miscarrying the baby who’s been particularly on my mind of late, as he would have turned one this month.

My reflexive reaction to the simultaneous discoveries of my pregnancy and miscarriage shows that I have in fact learned nothing at all. Children of the Heavenly Father, I confess with my mouth, but...but…

But it’s not fair, I shouted heavenward, as the initial shock wore off. I lost him before I knew I had him! I didn’t even have a minute to be happy before I was sad! He was never mine!

I never got to feel his squalling, squirming warmth against my skin; never had him burrow and shudder happily in the instant postnatal recognition and quiet contentment of knowing his mother. He was so small when he died that, like most women who miscarry, I never got to feel him move, never had the satisfaction of knowing when he was awake and lively, or whether he had the hiccups. My especial reason for complaint was that I never had even a day of that peculiar maternal joy of being the only one in a crowded room who knows about the secret world within. He was never mine!

No. He was never mine.

Nor are my living children mine. Praise God; they too are safe in His hands. Neither is my life my own. Praise God; it is hidden in Christ.

My perfect idiocy of somehow attaining two months of pregnancy unawares was, after all, a blessed idiocy. Even in that, I can say, with scarcely a stutter (most days), “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” God is good. How could I say otherwise, when I search the faces of my living children, and know that I will one Day, in a world made new, trace their likenesses in another child as well?

Learning to love a child only through the losing of him—this is a strange grace indeed.