Your Pain is My Pain

Even after all this time the sadness over losing our baby has come in waves. Sometimes I go weeks, and even a month or two, without crying over our loss. Other times the tears won’t stop. Grief and longing have a way of creeping up on you when you least expect them. There are different triggers to my sadness, and sometimes the greatest one is seeing a father with his children.

As long as I’ve known Daniel he has loved children. It was one of the qualities that made me realize I wanted to be with him forever. He loves kids at all ages. We named our children before we even got married. Children are a priority in our lives and marriage.

From the moment I found out I was pregnant last July, Daniel began planning how he would provide for our little growing family. He signed up for extra classes in the fall semester, knowing that the spring would bring an added blessing and the subsequent loss of income when I came home with our baby. That’s just how he is. He does what it takes to lead our family.

And that is why this picture kills me.

I have felt the loss of our first baby, and subsequent waiting for another, acutely. I felt the physical effects of pregnancy and the loss. It’s my body that seemingly isn’t working like it’s supposed to in order to create another life. But that doesn’t mean this doesn’t hurt him too. I want him to be a dad to a living child as much as I want to be a mom. I want his desires for parenthood realized in a little life in my womb.

I think love is feeling the pain of another as much as you feel your own—perhaps even more than your own. Our grief over the baby we lost, and our hopes for another, is a joint longing. It brings us closer because in some ways we are the only ones who truly understand how the other feels. It brings us closer because we are together in the quiet places crying over what was lost. And it brings us closer because it is in this longing that we come to God asking him to work in our lives.

There’s no one else I would want to walk through this valley with—in sickness and in health, in sorrow and joy, as long as we both shall live.