My wife just said a quote to me, "Real loss only occurs when you lose something you love more than yourself". My reply was, "To me, real loss is something you lose that you can never get back again." Lets face it, most of the times when we "lose" something, we end up finding it or replacing it and never thinking back about what we had.
I wanted to talk about something that has been very hard for me to talk about. I originally was going to post some Facebook notes about this but my wife and a friend convinced me to post it as a blog instead. I wanted to write about my experience, what I was thinking, what I remember about it, how I felt, and how I handled it.
I needed to set a few things straight before I got into my experiences:
- I am not looking for pity
- I am not looking for people to tell me they are 'sorry' about what we went through
What I am looking for is:
- People to think twice before saying, "when are you going to have children?"
- Awareness that this happens to a lot of people.
- Men are affected and hurt by loss too. Sorry ladies, we are not robots.
I married my wife on March 25th, 2006. One of the many reasons we got married was we wanted to have kids. I'll admit it, I was really looking forward to being a dad. What I was looking forward to the most was a son or daughter to come running to the door when you get home from work screaming 'DADDY'!
Less than 1 month later (around the 3rd week of April 2006) I was woken up by my wife.
There are moments in one's life that you'll never forget - this was one of them. She woke me up at 6am on a Saturday morning shoving a stick in my face and screaming "DO YOU SEE A LINE?? DO YOU SEE A LINE??". Naturally being a guy and having no idea what to look for, I said yes and pointed to the control line. After being corrected (angrily), I found out that there was a very faint line next to it. I learned to tell how if a pregnancy a test was positive or not.
For those that have found out their significant other was pregnant, and assuming you were looking forward to having kids and being happy about it - you'd probably agree with me that it's very hard to describe how you feel. The typical guy answer is "HAPPY" and in my case it was "VERY HAPPY". The words / phrases that describe how I felt were:
- Happy, hope, joy (variants of "VERY HAPPY")
- Pride, proud (I don't know how you can not feel pride or be proud to be a parent)
- Concern (ie: do we make enough money?)
- Fear (do we have to get a minivan now? Am I going to have to drive it?)
- Boy or girl? Should we find out? What if my wife doesn't agree with me?
- How can I change the world to give my child a better world to live in than what I grew up in?
I promptly called my friends and family to tell them I was going to be a dad! It was on my MSN title and my facebook status. Seriously, if I had thought about buying a newspaper ad for it, I probably would've done it. I was ontop of the world!
After that, it was kind of a mixture of letting people know and busy at work for the next few weeks. The days after the first one that stood out for me were:
May 10th, 2006 - I asked my wife if sex while she was pregnant was bad. She said no, I wasn't sure if it was safe so we didn't. No birthday sex for me.
May 11th 2006 - I was at work and was planning for an afternoon meeting with a Samsung rep. I got a call from my wife - she was crying. We had lost our baby.
... to be continued in Part 2.
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