Life With Three

“Let us build the city of God, may our tears be turned into dancing. For the Lord, our light and our love, has turned the night into day.”*

A little over three weeks ago, we found out that we were pregnant with our fourth child.  It came as quite a surprise, but we accepted the news with love and faith in God that he would continue to guide us. We weren’t sure if or how this changed our plans - we were already struggling with our life in Honduras for a variety of reasons, including safety/security and the abundance of travel Michael-John had begun with work. We were questioning the goodness of fit of the international lifestyle, with its many moves and changes and unpredictability, for our family.  Still, we trusted that God would guide us through the decision-making process as we tried to figure out the next steps for our family.

It was with great sadness, then, that we learned last week that we had lost the baby. We had only ‘been pregnant’ for 17 days, but already I/we loved this baby dearly. As we struggled to cope with both the short-term challenge and the long-term impact of this loss, and integrate it into our already-begun thought-process, it became clear to us that the best decision for our family was to return to the States. We returned to South Bend to seek care from a group of midwives, and to find support and love with our family and friends, both here in SB and across the US and the world. Michael-John returned to Honduras this morning to spend a month finishing up things in his office, and will return to us in a month so that our family may move forward.  We’ll start our journey with some time in South Bend, then most likely move onto Chicago - though the path our journey will take is known, as always, only by God.

I am grateful for those 17 days of joy, of being filled with another child, of knowing the beauty of pregnancy and the blessing of conception. I am awed to be a mother of four - for though this child has gone ahead of us to heaven, this child is still ours. I am saddened by our loss, and yet joyful for the knowledge that God continues to work in our lives in surprising and beautiful ways. 

Thank you for your love and support through this difficult time.  Thank you for the emails and phone calls, for sharing your stories, for the hugs, the thoughts and prayers. Thank you for saying, when you didn’t know what else to say, “We love you.” It’s hard to know what to say or to know how to grieve for a baby we never saw - but we do grieve, and cry, and wonder what this baby would have been like. And we thank you for being with us through this process. (Please know that the kids don’t know about any of this - and though we’ll tell them when they’re older, we appreciate you allowing us to share this experience with them in our own time.) We love you all.

* City of God, by Dan Schutte.

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