Entry 3. Today.
I had a miscarriage. For lack of a more profound term to incorporate all the emotions involved, it sucked. It sucked hard. Shortly after the news from the doctor that we were going to lose the pregnancy, one of my friends asked me if I needed anything. I told her I needed to get completely obliterated, go outside and yell several f-bombs into the universe (yep, this "good little WV Christian girl" said that...), and get a really bad tattoo. She graciously answered that she could take care of the first two, but let's hold off the tattoo...ha! While we may not have participated in any of my reactionary ideas, I absolutely love my friends and have been incredibly blessed to have found some of the greatest women alive who I can count amongst that category in my life.
I would be well into my 2nd trimester by now and probably not traveling much, as I would have been a high-risk pregnancy, but instead I just returned from a weeklong mission trip to western Honduras. While there were most definitely times of great sadness, there were also times of great joy and reflection. You see, the miscarriage has caused me to do something I have never done in all my 40 years of life...figure out who I really am and who I want to be.
This journey to realizing I still hadn't "found myself", a quest I was convinced I surely must have completed by the end of college and after several mistakes along the way, came straight out of left field for me. After all, I was a 40-year-old woman with a husband, a child, a faith and a routine, so how was it possible that I didn't know who I really was or wanted to be at this stage in the game? I realized the "routine" I mentioned had been clouding my vision for longer than I wanted to admit...
The revelation came to light when I started seeing a pregnancy loss/grief/women's health therapist, Tricia, shortly after we received the bad news, as this was something I promised Jason I would do if anything happened to this pregnancy so that he wouldn't "lose me" in my loss. One of the most poignent subjects we will tackle on this quest to find myself was asked during my initial intake session. She asked about my faith. In particular, she asked me if I had my own faith or I have faith by habit. This shook my frame.
Up to this point in my life, particularly the last decade or so, I had convinced myself that because my ideas and philosophies were more "open-minded", lets say, than my family's, that I had adopted my own faith; however, it seems that I may have just been practicing a more open-minded version of their faith that had honestly just been a habit all my life instead of truly developing my own.
How had I come so far and just now realized I still have so far to go?
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