Life in Stepping Stones

Read Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven

It’s official! I am 14 weeks along and it has seemed like a lifetime, holding this secret in and constantly counting down to the 2nd trimester milestone. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for weeks and I can finally breath a little more. I’d be lying if I said the anxiety didn’t still get to me sometimes, but I feel good about this pregnancy; I feel hopeful. I am excited to start sharing my journey with you to having our rainbow baby. When I first became pregnant, I wrote down my thoughts and feelings about this pregnancy in hopes that if I made it this far along, I could start to share them. I hope this journey will help you or anyone you know who has suffered a miscarriage or is pregnant with their rainbow find hope.

I will be posting over the next week the journal entries I wrote as this first trimester progressed. Here is my first, that I wrote just days after getting that positive test.

Thank you everyone for reading.

~ Justine

October 2, 2019 — Song Lyrics

The rain has stopped
I see the rainbow in the distance
I've got this buried treasure
and it's our own little secret.
Nobody knows it,
but you and me.
Keeping this secret under lock and key.
Not about ready to set it free.

I, I, I. Thought that tsunami should've brought me down.
But I'm, I'm, I'm. Feeling the calm after the storm.
This might be the one.
Oh this might be the one.
You might be the one.

October 4, 2019

I’ve had a secret. A big secret. A secret I’ve been hiding partially because I don’t want the world to know too soon after last time, but partially because I’m worried saying anything will jinx it.

I’m pregnant again. After my miscarriage in January, I’ve been waiting anxiously for this day to come again. In July, for a split second, it did. For one single day I had a positive pregnancy test. The next day, on the day that my miscarried baby from earlier in the year would’ve been due, I woke up to the news that I got my period and I felt like the world played a huge joke on me. I was devastated. Lost. Destroyed. I still don’t know if it was a chemical pregnancy or some fluky false positive that the internet claims rarely ever happens (but every once in a while it does for whatever reason). I didn’t want to know at the time.

I found out a week ago I’m pregnant again. I had a negative test a couple days before my positive test, and despite seeing the negative, I knew in my heart I was pregnant. And I am. I continuously try to keep myself from getting too happy about it. Remain hopeful, but cautious. Optimistic, but realistic. Right now, I feel like I’m jinxing myself just typing my thoughts out. I’m not even planning to share this until after my first trimester but just saying that, makes me think I’ve already jinxed it.

I’m trying to stay distracted and calm throughout the day, but I can’t help but second guess everything I do. “I’m tired”, I should rest so I don’t harm this pregnancy. “I’m feeling energized”, should I do some light exercise or go out? Is that going to be somehow dangerous? “I’m hungry”, is this food I’m eating the healthiest thing I can eat for my growing fetus? “I’m nauseous”, what if I don’t eat enough? “I’m not feeling nauseous right now”, is everything still okay? Am I going to have another miscarriage? Oh wait, maybe the Seaband and the B6 vitamin is just helping. “I can’t sleep”, what if my lack of sleep causes harm? How do I get myself to sleep? After all, I don’t want to go to sleep after what happened in July. What if that happens to me again? What if I wake up and it’s all over again?

A million thoughts go through my head. A million fears. The irony is in some ways I have this calm feeling in the back of my brain that keeps telling me everything is going to be okay. Is that the optimist inside me? Or does my body just know that this is the one?

My pregnancy last year that ended in a missed miscarriage, I was constantly paranoid about a miscarriage. I was also craving literally every food that has made me sick over the years from allergies. It was very weird. I didn’t want to tell anyone and felt very tense that I had. This time I don’t want to tell anyone because I want to protect my heart, in case something happens again. But I’m not sure, in my gut that I actually believe something will happen like I did last time.

I’m hoping having those positive thoughts isn’t setting me up for disaster. But I don’t want to sit around depressed and scared every day too. How is it that my positive thoughts are what give me the most anxiety? Like I’m cursing myself by thinking positively.

I just want this first trimester to pass. I want to relax. I’ll keep writing how I feel and if all goes well, I’ll share this in a few months and hope it helps someone else in my situation feel they’re not alone in their thoughts. After all, every time I try to look something up, I get an article about “How to Relax” and how stress is bad for me, or the opposite: about how stressed someone is through their first pregnancy post-miscarriage, but there’s never any resolution to that story. It’s some ScaryMommy post that you never find out if they made it successfully through that pregnancy because thats the only post the author ever wrote. I hope I can give people hope with this. If I’m sharing this with you, it means I can.

Read Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven

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