Meeting Yourself Where You Are

It’s no secret to anyone who reads my blog that 2022 was a difficult year. The most difficult of my life. I had a miscarriage in February, and it really affected me. I can only speak to my own experience, but it was shattering. I think the hardest part was feeling like it shouldn’t have been so difficult. Like I should have been able to bounce back faster. Heck I only knew I was pregnant for just over a week. I hadn’t even had a doctor’s appointment yet. I felt like I was blowing it out of proportion. Why was I so distraught over a baby I only carried a few weeks? Plus I had these two beautiful amazing healthy children. Even so I couldn’t shake it. Nine weeks, twelve weeks, three months later it still consumed me. I cried less. I got back into a normal routine. But I still wasn’t myself. I still thought a lot about what I had lost.

They say time heals all wounds. I don’t really believe that, but it does make them more tolerable. As more time passed, I became more and more myself. I thought about losing the baby with less and less pain attached to it. We made it through the due date. I was able to share my story.  And while this loss was the biggest thing, I dealt with this year it wasn’t the only thing.  I still had kids to raise, a business to run, and a husband who started a restaurant from the ground up.  It was a busy year, a hard year.

It’s strange that I’ve written all of this as I didn’t sit down to write about my miscarriage. I sat down to write about Grace. God’s Grace and how we need to give it to ourselves more. You see in 2022 I didn’t exercise. I didn’t eat right. I was having a glass of wine more nights a week than normal. I was eating pizza and drinking beer at the restaurant we opened in July.  I gained 20 pounds. While I was experiencing it, I didn’t really realize it was depression. I mean I knew I was depressed in some ways, but it wasn’t until I really started to come out of it around Thanksgiving that I started to notice just how much I’d been going through the motions of life. Even over the last two months as I started putting more effort into making healthier choices I still wasn’t aware of how down I had been.

It’s only on the other side where I finally want to keep my house clean instead of doing it because I know it’s what’s expected of me.  A mental state where I want to make an effort to get out of bed with my alarm and not at the very last second before we will absolutely positively be late if I don’t get up right now.  A place where I actually want to exercise. It’s here where I can see just how far from this place I was. It is here that I really understand the poem about footprints in the sand. I know that I was too weak to pull myself through this time in my life and God picked me up and carried me through a season when I really didn’t feel close to Him. I felt lost and the reality is that He was holding me and carrying me through to the other side. To a place where I can walk with Him again.

It is also here that I’m proud of myself for not pushing myself harder. For allowing the house to be a mess. For not doing laundry until we ran out of clothes. For eating what was available instead of pressuring myself to cook. For sleeping instead of exercising. For getting my kids to school at all. I didn’t do it actively to heal. I did it because it was all that I was capable of. But I look back at who I was then, and I want to hug her and tell her to leave the dishes, take the nap, gain the weight and don’t rush the process. Love yourself where you are and you’ll come out of it.

What I find the most interesting is that the time it took me to heal is the same amount of time it takes to grow a baby for 40 weeks and then heal for 12 weeks postpartum. It’s almost like my body just never really coped with the loss. But no matter what you may be going through, the moral of this story is to give yourself Grace. Whether you are dealing with a loss or stress or depression or just in a funk for no particular reason, give yourself Grace. I capitalize Grace because I want you to give yourself God’s Grace. I want you to love yourself the way God loves you. I pray you can find that and I pray I can remember it in life’s next storm.