All Was Not Lost

After a few years of marriage, my husband and I finally decided to stop dodging the grandmothers' demand for grandkids and actually start trying for kids. We got pregnant with our daughter quickly and naturally. The pregnancy was textbook and my labor was 6 hours of natural childbirth.

What nobody had prepared me for was everything that came after the positive test.

The $5,000 out-of-pocket hospital bill — with good insurance, for a natural delivery. The $25,000 a year for basic daycare that nearly wiped out my entire paycheck after taxes and diapers. The quiet, creeping realization that two incomes and a plan don't actually prepare you for the reality of a tiny human who needs everything from you. We figured it out — I went half-time, we made it work — but I remember thinking: why didn't anyone tell us this was coming?

My parents had two kids and stopped because that was what my father said he could afford to put through college. I grew up hearing that as just... the math of a family. Two kids, that's the number, that's the plan. So when my daughter was about a year and a half old, we started trying for our second.

We got pregnant fast. We were thrilled. We told everyone immediately — family, friends, anyone who would listen — because we were so excited.

And then at twelve weeks, I miscarried.

I was at work when I noticed the spotting. I remember standing on the train platform in the River North neighborhood of Chicago, watching the city move around me like nothing was wrong, while I knew — I knew — something was. I called the doctor. They told me it was probably nothing, to stay calm, to just wait and see.

When I got home, I told my husband something wasn't right. That night, the bleeding became serious. We called a neighbor to come watch our daughter, and I went to the hospital for a D&C procedure to stop the bleeding.

After it was done, no one talked to me about what had just happened to my body or my mind. The male doctor had a fatherly energy that was comforting and grounding. He didn’t have many words but just said, sometimes these things happen. There was a checklist, a discharge, and then I was just... back in my life.

A few days later I was at my aunt's birthday celebration in Lake Geneva. My hormones were crashing in a way I had never felt before — relentless headaches that wouldn't quit. I'm not a caffeine person at all, but Coca-Cola was the only thing that touched it. I ordered a coke at dinner and finally had some relief.

The most unexpected moment came from my father. He pulled me into a hug and just held me. He's not a touchy person. He doesn't do that. But he was sad for me, and he showed me. I still think about that hug. He told me it will all be okay.

It wasn't until more than a decade later — while working with a chiropractor who also does energy work — that he explained to me that the spirit of that pregnancy was still energetically present and needed to be released. I hadn't even realized I was still carrying it. That process of acknowledgment and release was genuinely healing in a way that the clinical experience never offered me.

There's still a moment that gets me. My neighbor was pregnant at the same time I was with that second pregnancy. She carried to term. She had that baby and then a third one. When I see photos of her family, I still feel a quiet ping — a little flash of grief for the child who didn't come. Even though I went on to have my son a year later. Even though I only ever wanted two. Even though my kids, now 16 and 18, are close and healthy and the greatest joy of my life.

The grief doesn't require you to have wanted something different. It just shows up sometimes.

I'm sharing this because when women come to me after a miscarriage, or a failed round of IVF, or a loss they haven't fully named yet — I lived a version of it. I know what it's like to leave a hospital with nothing but a procedure. I know what it's like to carry something invisible for years without realizing it's still there.

That loss changed how I work. It made me slower, softer, more willing to sit in the hard stuff with someone before rushing toward the solution.

And I can honestly say my kids are more precious to me because of what I went through.

If you've been through a loss and it's still sitting somewhere in your body, in your chest, in the place you don't talk about — I see you. And there is work we can do together to help you move through it.