Trying to regain your breath after loss.

The day you heard the words that you lost your baby, it broke you down to your core, because everything you hoped for was crushed in a second. All the building that was done to get to a place of achieving pregnancy was immediately gone with just a few words. The phrase “words hurt” takes another meaning when you find out about your precious baby not being able to live the life you envisioned, even though they will always live in your heart.

One of the songs that I feel resonates well with this is by the artist Danny Gokey, “Tell Your Heart to Beat Again.” The lyrics go like this:

Tell your heart to beat again.

Close your eyes and breathe it in.

Let the shadows fall away.

Step into the light of grace.

Yesterday’s a closing door.

You don’t live there anymore.

Say goodbye to where you’ve been,

And tell your heart to beat again.

As a mother experiencing loss, telling yourself it’s okay to breathe, it’s okay for your heart to beat even though there are seasons of anxiety and depression that occur when thinking about not having your child you prayed for. You have to believe, to feel it, and to know it’s possible even when taking breaths is exhausting. And sometimes it’s not as simple as people may appear, because when the flood of emotions starts to overwhelm you, what do you do?

Sometimes pregnancy loss doesn't necessarily hit you right away, in moments where you think you are doing okay, until something happens, and you start to get triggered by a word, a sound or even smell. When your senses start to get overstimulated, and you feel an anxiety attack happening and you're trying to figure out how to let your mind and body know it's safe, and for them to be aligned.

That happened to me. It took nine months for my brain to catch up with the fact that I had just experienced two miscarriages in under six months. But since my body was in pain, my brain wasn’t in a calm place to recognize the impact until I started to process the information. And then I stated, “Wait… that actually happened to me.”

Woo! Those three weeks of realization were so challenging, but yet, they gave me the courage to support others who may be in the boat, trying to figure out what way to sail, but need to put the oxygen mask on themselves first, so they can figure out how to naturally breathe again.

If you are currently going through this rough season of dealing with pregnancy loss, the process of healing truly is going to look transformative based on the nature of how you deal with it — whether it’s talking, not talking, reading, finding a support group, or doing your own research. There is no one way of having to cope through a situation that will always live in your heart.

Each person deals with loss accordingly, but also, figuring out how to truly feel “okay” is a start. It’s easy to sometimes tuck it in the back because it’s too piercing to talk about it or relive the experience. But when you are in a place where you have to tell your brain it’s okay to breathe, sometimes that’s where it begins.

A few deep breaths in, and a few inhales out… it can simply start as such, and I will continue to help you understand how breathing is a huge component of how you heal, along with providing more education on this

Learning how to regulate your body, when so much has been happening to it for the length of time from the pregnancy to the end — the physical aspects of the pregnancy play such a large role. But after everything does calm down, then how is your mind navigating through the traumatic experience that you went through?

Maybe it doesn’t feel that way based on how you regulate your emotions, but it is something to think about deeply.