When a candle is blown out....

Apologies all around for the lack of blogging lately. It was, entirely due to a medical problem that was unavoidable.

When I started blogging, it wasn't ever my intention to bring my personal life into this. The blog was supposed to be all about the political world. But there are those very rare times when the personal and the political collide and it is close to impossible not to make some relevant comment.

The news hit our family like a brick a few weeks ago -- I, at age 39, was expecting our third child. Words cannot possibly describe the joy, particularly because I had secretly hoped for just one more baby.

My mother had me at age 40 and her friends all thought she had lost her mind. I experienced a similar reaction from many of my friends particularly those who were concerned about a recent back surgery I had recovered from. There was very little joy in Mudville. But there was much joy in our household.

The story goes that at a Twelfth Night party in January of 1966, my mother took the traditional cutting from the Christmas tree and tossed it into the fire, wishing for a baby girl. Having had two sons with her previous husband, she had wanted a little girl since she played with dolls as a child. I was born in October of that year.

On Twelfth Night this year, I told our family this story and my eldest son took a cutting from the Christmas tree and tossed it into the fire wishing for a little sister.

My husband and I looked at each other and laughed, wondering how we could explain that not all wishes are meant to come true.

With the positive pregnancy test results a few months later, I began to believe in the Twelfth Night wish.

Despite the doubts and concerns of my friends, I revelled in the joy of the new life and its ups (the planning) and the downs (nausea, weight gain).

A week ago Sunday, after a lot of running around for my son's birthday party where we took a group of five year olds to the circus, I knew something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

I told my husband, "It is almost as though I was two people....now, all of a sudden, I feel very alone. It is like a candle has just been blown out...."

Sure enough, I had a miscarriage.

For those who believe that it wasn't a baby, let me assure you, it was. For those who believe that there isn't a connection between mother and baby because it is just a "collection of cells", you have no idea where of you speak. My baby had fingerprints and a heart and every organ and most importantly, a soul that I pray I will meet someday in heaven.

Can't tell you why things like this happen, only that they do and there is a reason for it. Maybe it is simply for me to tell all of those who celebrate abortion that while I never held my baby, saw his beautiful little face or even gave him a name.....but I loved this little "collection of cells" with every fiber in my being....as much as I love the two sons I was blessed to give birth to. I knew the little life within me and I knew the moment when it was snuffed out. It isn't like having a mole removed or your appendix taken out. There is a distinct connection to the little life growing inside you that is undeniable.

And that, my pro-abortion friends, is something you may never understand nor want to understand because that would really burst the bubble of plausible deniability that you have constructed around the comfortable myth that conception is not the beginning of life but the inconvenient result of "hooking up."

Just because you haven't held your baby or seen her little face or heard the thump of her heartbeat doesn't make her any less of a human being. What was the line from Dr. Seuss' "Horton Hears a Who"......"A person's a person no matter how small...."

After the miscarriage was mercifully over, I read website after website about the grieving process after a miscarriage, etc. and actually ran across a fascinating study about the long term psychiatric effects after a miscarriage versus an abortion. Needless to say, this study from Norway shows that an abortion has a far more devastating impact with long term consequences.

For those of you who have suffered through a miscarriage, my broken heart joins yours and I pray that the good Lord grants you peace in the knowledge that your little one is in the arms of God. I'm specifically praying that the peace we receive will patch the hole in our hearts and the emptiness left by the death of our little ones.