Ask the Blog Team: What is Something You Wish You Would Have Known?

Welcome to our Q+A series, Ask the Blog Team. In this series, the Hope Mommies blog team joins together to answer questions that are commonly asked in grief. If there is a question or topic that you have wrestled with in your grief that you would like the opportunity to see how other Hope Moms have processed or answered, we would love to hear from you. You can submit your questions here.

What is something you wish you would have known in those early days of grieving when it felt so heavy and dark?

I wish I had known it wouldn’t always be so heavy and dark. I wish I knew my joy would be restored. In the beginning, I willed myself to believe that, “Weeping may endure for the night but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). In time, it became true. After 26 years, I still miss my son and wonder what my life would be like today if I had been allowed to raise that boy. But I don’t grieve like I did in the beginning. Notice I didn’t say that I don’t grieve. I said I don’t grieve the same. My grief is more of a wistful grief instead of a gut-wrenching sadness.

- Shelly

Hope Mom to Zachary Robert

While I would take Max over everything learned or gained, I wish I had been able to have the perspective of all I would gain in the next five years. I was indescribably blessed that my marriage and every one of my closest friendships grew deeper, stronger roots in that season. Due to losing Max, I hold my living babies both tighter and more loosely. And I get to serve with a ministry that is literally changing lives. The darkness felt so heavy and enveloping, but the light and joy is greater.

- Sam

Hope Mom to Baby Martin and Maxwell Spencer

The heaviness will lift. It doesn’t feel like it, and that’s okay that you can’t feel it now, but eventually it will. The darkness you feel deep in your chest and in your womb will relieve one day. Yes in eternity, but even here on earth. The tenderness you feel about seeing others get pregnant, it will all sting a little less with time. I loved the way Lysa Terkeurst explains this: “Then one day you take off the blanket of deep grief. You fold it neatly and tuck it away. You no longer hate it or resist it. For underneath it, wondrous things have happened over time. Things that could only have come about when Divine Hope intersects with a broken world. And finally you can see years stretching before you once again.”

I have also found this to be true. God allows your grief to be a beautiful addition to your life and eternity. He brings beauty even from these ashes. Do the work of feeling all the feels and crying all the tears now, because on the other side of your grief journey you will gain more lasting peace than if you ignore it now. It will come out eventually, its best done now in the early days where it feels unbearable.

- Kayla

Hope Mom to Anna Joy

The Lord is enough. I do not mean to sound calloused. I would give anything to have four living children instead of two. However, this is God’s lot for me, and it is good even if I don’t understand it or feel like it is. He has given me Himself, and that is so much more than I deserve. I deserve hell, yet the Lord has given me eternal life. The Lord is tenderhearted and with us in our grief, but we must love and honor Him above all else. I say this because it is very easy to idolize our children or our husbands. When I realized that God is enough—that if I lost everything else, I would still never lose Him—I was able to rightly mourn my children instead of obsessing over them and how the Lord had “wronged me.”

- Ravyn

Hope Mom to Noah and Isabelle

God revealed so much of Himself to me in my grief, and I know and love the Lord in deeper ways now than I did before my losses. While I would have never chosen for this to be my story, I wouldn’t go back to who I was before loss. God has allowed my sorrow to become a beautiful platform for the gospel, and has opened up so many opportunities for me to bear witness to His greatness through it all.

I don’t want to in any way minimize the extraordinary heartache and pain that I have walked though in losing my babies, but I wish I would have known just how sweet the Lord would become to me as He continued to draw me closer to Himself in my sorrow. I still miss my babies every day and often wonder what life on earth would be like if they were here with me, but there has been such a beauty that has been added to my life in the ways that God has given me more of Himself along the way.

- Ashlee

Hope Mom to Simeon and Odelle

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