It’s taken me a long time to write this; I found out I was pregnant back in March and I’ve wanted to write about it ever since we announced that we were having a baby.

So what’s stopped me?

Pregnancy after loss is an incredibly complicated time; for me, it can be described primarily as a loss of innocence.

The first time, the idea of anything going wrong was something vague, something that happened to other people.

This time, miscarriage has been at the forefront of my mind most days, particularly before the first scan.

The fear has been omnipresent.

And yet, so has faith.

Fear and faith have sat side by side, in an uncomfortable alliance.

They have not negated one another, as I might have expected, but I’ve lived in between the tension of the two.

I have had faith that God does and will work, that He is love, that He is trustworthy.

And I have feared the loss that I’d only just begun to get my head and heart around when I fell pregnant again.

I have written very little; in part, I think that’s because so far, pregnancy has been good to me. I’ve felt almost guilty that I’ve (so far) escaped the worst and in part because I’ve not wanted to sound like I’m boasting in any way.

I also haven’t written because losing our baby in December changed the whole way I relate to God, it pulled away my certainties. Shortly afterwards, I lost my voice after a virus and all of a sudden I couldn’t use my voice to sing and lament, I found myself silenced in worship.

And in my silence, I began to listen. Sometimes there has been comfortable silence, but at other times I was able to reflect on scripture in ways I have never done before.

As I wrote in my last blog, I felt the call of the those truths which drew me to faith in the first place.

Now, as I enter the second half of pregnancy the hope and the fear are growing still – but what is growing more than I’d imagined is my faith – whatever happens going forward, I’m trusting that God is moving and God is present in the darkness, but also in the light.

As the snow fell thick and fast, excited squeals could be heard from small children discovering the world covered in white, but my husband and I sat together on the sofa, tears falling unchecked down our faces.

Just two days before we had been excitedly planning for the baby we’d just discovered I was carrying. It was a longed for pregnancy, and we were over the moon. We knew that miscarriage was something that happened, but our excitement wasn’t particularly marred by any fear, we were going to be parents and we happily sat together and planned how we would rearrange our flat to accommodate a new arrival.

When I awoke on the Saturday morning after a blissfully long sleep I wasn’t, at first, particularly worried about the spotting, I knew that it was normal in early pregnancy but I rang my Mum and we called NHS 111 just as a precaution.

As the morning went on however, and the pain started and fear bloomed.

All we could do was wait; it was a Saturday and it was snowing so there would be no resolution, no answers until Monday at the earliest.

As the pain and bleeding continued I clung to the most fragile of hopes that this little baby (the size of a chocolate chip the app told us) would survive.

It wasn’t fair.

And the uncertainty was agony.

As time went on I knew in my head that I was probably losing the baby, but I refused to believe it; there was hope.

My husband and I huddled together and watched countless episodes of our favourite sitcom, pleading with God. All we could do was wait for Monday.

As the weekend passed our prayers changed as our hope flickered falteringly, I just wanted to know what was happening. Our changed prayers were answered; no wait for an appointment, a scan that same day.

And yet in the small cramped room of the Early Pregnancy Unit, the screen showed starkly that our baby was gone.

The sound that came from me was guttural, the empty screen scored into my minds eye.

In the month that has followed, it has been the strangest grief. Christmas came and the message of the baby who came to save felt sharp on my bruised heart. That I could get pregnant was, at the time little comfort. I didn’t care about the possibility of a future baby – I wanted the baby that was lost to us.

Friends and family rallied around us in the most wonderful of ways; providing love, food and company.

After an early miscarriage there is no burial, there is no one to miss as such; it’s the loss of potential, the loss of what could have been. I can’t help but count the weeks that I would have been happily anticipating and tracking on apps and in journals.

I can’t help but rage at God – because the Bible talks of God knowing us before our birth, choosing us and crafting us in our mother’s wombs – and the questions this raises are unbearable.

If God knew my baby – what does that mean for them? They were known by God – but why did they never see life on earth?

I can’t answer these questions; but I can put them to God.

I’m learning to talk to God in a new way, lamenting the loss of what could have been and trying to trust in the sometimes invisible, incomprehensible plan of God.

For more information and support I recommend The Miscarriage Association, https://www.sayinggoodbye.org and http://saltwaterandhoney.org/