Taya Josephine

Originally posted October 17, 2018

Note: This is a personal post. It’s my goal when I photograph you to tell your story. I want to tell you mine.

I’m not a person who journals. My husband, Colin, writes in his every day, multiple times a day—nothing terribly long or complicated as far as I know—but he is faithful to writing down things about the day. When our lives got turned upside down (that’s not even an accurate enough way to describe it. More like a tornado rolled through and desecrated everything) a few months ago, I tried it. I thought maybe I should record how I was feeling sometimes. Maybe it would help me work through some things. I just didn’t want to. I didn’t want to think or write or process. And so I have a handful of pages in a notebook that I picked up when I was feeling particularly sad or worked up or thought I should, but overall it’s a pretty puny offering.

But today, I felt like writing. Although I once thought I’d make a career out of writing, I don’t write recreationally. Since leaving the journalism world, I’ve written a few times, and each time it was simply because I needed to get it out. Things were weighing on me, and the writing was therapeutic. I think that’s what’s happening now. I need to get it out. I don’t even know where this is going to go as I’m writing right now, but I need to get it out.

Colin and I have the best little boy we could ever ask for. Connor entered this world January 17, 2015, and he has brought more joy than we could have imagined. I love being his mama. I love his laugh, his wild and outgoing personality, the way he loves his puppies, the way he sings all the time. Colin and I knew we’d like at least one more kid, but we weren’t in a rush. I had a bit of a hard time when Connor was a baby, (looking back I probably should have been medicated for a while), and that was enough for me to be okay with waiting for a while.

Then, eventually, we went for it. Connor was conceived fairly quickly—four months—which was still long enough for me to become a crazy person. I’d like to think I went into it the second time around at least TRYING not to become crazy again. And this time, it happened in three months. I had taken a pregnancy test a few days before my period was expected, because that’s what you do when you’re a little crazy and trying to conceive. We were so excited! And go us! So fertile! But a few days later, I started cramping and bleeding and I knew.

Although sad, I pressed on with life. Miscarriages are so common; I knew that. Not that knowing that makes things hurt less, but for some reason that baby was not meant to join us. We mourned and then went back to trying for another baby. But this time, more months went by. And more months. When I hit the year mark, I called my doctor to make sure everything was okay with me. She reassured me that I was healthy and Colin was healthy and everything looked just fine, but we’d get blood work anyway to make sure. From those results, it was determined that my body wasn’t ovulating.

Oh, but ovulation is like one of the easiest things to fix! All you have to do is take some Clomid and those ovaries will spring into action. (That’s my paraphrasing.) I spent months on Clomid, and it made me a different kind of crazy person. A hormonal, grumpy, bloated, sad, still-not-ovulating person. After enduring those months with a less-than-attentive doctor’s office, I switched to a new office and asked for their opinion. I spent a few more months on a different drug, meant to do the same thing, this time monitored by ultrasounds to check that follicles were growing and other necessary things. Finally, in December 2017, my doctor looked at the ultrasound results and said if the drugs hadn’t worked by now, they probably weren’t going to. He referred me on to The Fertility Center. We needed the big guns to make a baby.

I wasn’t ready for that. Colin and I were in different places. He hated to see me suffering through the side effects of the drugs. I told him if all of the side effects lead to a baby, I’d do it again and again. But I couldn’t handle it emotionally yet. And also, fertility treatments can’t be cheap, and so we discussed if it was the right thing to do. We talked about the chances of conceiving there vs. the options we had with adoption. In the end, we decided to wait a while. Give it a few months. Keep praying for direction but take a break from hormones and pills and crying.

Then, it was the middle of April. I had just quit my job and pulled Connor from daycare to stay home with me while I put more effort into my photography business. I had a week where I felt SO TIRED all the time. Why would I be tired? I could sleep in until whenever I wanted. Then I realized my period was late. I had one lousy Dollar Store pregnancy test in my drawer. After a while, I stopped believing I would get pregnant, and stopped buying the good tests. So I pulled out that cheap little stick and took the test, expecting to see what I always see. Nope! Two lines this time.

I freaked out. But not believing it was true, I went to Target and bought the good tests. After I confirmed with those, I spent the rest of the day in shock, waiting for Colin to get home from work. As soon as he walked in the door, I burst into tears. I couldn’t even tell him, I just showed him the tests. And then we spent the next few weeks elated but cautious, not daring to accept that this was our baby yet.

At around the 8-week mark, we went to an appointment and we heard the baby’s heart beating. More tears. We started to relax. We were having a baby. A miracle baby! After being told this wasn’t going to happen on its own, it did.

The next few months were normal. Telling people we were pregnant after trying for so long was so exciting. I felt sick occasionally but overall I was so happy to be pregnant that it wasn’t terrible at all. The week before our big anatomy scan, we went camping to one of our favorite places in Petoskey. Colin, Connor, and I had a wonderful five days on our little vacation. We came home feeling refreshed and happy, and only two more days to wait to find out if a little girl or boy was joining our family.

Our ultrasound was scheduled for a Friday at 12:15. The doctor’s office was empty when we showed up, evidently because most of the people take their lunch break during that time. I was nervous to go in. I kept telling myself that everything was fine, because I had felt movement at this point and so the baby had to be healthy. The exam started and we saw the baby’s heart beating and I relaxed.

But things were off. The ultrasound tech said she couldn’t get a good angle on some of the baby, but she made it sound like the baby was just positioned in an inconvenient way. I noticed she shook her head a lot, like she was frustrated. I stopped to use the bathroom, and when I came out she was gone. Colin said she told him she remembered she had to tell a coworker something, and I was suspicious. She came back and continued the exam, still claiming she couldn’t see things quite clearly. She then wanted us to move to another room. “Dr. I isn’t working today, but Dr. V is here and she’s just going to quick go over things with you.” At that point, I knew something wasn’t right.

Dr. V came into the room and sat down, and she said, “I don’t have good news for you today.” Colin and I clung to each other as she gently but firmly walked us through a list of things that looked wrong with our baby. She didn’t have definite answers, just a lot of “it could be this.” She used the words “grave abnormalities.” I asked her straight out, “Is our baby going to die?” She didn’t have an answer. We were sent downtown to Maternal Fetal Medicine, who would do another ultrasound and tell us what they found. That appointment wasn’t going to be until Tuesday morning.

All weekend I cried. We had to shoot a wedding on Saturday, and I don’t know how I made it through. Colin was my rock throughout the day. We got into the car at the end of the night and I broke down again. We prayed and hoped and tried to stay positive, but the list of things wrong was so long.

Tuesday, we headed downtown. During our ultrasound, the angel of a tech switched over to the 4-D screen and showed us our baby’s face. So sweet. So real. So beautiful. Already so perfectly formed, with a cute little nose. After about an hour, we went into another room to meet with the doctor. She confirmed what Dr. V had suspected, only with more certainty. Then she said our baby was “incompatible with life.”

When the results came that she was indeed a girl, I asked Colin to come up with her middle name. Almost instantly he suggested Josephine, which means “Jehovah increases.” There was no more discussion about her name. We knew that was it.

I know I have not said what is wrong with Taya specifically. Of all the sharing we’ve done on social media about her, we have not gone into detail. That is intentional. I don’t want people googling and picturing her a certain way. Her condition is a 1 in 20,000 chance, and in every case of someone carrying the baby to term (of which there are not many cases) it is 100% fatal. Not sharing these details has caused some unintentional heartache, because people will try to encourage us by saying that doctors are wrong all the time, and babies are born healthy when they are expected to not be. I understand people are trying to help, but Colin and I have sat in several ultrasounds now and have seen and confirmed what the doctors have told us. Unless an actual miracle of God happens, Taya will not survive long past birth.

So here we are. Our first ultrasound was August 5. Today it is October 17. I am almost 31 weeks pregnant. We have spent almost three months with Taya in my womb knowing that she will not be coming home with us. This is the part where I should have been journaling and recording my feelings. I think I just can’t put it all into words.

Grief does, in fact, come in waves, just like they say it does. There are days when I can’t get out of bed and nights when I wake up weeping. I think I cry every day at some point. But I’m trying to also have SOME joy during this. I’m trying to treasure every movement I feel of her in my belly. It’s hard to grieve and feel joy at the same time.

I have a hard time going out in public places. I feel like I have a giant target on my belly, because people like to talk to the pregnant lady about her baby. I sent an email out to Connor’s preschool parents briefly describing our story and asking that nobody ask me about my pregnancy, because I didn’t want Connor to see me cry at his school. Last week, I went with him on a field trip and thought I’d be safe, only to have another mom ask me my due date and the dumbest question to ever ask a pregnant woman: “Are you excited!?” I shut down and seriously didn’t know how to answer.

I spent some time thinking about that, once I was home and shut away. Am I excited? I am excited to see Taya. To hold her. To kiss her sweet face. To observe her features. To introduce her to her brother. I can’t even begin to think about saying goodbye to her. How, when the time comes, Colin and I will have to say it’s okay for someone to take her out of the room forever. Or how we have to come home without our daughter. I am not excited.

I want to make sure I say Colin and I both have felt supported by our circle of friends and family during this time. We have people who have been there with us, who “sit in the shit” with us, as one friend so poetically put it. They don’t have answers for us, but they grieve with us, and pray with us, and sit quietly with us. We are thankful for them.

I also want to make sure I say that we still trust God’s plan for us, and for Taya. Taya is fearfully and wonderfully made, and she was given to us as our daughter for a purpose. Her life, however short it may be, is a gift. I still believe she is our miracle baby, just as I believed it back in April when I found out I was pregnant.

Even with the support and our faith, every day is still a battle. We grieve now and we know we will grieve later. Life’s responsibilities don’t just stop because our world is shaken.

I have a lot of fears and anxieties about the next few months, all of which I am trying to just give to Jesus and trust that He will take care of us. As of our last appointment, two weeks ago, my doctor thinks I will carry Taya to full term. She will be delivered via c-section. Her due date is December 23, although her delivery date may be a week or two sooner than that. Of course, anything is possible, but I am trusting for a safe delivery at an expected time.

Well. I guess I did have some things to say. I suspect someday, a few months or years from now, I’ll look back and appreciate that I wrote SOMETHING about this season. If you’ve managed to read this far, thank you for reading our story. Taya Josephine’s story.