what loss taught me about love & marriage

My first blog post! I racked my brain with what topic to write on...with the loss of our twins being so incredibly fresh and my brain being overwhelmed with so many thoughts...I figured in spite of it all, I would start with a post about love and marriage, being it's Valentine's day tomorrow and because all of these significantly devastating events have taught me a thing or two about love and the strength of our marriage.

I look back on dating my husband and even into the early parts of our engagement/marriage and realize how I truly did not understand love. Sounds strange, right? Because I vowed to spend the rest of my life with this person...what do you mean you didn't understand love?! Red flag. No, no...I loved him but I don't think I understood the magnitude of what love and a marriage meant. Marriage was exciting: pretty dress, big party...I'm a Mrs, how grown up! But...it seems that with the excitement of those moments we lose the true meaning of the commitment you're making and what real love is.

True love isn't the movie we watch that makes us wonder where we went wrong or the fairytale we grew up reading...and we know that. We know there's a line between reality and that built up version of what love is.

When we were early into our relationship and even up into marriage, I was jealous and insecure. I couldn't understand that this man had married me. I think immaturity has a lot to do with that, piled along with the emotions that infertility blindsided me with. Infertility has this nasty way of making a woman feel inadequate. How could this man want someone who can't even give him this family we're exhausting ourselves for? Making babies should be easy, it should be fun. These thoughts destroyed my self confidence. It took a long time to realize that my husband married me AFTER we lost our first baby, AFTER we sobbed in a cold hospital room where we were told it was going to be a struggle for a family, AFTER all of that...full knowing the challenges, he chose to buy a ring and propose a lifetime because despite the challenges...he wanted to work hard to make it happen with ME. Hindsight is 20/20...insecurities now seem so unnecessary.

Marriage changes things...and when people say that so many times it's focused on how it negatively changes things. I call bull on that. (Pardon my French.) Marriage is amazing and it has taught me what love really is.

Love is finding a way to navigate through the problems you have and finding a way to get past them. Love isn't clean and free of conflict. Conflict teaches us what we stand for. Early on, we fought often...about stupid things mostly. I look back at that and truly we misunderstood each other and hadn't figured out how to communicate on our own terms. If we hadn't had that blow out about how something as insignificant as why deleting his Game of Thrones on the DVR sent him over the edge...I don't think we'd realize that those insignificant things mean something to your spouse. In dating, you may say screw it. In marriage, you make note. What matters to them needs to matter to you. That's love. You start to protect them in a way you would your child, you want them to be happy. One of the hardest parts of my pain in losing our twins was seeing the heartache on my husband's face. I could have taken all that pain on myself to protect him from feeling that...because his feelings matter to me. That's love.

Love is having a family member. This person isn't a boyfriend/girlfriend, friend, lover...they are your family. This is important and not realized (at least it wasn't for me) until you go through something life changing like holding a child you created together as they take their last breath. You see, we feel the pain as a family. We cry together, as a family. I know that the emptiness I go to bed with sometimes, he goes to bed with, too. You feel strength because of that. It's strange because I had never felt so close to my husband until we went through this ultimate test of heartache. I never felt like such a team and that may sound ironic but when the dust settles and the outside world stops grieving with you...this man is my family, my partner...and we hurt together, we'll heal together and move on from this...together.

Love is not about vanity and superficial things and it goes past getting ready for date night...that marriage vow we took..."in sickness and in health"...I would tease him and hold that over his head while I was hospitalized and on complete bed rest while going through the loss of our twins. Love for me was my husband helping me go to the bathroom on a bed pan while all my humility went out the window, love was my husband making sure I was ordering three meals a day because he worried, love was him making the trips to Wal-Mart to buy necessities like feminine wipes and Twizzlers, love was him buying glue dots because it was so important to him that every card I received was hung up so I knew how many people cared about me, love was my husband juggling work schedules so he could sleep beside me in a prison style cot so I wasn't in pain alone, love was sitting with me while I was barely able to answer a question in a conscious state because of the meds they had me on, love was celebrating every time we had a positive milestone and then holding me while I sobbed and begged God to not put us through this. Love was and is just being there because that person means the world to you and you can't bare to see them go through any pain alone.

We left the hospital with boxes full of mementos and support information for grieving parents instead of babies. We drove the hour home in mostly silence. We cried together and held hands as if to comfort a pain that is impossible to comfort...but we felt the pain together. We knew that everything we had gone through and the ladder we'd have to now climb again would be climbed as a team effort as it has from the beginning of our journey. I feel sad and even angry at times...but because of the strength of marriage, I don't feel alone. I feel as though I am part of the strongest team I could possibly pull rank on and after we brush the dust off, we'll face the world of grief and healing and navigate through IVF again, together.