Pippa V

By September 2001 I’d been married to my husband for seven years, I’d been a partner in my GP practice for a year, and the time felt perfect to start on the next stage of life – having children. Four weeks later I was pregnant, a couple of weeks after that I was being sick, and a few weeks after that we started to tell people.

Everything felt perfect – even one of my best friends was due to have her baby within days of me. One Sunday when I was almost twelve weeks pregnant we were driving home from a friend’s house. I turned to my husband and asked whether he ever worried about the fact that we were so blessed.

“We have good jobs, a nice house, our marriage is good, we got pregnant straight away, we have everything we need… Do you think God doesn’t trust us that we will stay faithful if he lets anything bad happen to us?”

My husband was sceptical of my thoughts, but they stayed in my mind.

We got home and I discovered I’d started to bleed. Over the next couple of days we found out that I was no longer pregnant. Sometime earlier in the pregnancy the baby had stopped developing. I was offered a D and C (when the contents of the womb are removed) but decided to wait a week or so to see if things happened naturally. Somewhere deep down in my mind, I was also allowing space for God to work a miracle if he so chose. He didn’t and I had the D and C a week later. This was late November. We were both really sad and upset and confused, but I did know that miscarriages are relatively common so I tried to look forward to the future and getting pregnant again.

And in January 2002 I did get pregnant again. This time I started bleeding at eight weeks. Again the scan confirmed that the baby hadn’t developed properly, but this time I miscarried completely over the next week. I was just as sad and upset but also a lot more angry. A second miscarriage felt a lot more unfair and also led me to worry that there was a reason behind all this; maybe I would never have a proper pregnancy or a real live baby.

The next three months were probably the hardest in terms of my feelings of devastation. My due date from the first pregnancy came and went (everyone had reassured me by saying, ‘You’ll be pregnant before your due date; you won’t even remember it.’ I wasn’t and I did). My friend’s baby was born and I had to cuddle it and be pleased for her, all the while feeling that we should have been sharing the experience together. Realistically I knew that three months trying was absolutely nothing in comparison to many of my patients and some of my friends – but it felt like a lifetime. I remember coming to church and forcing myself to sing songs about God’s faithfulness all the while thinking that I didn’t see much evidence of his faithfulness to me.

In June 2002 I got pregnant again. I was over the moon; this time everything would be OK. We’d been through enough by now. Five weeks later I miscarried completely over the course of a few hours. I was gutted – each time I’d got pregnant I’d been positive and full of faith, really trusting God that this time it would all be fine. And each time it hadn’t been.

This time I was really angry at God. I kept bringing up the parable in which Jesus says, “Which of you, if your child asks for bread would give him a stone, or if he asks for a fish would give him a snake?” (Matthew 7:9-10)

I’d rant that: a) that’s exactly what he was doing – I was asking for a live baby and I was getting a dead one, and b) how dare he use good parenting in a parable! He wouldn’t even give me a chance to prove to him that I could be a good parent, because he wouldn’t give me a baby!

As I said – I was really angry!

My husband wasn’t in the same place as me – he was really upset and devastated but he wasn’t reacting at God like I was. So I got pretty angry with him too at times!

It sounds as though that process went on over a long time but actually it didn’t. Just about two or three weeks after that miscarriage I received the “Thought for the Day” email from church. To this day it’s in my inbox. It said:

But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?' (Romans 9:20)

Father, thank you that although I cannot understand what is going on right now, I know I can trust in your unfailing goodness. Amen.

It hit me like a physical blow. I knew that it was a message for me that day. I was being told to wise up, that basically God was God and I was just me, and really I’d do well to stop telling him what to do and just let him do what he wanted - because he was God.

All the stuff I’d been moaning about – that I was meant to be his daughter, one of his chosen ones, his precious child – whilst all of that is true, I’d been forgetting that ultimately he is God, in charge of the universe, and I was fairly insignificant except as his ‘clay’, to shape as he chooses. Having grown up with Christian parents and becoming a Christian very young I’d accepted his humanity in Jesus, his fatherhood and his love, but perhaps not the sheer fact of his deity.

It did change my perspective. My feelings about things did change. I accepted that what had happened to me was acceptable, that if it’s what he had allowed (I couldn’t go as far as ordained) then presumably there was some purpose. I changed my attitude and accepted that he was God and he was right and he was good and, even if my life didn’t seem to me to reflect that right now, then it didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

In truth, I wasn’t tested on any of that. I know that my attitude changed but I don’t know whether I would have held firm if we’d had more to suffer. I’d like to think it would have done, but I can’t say for certain. Neither did I want to suffer more to find out! Within a few days – just four weeks after my third miscarriage – I discovered I was pregnant again. Again I started to bleed, but this time the pregnancy was confirmed as healthy and ongoing. Life wasn’t quite a bed of roses – I was taking a cocktail of drugs, some by injection, plus I was hospitalised twice with severe nausea and put on a drip – but in March 2003 our perfect, healthy daughter was born, to be followed nineteen months later by our son.