Sara's Story

Here on the Silver Lining Sisters blog we want to provide a safe place to talk about our (and your) experiences. However, we want to do it in a way that encourages us to look at the hidden blessings. We're trying to talk about sad subjects in a positive way. So, in our posts that detail different individuals' stories, we'll provide a quick summary along with a list of the hardest parts, or the storm, followed by the blessings that we can see in retrospect (the silver lining).

I've had 3 miscarriages and 1 successful pregnancy over 7 years. The first was about 5 months after we were married, and I was living by myself with my in-laws because my husband had moved to America from England to return to school and I was waiting on my visa. After a brief period where we didn't have health insurance, we started trying again and had our second miscarriage in 2008. It took a little while to get pregnant again after that, and my third miscarriage was in 2009. Our daughter was born about a year later.

To find the silver lining there has to be a storm. The blackest clouds in my experiences were...

• Feeling like I was bothering my doctors by calling them and asking lots of questions.
• Not having enough (or any) information to understand what I was going through. I felt like I had no idea what was happening to me or how I was supposed to be dealing with it (which is part of the reason we've started this blog!).
• Telling my husband over the phone that we were losing our baby.
• Wanting my husband to be there with me.
• Being in more pain than I had ever expected or been prepared for.

In trying to write this post and decide how much detail to share, I've realized that I shut out a lot of these things. The clouds aren't what I choose to remember. Instead, I focus on the silver linings from my experiences, which include...

• Building a stronger relationship with my husband.
• Getting to know my husband's family and developing positive relationships with them in way that I wouldn't have without these experiences.
• Being able to share my storm with others who are going through or have been through similar experiences. I've had the opportunity to help people try to focus on the positive.
• Helping me realize who I was as a daughter of a Heavenly Father who loves me and knew what I was going through. 

Over the last 7 years, I've come to realize that in our society miscarriage and baby loss are a hidden taboo. I've found that there are actually many people who have had these experiences, but no one talks about it (even within families sometimes) so everyone thinks they're alone.

You're not alone. It shouldn't be this way, and this is why we're putting together this blog. We don't always need to share all the nitty gritty details, but knowing that others have been in similar situations helps us realize that we're not broken.

What do you think? 
Do you think that this is something that needs to be talked about more openly? Have you ever felt like you needed someone to talk to about your experience with miscarriage or baby loss?