Bravely Facing the Unknown
Updated: Mar 3, 2020
By Anna Kettle
God's Brave Women - Anna's Story
It was December 2017 when my life plans were first turned upside down by a sudden and unexpected miscarriage.
My son Ben was two and a half at the time and he was settling into preschool well, so it felt like the perfect time to begin turning our attentions towards extending our family. We got pregnant pretty quickly too, so everything felt like it was falling perfectly into place... until I discovered that I was miscarrying the pregnancy somewhere between 7-8 weeks. But even though that loss was upsetting, initially I mostly just treated it as a temporary pause in our family planning. It was inconvenient for sure, but we would just take a few months to heal and then try again, I resolved… At that stage, I couldn’t even have begun to imagine how that pause would linger for so long, and eventually end up feeling more like a permanent full stop, as several more consecutive miscarriages followed. There’s so much I could write about – my experiences of recurrent miscarriage, the unfolding disappointment of secondary infertility, my frustration about not being able to provide a sibling for our son. But I have already written about all of that stuff extensively in Notes on Life (my blog), so what I really want to share with you today is this. I don’t consider myself brave because I’ve had to endure multiple miscarriages and learn how to process all of that loss. That’s not really about bravery, because it’s not been a choice at all. It’s just something that’s happened to me.
I don’t consider myself brave because of all the fertility tests and treatments that have ensued either; all of the appointments, procedures, needles and drugs are just a necessary means to an end that I’m still hoping will materialise some day. And I don’t even feel especially brave because I spill my experiences of this all over the internet for absolutely anyone to read (even though a lot of people tell me it is!). To me writing is just a tool for processing my pain, and if pressing ‘publish’ means that I can encourage someone else in a similar position, then that’s all gain to me. But what does feel like bravery to me is learning how to embrace a future that now feels so uncertain and unknown. You see for as long as I can remember, I have always imagined having a large family, with two or maybe three kids running around my home. And now that is morphing into an unlikely possibility.
"It’s a pretty scary thing to realise that the future you had always mapped out in your head and your heart may not actually be the future God has for you at all. And it’s a pretty courageous thing to decide that you will on keep trusting God for that future anyway - a future that you didn’t expect or cannot see."
It’s a pretty scary thing to realise that the future you had always mapped out in your head and your heart may not actually be the future God has for you at all. And it’s a pretty courageous thing to decide t