The News

Wednesday, April 22, 2026: 7:08PM

I’m pregnant.

Again?
So soon?

Those are the comments I have braced myself to hear when sharing this news.

And yet, that has been few and far between. I have mostly received loving hugs, compassionate tears, and dedicated prayer and joy. Thank You, Lord.

I can’t tell you the host of emotions I feel in this. I can’t untangle it at times; it’s messy, it’s raw, it’s confusing. But if it brings us a new little one, we are willing to endure.

I had my first ultrasound at 6 weeks. My OB wants to be extra thorough, and I so appreciate the attention to my emotional well-being in this.

I stared at the familiar ultrasound screen with a new due date, a new gestational age, and it felt surreal. And then I saw the little one and heard the heart beating and continued to feel…surreal. I wasn’t in my body. I felt the tears in the corner of my eyes, felt my dear husband’s hand, but I wasn’t fully there.

My first thought was that because Maggie died, this baby is now here. I didn’t want that to be my first thought, but I don’t begrudge myself for it. It is a sobering, confusing internal dialogue- this pregnancy and this loss. And that tension continues to settle on me.

I knew this journey would be full of tensions and seeming contradictions: joy and loss, grief and hope, sadness over the past and fear over the future, death and (hopefully) life. But I have been encouraged by my new Christian counselor who has encouraged me to embrace it all in my mind as not actual contradictions, but dual feelings and realities that both serve a purpose. One does not negate or cheapen the other emotion.

They are both of value and both important to hold.

I knew being pregnant would not take away the grief, and it certainly hasn’t. If I am being honest, it has felt like it has multiplied it.

I am wrestling with the questions,

“Why choose one life instead of another, God?”
“Will this happen again?”

It is not easy.

I grieve Maggie. I grieve being 7 weeks along when I thought I would be 7 months along. Instead of a bursting belly and strong kicks, I am fatigued, nauseated, and silently growing a new life.

Instead of preparing a nursery and finalizing plans, I am planning a memorial and walking into medical appointments holding back tears.

This isn’t how it should be. This broken, broken world.

I am also crushed by the weight that a “simple pregnancy” is gone. The illusion of security in statistics and the comfort in certain thresholds being met hold no meaning to me now.

Each appointment and ultrasound, I walk in holding my breath. Waiting for the bad news. It sometimes takes everything in me just to get out of the car and through the OB office door- to tell my brain that this is a new story. To live in the moment and not project the past into the future.

And I have certainly had my moments of panic and fear. I blurted out in an exasperated, weary moment why I even thought to try for this again, and a loving friend spoke gently and said, “Because you wanted to have another child. There is nothing wrong with that.”

I am so thankful for the encouragement in my life.

And I am thankful for daily, hourly dependence on God when hormones are all over the place, thoughts are swirling, and my body that has been through so much slips into its understandable responses.

Today, I am pregnant, and I am grateful for that.