Bump in the Night

A reflection on pregnancy after loss in the early hours of the night.

Somewhere between sleep and consciousness, I roll over onto my side, squishing the pillow beneath my head for optimal comfort and accidentally kicking the cat. Sleep begins to gain ground against consciousness. Then it hits me. I’d been asleep on my back again. All chance of sleep melts away and I’m fully awake.

How long has she been quiet inside me? 

Is she okay?

I remind myself that my OBs aren’t terribly concerned about accidentally sleeping on my back so long as I readjust when I realize it. When I had my husband look it up on WebMD, it said the same thing. 

But she’s so awfully quiet right now. 

I lie there in the dark, hand to my round stomach, waiting. 

This isn’t my first night with these fears; I’m sure it’s far from my last. When I was pregnant with my son, I spent hours in the night waiting to feel him move. Then, when he would, I’d wait to feel him again and again, never reassured. For all nine months of that pregnancy, I lived in a cloud of anxiety, terrified of the worst.

I am all too familiar with the worst. I know what it is like to go to the hospital pregnant and leave no longer pregnant, not because you delivered the baby but because the baby wasn’t medically speaking alive to begin with, and never would be. I know what it is to feel your body failed you in the one task it was uniquely made to do — at least according to all the crunchy moms on the internet.¹ I know what that loss feels like.

I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I do believe that people can be haunted. The loss I’d experienced the year prior haunted me all nine months I carried my son. When I first heard his cries in the OR and knew he was alive and well on the day of his birth, I felt my soul tear free of that loss. The curse broke. Tears of joy and pure love rolled down my face. At the time, I thought it was only the relief of my son’s safe delivery driving my emotions, but reflecting 15+ months later, I can see that’s also the deliverance of my own heart from grief.

Yet, loss is still a part of my motherhood journey. It remains forever a chapter of my family’s story. While this pregnancy with my sweet girl has been wildly different from my experience carrying my son, there are times when my heart remembers that lonely road it walked in June 2022. Like right now, in the darkness.

Then I feel it. A squirm. Then another. And another.

Soon she’s wiggling and jumping all over the place, keeping me awake for an entirely different reason. I sigh and curl into the pillow at my side. The cat returns to her corner of the bed. My husband continues to breathe steadily next to me, our son breathes equally steadily through the monitor.

I close my eyes, and think my favorite nighttime prayer:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake.²

It’s a prayer for anyone awake at these odd hours of the night when all the world is still. Tonight I find myself in the phrase ‘shield the joyous.’ I pray that the joy that broke through my grief the day my son arrived in my arms would remain stronger than any fear or anxiety of the night. I pray for some rest. And I pray that the angels would watch over my loved ones who sleep (or wiggle!) — both those who sleep here on this side of Resurrection and one who sleeps on the other.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Sleepless."

1. I could write an entire piece on this particular feeling — and many women have! I do want to make clear that pregnancy loss is not because the mother failed. But I know that this is how I felt when I learned that my first child’s chromosomes had joined together incorrectly, that there were too many, that what I was carrying would never yield life. I also want to make clear that as profound as I’ve found motherhood to be, this is not the only value or purpose women have. Far from it. But, in the moment of loss, I felt like I failed in this profound, unique way — especially when so many people in my life were growing healthy babies at the time.

2. A prayer from The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, An Order for Compline