Divorce vs. Miscarriage

We sat around my living room, 3 women,  with loaded glasses of wine, on a Friday night.  We were way past due for a wine night and had lots to catch up on.  I had not told these girls about my miscarriage, one woman had yet to fill us in on the night her Husband left her after 6 months of marriage and another was stressing about her son that needed testing in school.  That is a lot of heavy talk in one evening and we each sat with our own bottles of wine on the end tables next to us.  By 2 am they were each empty.

As everyone’s stories were discussed at length I was asked a very tough question.

What do you think has been harder to go through in your life, your divorce or the miscarriage?

Old emotions had been brought up through the night discussing the one woman’s divorce.  Emotions that never seem far away.  And there are no scars covering the current emotions of my recent miscarriage.  I sat, staring at my glass of wine, thinking, while they sat in silence waiting for the answer.

The basic answer: my divorce was harder.

My divorce was a time that I had to suffer greatly on my own.  A world where the nights seemed endless, everything was falling apart, and nothing was once what it was.  The whole process to grieve and move forward was partially on someone elses time frame.  I couldn’t control my future because my entire life was pending the decisions of many others, including lawyers and the court.  It took forever to gain some sort of footing and when I did it was on entirely new ground.  Everything in my entire life changed and I only had myself.

Through my miscarriage I have had my Husband.  We get through each day together, we still have one another, we still have love, and we still have our home.  We can grieve on our own terms.  As much as we didn’t have control over what happened to our baby we have control of how we want to move forward.  Our life will never be the same but we still have one another and it has made us stronger than ever.

Isn’t that the best part of having a strong marriage?  When life gets hard you have someone to turn to. You don’t have to face the tough times by yourself.

My divorce was one of the most life altering things to happen in my life and it is amazing how often I turn back to the life lessons I learned then and pertain them my new life today.  At the end of our lives I’m sure we can look back and see how all of our ups and downs were actually so intricately woven together to make the perfect story of how we are our own heros.