I don't think I fully understood how much miscarriage would change me.

Of course, I knew I would grieve. I knew there would be sadness and questions and days that felt heavier than others. But I don't think I understood how loss would quietly rearrange the way I see the world.

It has changed the way I see pregnancy announcements and babies. It has changed how I understand grief, how I pray, how I mother, and how I respond when people say things that hurt. It has changed the way I experience the ordinary passing of time and, perhaps most of all, the way I understand the nearness of God.

Some of these changes are painful. Some are beautiful. Most are both.

I see pregnancy announcements differently.

I don't remember exactly when it started, but I can't seem to hear a pregnancy announcement anymore without wondering about the story behind it.

My mind just floats there.

I wonder if the baby was a surprise or a long-awaited gift. I wonder if she spent years praying for this child. I wonder if she is announcing with nothing but excitement or if she is holding her breath because she has lost a baby before.

I can't help it. I know too much now.

I know that a pregnancy announcement only tells us one tiny piece of someone's story. There may be years of infertility or a previous loss or a whole lot of fear hiding behind those few words. There may also be an answered prayer so precious that the mother can hardly believe she gets to say it out loud.

I don't need to know which story it is. In fact, I'll probably never know.

But miscarriage taught me to remember that, whether we are aware of it or not, there is almost always more happening beneath the surface of someone's life than I can see.

And I think loss made me more aware of all the things people carry that I will never see.

I talk about babies differently.

I always knew babies were precious.

But now when I think about a baby, I don't only think about pregnancy or a future child or the tiny person who will eventually grow into someone with a personality and a favorite color and a driver's license.

I think about a person created in the image of God.

A little life with a unique purpose. A life known by God, even if that life was incredibly brief.

Miscarriage taught me something about the significance of a life that doesn't get to unfold the way we expected. A baby does not have to live for decades to have mattered. They don't have to take their first steps or say their first words or graduate high school to have had a meaningful life.

Some lives are painfully short.

They are still precious lives.

They are loved, remembered, and worth honoring. Some may have been named and some may not have been. But Jesus knows them.

He knows every detail of the little lives I will never get to know here.

I don't know that I could have fully grasped that before experiencing this kind of loss.

I understand grief differently.

Miscarriage changed the way I understand grief, not just the grief of losing a baby.

There is something about carrying a loss that other people cannot see that changes the way you look at other people's pain. You begin to realize how much of grief happens beneath the surface.

I think about the woman longing to become a mother. I think about the person grieving a future they thought they were going to have. I think about how easily we can look at someone from the outside and have absolutely no idea what they are carrying.

I know what that feels like now.

And because of that, I have become slower to decide what someone's grief should look like. I don't need to completely understand someone's pain in order to believe that it is real.

Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is simply make room for someone else's grief without trying to explain it away or fix it.

I think miscarriage made me a little more willing to sit beside grief.

I respond differently when someone says something insensitive.

This one is still very much a work in progress. Lord, help me.

Because miscarriage does not make you immune to hurtful comments.

Sometimes someone says something and my brain immediately starts doing the mental gymnastics. Did they mean that the way it sounded? Were they trying to help? Do they just not understand? Am I being too sensitive? Should I say something? Should I let it go?

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I find myself praying for grace.

I ask God to help me remember that people don't always know what they don't know. How could they? Most people haven't walked through what I've walked through, and I haven't walked through what they have.

I ask Him to help me extend grace and not assume someone's heart when I don't know their intentions.

And, y'all, I pray something a little sillier too.

I ask God that if someone says something that could offend me, it would just roll right off me like water beads off a seal.

The visual has actually been surprisingly helpful. I can picture the words sliding right off me instead of sticking.

I want to be that unbothered.

But I also want something deeper than simply becoming less sensitive.

I want to become grounded.

If someone says something hurtful, I want to be so rooted in God's Word that their words don't get to redefine what is true. If someone says something about God, grief, heaven, motherhood, or me that simply isn't true, I want to know God's Word well enough to recognize it.

I don't want someone else's careless words to have more authority in my heart than what God has already said.

I pray differently.

I pray more boldly now.

Not because I think God will give me everything I ask for, but because I know He hears me. I know He isn't intimidated by my questions, offended by my tears, or threatened by my confusion.

I have become much more comfortable praying like David prayed in the Psalms.

There are times when my prayers sound a lot less polished than they used to.

Lord, this hurts.

I don't understand.

Where are You?

Please help me.

I need You.

And somehow, I've learned that I can say all of that to God while still believing that He is good.

I can lament and still worship. I can ask questions and still trust Him. I can tell Him that I don't understand without pretending that I do.

God can handle it.

That realization has changed the way I talk to Him.

I mother differently.

I find myself lingering over the ordinary parts of motherhood now.

Sometimes it is something as simple as holding my daughter up to the sink while I wash her sticky little hands again, or sitting outside playing chalk and bubbles for what feels like the hundredth time that week. These are the moments that could so easily blur together into the routine of raising children, but I find myself wanting to stay in them a little longer.

I get to experience these things with my two living daughters, and I am deeply grateful for them.

But there is another reality that exists alongside that joy.

There is a little tinge of pain in knowing that there are ordinary moments I will never experience with my two babies in heaven. I will never know what their toddler personalities would have been like. I won't know what they would have loved or what their laugh would have sounded like.

That grief doesn't disappear just because I am grateful.

And my gratitude doesn't make the grief less real.

Motherhood now holds both.

I can be completely delighted by the children I get to mother here while still aching for the children I don't.

I've learned that those two things don't have to compete with each other.

I celebrate differently.

I take approximately a million trillion pictures of my family.

You should see my camera roll. It's obnoxious.

At this point, documenting my children's lives may as well be my full-time job. And I don't even post most of them anywhere. I just keep them for myself.

I've become particularly interested in the completely unremarkable things. The random Tuesday afternoon. The way they're sitting on the couch. The little outfits. The funny face they made that I know I would otherwise forget.

Because I don't want to forget.

I don't want to rush through a season and realize years later that I was so busy trying to get to the next thing that I failed to notice how sweet this season actually was.

I am living the good old days right now.

I think grief has made me more aware of that.

I've tasted longing. I've known what it is to desperately wish for something I could not have. And because of that, I want to notice what I do have.

I want to take the picture.

I want to stop and look around the table.

I want to laugh at the ridiculous things my kids say. How my toddler calls toilet paper, “paper toiler”.

I want to remember it all.

Because this life is so painfully beautiful.

And at the same time, grief has made eternity feel more real to me.

I have seen enough of the brokenness of this world to know that even its sweetest moments are not the end of the story. There is something coming that is so much better than anything we can experience here.

So I want to enjoy this life deeply without pretending that it is all there is.

I want to celebrate what God has given me while remembering that one day, all of this will look very small compared to the glory of what is waiting for us.

I think about time differently.

I notice time passing in a way I didn't before. I notice my daughters getting older, and every time another birthday comes around, I feel both the joy of watching them grow and the ache of knowing how quickly it all goes.

Sometimes someone in my family will joke, "How are you this old? Stop growing up so fast!"

And I'll laugh.

But somewhere underneath the joke, I say a little prayer:

Lord, please let them keep growing.

Because now I understand that growing older is a gift.

Every year I get with my children is a year I didn't have to be given. It is a gift.

That doesn't mean I want to freeze them in time. I want them to grow. I want to watch them become who God created them to be.

But I understand now why motherhood can feel so bittersweet. You spend so much of your time wishing they would hurry up and then, suddenly, you would give anything to slow the clock down.

And underneath all of it is the reminder that our time here is limited.

Eternity is coming.

Just like Jonathan Edwards prayed, “Lord, stamp eternity on my eyeballs,” I want to see the world through that lens.

I understand God's presence differently.

Perhaps more than anything else, miscarriage changed the way I understand the nearness of God.

I knew before that God was present in suffering. I believed it. I had read the verses. I could have told someone else that God is near to the brokenhearted.

But there is a difference between knowing something is true and needing it to be true in the middle of your own grief.

God's presence didn't erase my loss. It didn't make me understand it. It didn't make me stop wishing the story had been different.

But He was there.

He was near.

And I experienced that nearness differently because I needed Him differently.

There were moments when I didn't have the words to pray, when I didn't know what I was supposed to feel, when I couldn't make sense of what had happened. I didn't need God to give me a perfect explanation in those moments.

I needed Him.

And He met me there.

He met me in Scripture and in worship and in the quiet moments when all I could do was sit with my grief and know that I was not alone.

I think that is one of the things I carry with me now.

When someone is hurting, I don't assume that God's presence means their pain will disappear. Sometimes His presence is simply what carries us through it.

I have known what it is to be deeply sad and deeply loved at the exact same time.

And I don't think I will ever forget that.

Miscarriage changed me.

I would never choose miscarriage.

I would never call losing a baby a gift.

But I also can't deny that it changed me.

Loss has made me more aware of how much can be happening beneath the surface of someone's life. It has made me more tender toward grief I cannot see. It has made me more awake to the ordinary beauty of the life I have been given.

And it has made eternity feel a little less distant.

I still carry the grief.

I always will.

But I also carry what God has taught me through it.

There are things I lost that I will never get back.

But there are also things I see now that I don't think I could have seen before.

And I want to remember them.

Journaling Prompts for Reflection

These are the things miscarriage changed in me. But I wonder what grief has changed in you.

One of the strange things about grief is that you don't always realize how much it has changed you until you stop and look back.

Maybe you've noticed some of these changes in yourself, too. Or maybe your experience has been completely different from mine.

Either way, I think there is something meaningful about slowing down and considering what your own story has taught you, changed in you, or made you see differently.

You may have never stopped to put words to some of those changes.

Take a little time to reflect:

What has grief or loss changed in you? Has it changed the way you see God, yourself, other people, or the ordinary moments of your life?

Has your experience of grief changed the way you pray? What have you learned you can be honest with God about?

Is there a part of your story that you wish other people understood better? What would you want them to know?

Is there something you understand differently now because of what you've walked through?

What ordinary part of your life feels more meaningful to you now? A person, a routine, a season, a place, or a moment you don't want to take for granted.

If you could go back and sit beside the version of yourself who was first walking through this loss, what would you want her to know?