Hi all, and welcome back to our blog!

For returning readers, you’ve likely noticed that we’ve taken a bit of time off from writing posts. We blame Finn, the sweetest little attention hog there ever was. We’re happy to announce that we are officially back in action, and you can expect regularly scheduled weekly posts. Check the blog on Thursday evenings for your weekly Shanti Family update. And don’t worry, we’ll remind you on Instagram.

Today’s post will be a somewhat heavy one, though hopeful and bright at its core. We’ve decided to open back up with, first of all, a celebration of new life by introducing you all to the newest addition to our Shanti Family: Finn Fay Zachik Smith, who came into the world, healthy and perfect, weighing 7 lb. 13 oz., 20.5 inches long, on August 5th, 2020. We’ll then transition into the heavier part of our story: our journey to parenthood.

This post will feature our untold story - one that only our very closest friends and family members are privy to. Here’s our secret: Finn is our “rainbow baby,” meaning, Finn joined our family following miscarriage - the most devastating heartbreak, which led to the most profound growth, we’ve ever experienced, both individually and as a couple.

So, why open up about this now?

To be quite honest, I didn’t think I’d ever open up about our miscarriage. I almost never speak of it - not because I’m ashamed, but because it’s always been too difficult to talk about. It’s hard enough to confront what happened within myself, let alone with other people, especially on a public platform such as this.

But as I sit here, looking at the perfection that my body has created, at this little miracle of ours, I feel emboldened to tell my story.

In my experience, miscarriage is a deeply personal, and incredibly lonely experience. Even with the strongest of support systems (which I am blessed to have had), the only person who really knew what I was going through was myself. Throughout life, everyone goes through loss in one form or another, but miscarriage is a truly unique form of loss, and is therefore isolating in its very existence (not to mention the shame and stigma attached to pregnancy loss).

Women who have lost a pregnancy are the only beings who understand what it feels like to lose life inside of your body - to, essentially, grapple with the completeness and the finality of death from within.

Needless to say, the loss of our first child (yes, to us that baby was our child, however early on it may have been), and the loss of Finn’s twin, were absolutely devastating. But this story is, at its core, a happy one; we have our Finn, and, for us, that is a dream come true.

To begin on a high note, here is Finn’s (abbreviated) birth story:

My water broke at 3AM; we spent the first few hours of labor in the comfort of our own home, before boarding a 9:00AM ferry to St Thomas, arriving at the hospital around 9:45AM, just as contractions were starting to pick up in intensity.

Finn must have been eager to enter the world because when we arrived at the hospital, my cervix was just 2 cm dilated; by about 1PM, my cervix had reached 9 cm, Finn was crowning, and five pushes later, Finn slid through my body’s gateway and into his father’s (and our fantastic doctor’s) arms. Eleven hours total, and we had a baby boy.

This is the brief, simplified version of Finn’s birth story, of course - to suggest that it was so quick and easy is misleading; giving birth was the most painful, beautiful, surreal, life-altering experience I have ever encountered. In a future post, I will elaborate on this - on the profound event that marks our transition into parenthood. This post, however, will focus on the events that led up to Finn’s birth, on the pregnancy itself and on the path upon which Kevin and I traveled to become parents. Like many, our journey involved beautiful moments of love and hope, coupled with penetrating moments of trenchant heartbreak and devastation.

This is our story.

I must warn you before you read on, that, true to my nature, I have included details that are raw and true, graphic and organic in their portrayal of events that transpired. My goal is to tell my story in its realest and purest form, free from palliation or varnish.

Read on for an honest account of what it’s like both to lose life and to create life within your body. Read on to learn about my miscarriage - its affects on me, physically, emotionally, and psychologically - and my subsequent pregnancy, which resulted in, miraculously, our sweet and precious baby, the love of my life: Finn.

When I was young, I thought that getting pregnant was easy - so easy, in fact, that a missed pill or a day-late period was cause for panic. For some, it may have truly been that easy; what I’ve learned in my later years, however, is that, for many of us, pregnancy doesn’t come quite as easily as our high school sex education teachers led us to believe. Think, Coach Carr in Mean Girls: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”

For many of us, pregnancy takes time, patience, setbacks, and perseverance. It certainly did for Kevin and me.

When I first got pregnant, I had been off the pill for about eight months - not an unreasonable amount of time, but also not instantaneous, as culture had led me to believe. We were newly married, not necessarily planning on expanding our family right away, but not against the idea either.

It was sort of poetic how we learned we were pregnant just two weeks after our wedding (who knows, we may have even conceived on our wedding night). Naively, we told our family members the news, researched best pregnancy practices, began daydreaming about parenthood, even started discussing names and plans for our child-to-be.

We grew attached to the idea of parenthood, without putting a whole lot of thought toward the possibility of pregnancy failure. (I mean, who gets pregnant and researches what might go wrong? Probably someone a lot more realistic and down to Earth than I was at the time; I was too enamored with the idea of being a mom to pause and calculate the risk.)

Eight weeks after we learned we were expecting, I noticed some spots of rust-tinted blood on the inner lining of my underwear. After consulting our midwife, who assured me this was normal, Kevin and I boarded a plane to California, where we would attend a friend’s wedding and reunite with Kevin’s side of the family (several of whom were unable to attend our wedding).

Throughout our week-long California trip - during the wedding (throughout which I fought to swallow the pain of incessant cramping in my lower belly), on our road trip along the Pacific Coast Highway, at the family reunion (during which I snuck in an outfit change to hide my blood-soaked pants) - the bleeding from my vagina worsened, and as it worsened, the feeling of fear, apprehension, in the pit of my stomach strengthened. Again, our midwife said this was normal and no cause for alarm. (To quote her: “Women throw themselves down stairs to abort a pregnancy; you’re young and healthy. Your baby will be fine.”). Despite her reassurance, and however hard I tried to bury the thought, I knew I was having a miscarriage.

By the time we arrived back on St John, the bleeding had intensified - I had begun to pass clots and was drenching one pad after another.

On the morning after we got home, while Kevin was out running errands, the single most traumatic event of my life occurred in a matter of seconds.

Almost instantly after I sat on the toilet, I felt a wet, gooey object, about the size of a summer peach, slip out from within my body. There it was, there he, or she, was, bobbing lifelessly up and down in a pool of bright red blood. Sometimes I wish I didn’t look. But I did. And to this day, I remember every detail.

What happened next, what I did next, is what haunts me the most: I flushed.

I flushed the toilet, and away it, or he, or she, went, leaving nothing but a sticky trail of mucusy redness clinging to the sides of the toilet bowl. It’s been 14 months since that day, and even though we’ve replaced the toilet, I can’t pee in that room without thinking about that moment.

And every time I look down into our backyard, I see the sturdy concrete of our septic tank, of our baby’s resting place - a memorial, a reminder, a home.

Not quite four months after the loss of our first baby, two thin blue lines pulled me from the depths of my grief; I learned that I was pregnant again.

It’s funny how time seems to slow down while you’re waiting for something. The three minutes between capping the urine-drenched stick and reading the results tab felt like an eternity. Kevin clutched my hand while I kept my eyes peeled to my phone, watching the timer tick away, one second at a time, not daring to glance at the test until time was up.

When the alarm finally sounded and I mustered the courage to peek, there they were: two vertical blue lines, standing distinctly beside one another, confirming … I was pregnant.

Given our previous pregnancy experience, I was hesitant to believe that I was truly pregnant again, reluctant to trust my body, afraid of becoming attached to something so uncertain. I built an emotional wall; this time, I wouldn’t let myself get too excited. This time, I would prepare myself for failure, for loss, just in case.

But despite my efforts, despite my psychological fortress, when I spotted those rust-colored speckles in my underpants, my world, once again, came crashing down around me.

I screamed - no, I wailed - from the bathroom, and Kevin came running. The next day, we went to the doctor (a new doctor - we haven’t returned to that first midwife since her “falling down the stairs” comment). After some blood tests, the doctor informed us that the progesterone levels in my blood had decreased significantly since the test I had taken a few weeks prior to confirm the pregnancy. This was not a good sign.

“It is likely that you will have a miscarriage within the next 2-3 days,” she said.

Two days later, which happened to be Christmas Eve, we went in for an ultrasound on St Thomas. My bleeding had continued, though not worsened, which was exactly what it had done the first time around (it took about 5 days to pick up in intensity during the previous miscarriage).

I think I actively tried not to be hopeful; expecting a loss would make it hurt less, right? Nevertheless I knew, deep in my heart, that bad news would absolutely shatter whatever was left of my morale.

The ultrasound itself was relatively routine (we’d had it done twice during the previous pregnancy - one to confirm the pregnancy, the other to confirm the miscarriage). The technician gave little information away during the procedure, so we walked out feeling just as lost and disheartened as we were going in.

Before we reached the ferry back to St John, my phone rang; it was our doctor (who is also a friend - remember, it’s a small island), calling to reveal our fate, our baby’s fate.

“You won’t believe this,” she said, her voice a little shaky. “From what we can see, there is one perfectly healthy baby growing in your belly.” She sounded teary. “It’s a Christmas miracle,” she said. And we cried, together.

She went on to explain that it is likely that we did lose one fetus - there was a mass (about the size of a plum) inside of my uterus from which they couldn’t detect a heartbeat (which explained the drop in progesterone level in my blood). But we had one healthy one. And to us, in that moment, that was all that mattered.

That healthy one was Finn, our Finn, the single greatest thing that’s ever happened to us. Our Christmas miracle.

And he really is just that: a miracle.

I think in a weird way losing that first baby has rooted me, us, our family, in this home.

You see, our septic tank has an overflow pipe. From that overflow pipe spills excess liquid (which has been broken down by enzymes - less gross than it sounds, okay) - a sort of fertilizer for our otherwise arid (ish) soil. Around the tank is a patch of lush greenery. Right now, that greenery consists of mostly overgrown weeds. One day, however, we dream of planting a garden - a garden full of tropical fruits, plantains, cassava, and other things that grow here naturally.

I hate cliches, and I’ve never been religious or even spiritual in any real sense. But I really do feel like this loss, this darkest of moments, happened for some sort of reason. I am tougher, more mature, and more ready to love in the way only a mother can than I ever was before.

Finn, you’ve got one hell of a big brother/sister to thank for the woman your mama is today.

Thank you for reading my story. Thank you for the love and support that many of you have shown. It wasn’t easy to write this, even harder to share it, but if my story can make another woman feel less alone, can help to destigmatize pregnancy loss, even in the slightest way, then a little discomfort for me is worth it.

Please feel free to share this piece with anyone who might benefit from reading it. If you or a friend has been through something similar and are willing to share your story with me, I encourage you to reach out. Let’s support one another and build this community. No one should have to go through a loss like this alone.