Losing Ezra

I wrote this piece since June of 2022 but only just realized that it had been sitting in my drafts. So, Time to release it! From me to you, a very intimate piece…

I’m lying in bed with my husband. We’re cuddling and everything is really great.

He asks me: “What’s wrong?”

I say: “Nothing!” Because I really feel nothing wrong in this moment. Everything is perfect. “I’m happy”, I say. “I’m really happy”.

But he keeps looking at me weird. He doesn’t believe me. And that’s weird because he always believes me.

And out of nowhere, I am overtaken by a sadness that I didn’t even know was there.

I start crying. I lost my baby.

I’ve written about the experience of losing Ezra a few times before but here I want to write about how God spoke to me about it in a dream.

This is the dream…

We’re out on a big boat. Husband and I and a friend of ours and her daughter. Our friend’s husband comes on a smaller boat to pick her and her daughter up. They get on the boat and we decide to go ahead and join them and go home. While on the smaller boat and on the way home, I start to lean out of the boat. With the bottom half of my body still in the boat, I am pushing the upper part of my body more and more into the water, as if I am deliberately trying to fall out of the boat and into the water. Our friend notices this and points it out to the rest in confusion. “What is she doing? Is she trying to drown? Is she joking around?” I remember the feeling I was having in the dream. Some sort of calmness overtaking me. I wasn’t joking. I wasn’t playing around. I was letting go and sinking in.

The dream and the conversation in bed with my husband happened about a month after my miscarriage. At this point, my family (mom, sister, and husband) had come from different parts of the world and had gathered around me to support me. I was feeling very good. The miscarriage had brought my husband and I closer than we had ever been before. I was feeling ready to try again. But he wasn’t so sure. He was urging me to wait but I didn’t want to. I was convincing him that we should go ahead and get pregnant.

But then here I was, crying out of nowhere and being suicidal in my dream. It’s like God was grabbing my attention to tell me, “Erika, you’re still sad.” Crying in bed that morning really surprised me. At that moment in my life, I really did feel like I was fine. However, a big part of me being fine was the fact that I was heavily surrounded by my family. When this was over and they left and my husband had to travel again, how would I cope? Especially if I didn’t already have another baby to look forward to. How fine would I be? I realized in that moment that a big part of me wanting to get pregnant right away was to not be alone. Being pregnant could make me feel like I didn’t really lose a baby.

Not being pregnant on the other hand, would mean that I would really have to be okay with losing my baby.