Today, on the blog, we will be wrestling with lament and the heartache of grief and loss. Today I welcome my friend, Vanessa Strickland, to share her unexpected journey in motherhood with pain and loss. I love how Vanessa shares so honestly and openly about how motherhood became a series of overwhelming trials. We all experience joy and pain, life and death, and truly it is what our foundation is built on that will carry us through. She wholeheartedly lives and believes that truth even through a mother’s worst nightmare. Loss and pain are two words that no mother wants to have hand in hand. Our children are a beautiful blessing, and we want to hold and have them here with us always. We don’t know what tomorrow brings and through this blog, you will see that despite the reality that we don’t know the future, we can rest in the sovereignty of God.
I heard about the sudden loss of her son Jude three years ago and shed tears because I have children too and can’t imagine the pain that their family was experiencing. I have prayed for her and her family and always had hoped to be able to meet her in person. Well fast forward to my time at Heritage College and Seminary, I was blessed to be her classmate! It has been a joy to connect get to know her. I’m very excited that she is here with us on the blog. Welcome to seasons of motherhood, Vanessa!

 

 

 

 

Vanessa Strickland lives in Hamilton, Ontario with her husband Jamie and their three boys, Noah, Blaise and Haddon. Their second born son Jude now lives in heaven. Vanessa worships and serves at West Highland Baptist Church where Jamie is the Pastor of Discipleship and Interim Ministry Team Lead. She used to blog regularly at iamstricklyspeaking.blogspot.comuntil Instagram ate her blog. Now she regularly takes social media breaks but if she’s online you can find her on Instagram @vanessa.strickland. You can usually find her curled up with a good book and another cup of coffee.

 

 

 

 

 

Grief & Motherhood – Vanessa Strickland September 2023

 

My first experience with motherhood ended in grief. Motherhood snuck up on me 2.5 years into marriage with the realization that I was “late”. About three weeks late. One positive pregnancy test later and I was already living nine months into our future and suggesting to my husband Jamie that we probably needed to move and find a bigger apartment. Four days later the blood arrived and would later be confirmed that I had indeed been about seven weeks pregnant but that there was now no longer any heartbeat. No life. No baby.

No motherhood?

Surely I was still a mom because my heart had already expanded to include this new life into it. But I would never hold him in my arms. Grief exploded within me in a way that I’d never experienced. Shame, anger and embarrassment surrounded me and spoke lies to me but I learned to rely on the wisdom and loving support from our community of friends and coworkers at the time who showed up for me. They assured me that it wasn’t my fault and reminded me of God’s presence with me in my sorrow. This was new to me. I was aware that as a follower of Jesus, and as someone living in this broken world, I would experience trials and challenges. But Jesus sitting with me in the midst of the pain was a beautiful truth that flowed in and over me during this time. It wouldn’t be the last time I would experience Him as I cried over babies I would never hold. But that would come later, after I’d already birthed and held three beautiful baby boys. We lost two baby boys back to back before we’d welcome our fourth (seventh including the ones who would never take a breath) and final boy in January 2016. Grief partnered with Motherhood was familiar, but the joy always seemed brighter, louder, more real and tangible.

December 1, 2020 was when all of that changed. Our second born son, Jude, was hit and killed by a reckless driver on his way home from school while crossing the road at a crosswalk. Day turned to night, joy to sorrow, lightness was buried beneath the crushing weight of death and life as I knew it was over. I look back on the days “before” and it feels like an alternate reality, the one where we had Jude in our life, where our days were built on joy and laughter and death was acknowledged but not really relevant to me, so I barely gave it any thought. Nicholas Wolsterstorff’s book, Lament for a Son captures the reality of life after losing a child, the “after” as we call it in our family:

“Sometimes I think that happiness is over for me. I look at photos of the past and immediately comes the thought: that’s when we were still happy. But I can still laugh, so I guess that isn’t quite it. Perhaps what’s over is happiness as the fundamental tone of my existence. Now sorrow is that. Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea.”

There is a different kind of desperation for God now almost 3 years into the grief of Jude’s death. In the beginning it was raw and frantic, feeling the salt water splashing down my throat, knowing I am drowning and needing Him to grab me and pull me up. Everywhere I turned, I saw only the darkness and chaos of the storm raging within and outside of me.

Today the storm has calmed, but I still see the depth and darkness of the seas. Though they are calm, they don’t seem to have an end to them. I don’t see the same familiar land I came from and now I know I cannot go back. I understand now that the journey ahead of me is long. It will require perseverance and strength that I do not own but can be lulled into thinking I do or at least I ought to have “by this time”. The temptation to dwell in despair, to sit in sackcloth and ashes for the rest of my life, to give into death while still alive is very real.

I am still desperate for Him to hold me fast but the dulled and less visceral pain, the healing that has begun, sometimes fools me into thinking and feeling that “I can do it now”. I cannot. And I never could. At least not without the loving kindness of my Saviour, Jesus Christ. This is the grand picture I catch glimpses of every now and then.

The foundation of God’s Word in my life prepared me and continues to guide me as I wrestle and lament with the truths about what and who I know God to be with what I now experience daily. Is God good? Does He care about me? Does He hold all things together? Do all things truly work together for the good of those who love Him, who are called according to His name? I have learned that when I bring my questions and doubts to God and allow Him into my pain, sorrow and grief, that this is worship. This honours God. And it keeps me close to Him, even as I grieve. I don’t have answers to why God allowed Jude to be taken from us, but if I take comfort in the hope that Jude knew and loved (and knows and loves!) Jesus, that He is in perfect peace and joy in the presence of his Saviour because of what God’s Word teaches me, then I can also go to God and learn to take comfort in the truths of His Sovereignty, Goodness and Justice.

The love of God carried me in the early hours, days and weeks. His love carries me still. Though I wrestle and weep before Him, I know He actually weeps with me. His love carries me still.