People often ask me about the big age gap between my second and third child. The five-and-a-half-year difference makes people wonder why we began our journey through babyhood once again. When asked, I usually smile and say simply, “The timing was right.”

The truth is there wasn’t supposed to be such a big gap. Several miscarriages lead to the huge age difference.

How it started

One morning, the rain poured outside as I walked down the stairs into the basement. A good foot of water welcomed me. As I stepped into it, I realized it wasn’t just water. Our sewer line had backed up into the basement. Our upstairs neighbor called a plumber, but they couldn’t come until late that evening. So from 9 a.m. until then, I carried buckets of sewage out our backdoor and dumped it into our backyard. I yelled and even cried with exhaustion as I fought a losing battle with the rising water.

Then my wife walked into the basement. She hugged my sweaty, tired body, and said, “We’re going to have another baby.”

Suddenly, I didn’t care about the basement anymore; I just wanted to hug my wife. We smiled and kissed. She asked if I was happy and, with raw sewage dripping from my pants and shoes, I said I was. Very happy.

Unfortunately, I never got the opportunity to meet the source of the happiness. We had a miscarriage. It turned out to be the first of several.

‘The silence was backbreaking‘

My wife told me she was miscarrying as she laid on our bed. My stomach dropped. I felt like thousands of pounds were upon my back. It was still morning, so I got the kids dressed, fed, and off to school. I returned to my wife, who was still in the same position. I didn’t say anything and neither did she. We just occupied the same room for a little while. She didn’t want to talk and I’m not sure if I wanted her to. But the silence was backbreaking.

I think I muttered a few words. She may have muttered something back. Nothing real was said. Just murmurings. I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t.

Deep inside, I wanted to be comforted, too. But I couldn’t be and I couldn’t ask anyone to. She took a little nap and I left the room. I sat down on the couch with my hands covering my face and wept.

In the days and weeks that followed, we didn’t talk that much about it.

I think we both wanted to forget and, by not talking about it, we thought we could. We hadn’t told anyone about the pregnancy yet so nobody knew. There was nobody to give that sympathetic look. There was nobody for us to talk to. We were alone in our sorrow and we weren’t necessarily talking about it together. So I stuffed it into that place in a man’s soul where things are stored and never let out again.

My wife told me a few months later that she was pregnant again. But, only a few weeks later, that too ended in miscarriage. Two miscarriages in less than six months.

Putting up my guard

When my wife told me that we were expecting once again, I put up a guard. As the baby grew inside my wife, I refused to let myself get too attached. I didn’t want the ultimate disappointment to happen again. I’d go along with my wife for check-ups and ultrasounds, but I continued to wait for and expect bad news. When she was pregnant with our other children, I would stare at the ultrasound pictures and dream of their future in wonder. This time, I barely looked. Every day I battled to put on the face of the supportive husband, but inside I just couldn’t let myself get close.

When our baby entered the world, I finally exhaled. Everything that built up inside of me over the years had been released. There was a beautiful and perfect little boy in my arms and I once again felt joy. The barrier of speaking to my wife about the past miscarriages was gone. And we finally felt like we could talk about the experience with other people.

There are days though that I still can’t help but wonder what it would be like to have four or five children, instead of three. I always wanted a lot of kids and dreamed of a house filled with beautiful family chaos. Time has not been kind to my body and the days of hoisting babies into the air are coming to an end. To say that I’m completely over the miscarriages would be very wrong. I’m not over it and probably never will be.

I’ve talked to a few guys since then and it seems that we all feel the same way. We want to be there for the women in our lives and give encouragement and comfort. To try and make our partners feel better. But inside, we’re breaking.

I’ve also seen what miscarriages can do to women. Not only my wife but other women I’ve known. It’s terrible and difficult to talk about. My heart goes out to any woman who suffers through one. And my heart goes out to their men who aren’t sure how to talk about it, aren’t sure how to relate the feelings of great loss when they barely had anything to begin with.

When dealing with tragedies in life, most of us try to find some closure. When someone near to us dies, we talk about the life they lived and what they meant to us. The moment is heartbreaking and we never fully get over the loss. With miscarriages, closure is hard to find. A beautiful promise was there and now it isn’t. Your hopes were high and then … nothing. For the man, we can only observe the physical and emotional pains of the loss of the woman. Helplessly watch.

I’m not sure what my point in writing this piece was. Maybe I wrote this for my cathartic process. Or maybe I was hoping to have men start a dialogue about this issue. Maybe it was to let others know that nobody is alone when it comes to a miscarriage and there is no shame in it. It isn’t anyone’s fault and a miscarriage is just one of life’s many tragedies.

A version of this was first published here and on One Good Dad in 2013, and has since been updated. Photo by MART PRODUCTION via Pexels.

If you saw me pushing a shopping cart or chasing two quick-footed toddlers around a neighborhood playground you would probably say: “There goes a happy Dad of twins.”

What you probably wouldn’t guess is I’m actually the father of five.

No — although they consider themselves part of the family, I’m not including the dog and the two fish.

My wife and I have been very calculated in our relationship. We knew exactly when we were going to get engaged and tie the knot, and even planned when we would start trying to have children. Exactly a year after we said our “I do’s,” we took a trip for our anniversary to San Antonio, Texas. We said goodbye to our friends in Las Vegas for a week and also to any sort of contraception. It was time to begin trying to start our family, and as if right on schedule, it worked and we were pregnant.

The excitement was beyond words. We were almost nine months away from being the proud parents of a bouncing baby girl or boy, and things couldn’t have been more perfect. It was a few weeks later that things took a turn for the worse.

We lost the baby.

It was a long road to the two busy additions to our family we have now. Three times over the 18 months we were pregnant, and three times between the 5-week- and 10-week-mark we lost the child.

Our nerves were shot, and our emotional state was questionable. Each time we got pregnant, it became harder and harder to celebrate. We could no longer bask in the moment that we were going to be parents, and instead, waited daily for the other shoe to drop. After the first miscarriage, we stopped telling people that my wife was carrying. We even quit mentioning to people that we were trying to conceive.

It hurt. BAD. After each miscarriage, it felt like someone reached in, pulled my heart out of my chest, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it. I stood solid, puffing my chest out and being strong for my wife. A shoulder for her, and a pillar of support. What I wanted to do was lie on the floor and cry my eyes out until the pain went away.

After the third miscarriage, that’s exactly what I did. My wife and I sat on the couch and cried until there were no more tears to cry. But the pain didn’t go away.

I still feel the loss, but it’s a different pain now. I feel angry sometimes. Angry that my wife and I had to go through such emotions. Upset that ANYONE has to feel the hurt we experienced. Hurt that in a way, we were robbed of the joys of pregnancy. I know that morning sickness and swollen feet are far from joyful but even things like taking pictures of my wife pregnant or shopping for baby things early were taken from us. We didn’t even have a baby shower. If we lost yet another, we wanted no evidence around to remind us of our pain.

It’s taken me more than two years to talk about that miscarriage, and if it wasn’t for being made aware of there even being a day of remembrance, I would have continued to remain silent.  I’ve moved on in a sense, and am beside myself that we have two wonderful boys that I love with all of my heart.

But I’ll never forget. I’ll never not wonder why. And I’ll never stop squeezing my sons a little tighter every night knowing how blessed I truly am.

This originally appeared on Double Trouble Daddy to mark the Oct. 15 observance of National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. Photo by MART PRODUCTION via Pexels.