The Drive Home from the Baby Shower

You know the drive home from the baby shower.

You held it together inside. You smiled at the right moments, said the gracious things, and watched tiny little outfits lifted into the air with oohs and ahhs. And then you got to your car, closed the door, and fell apart — because that was the only place left where you were allowed to.

Maybe that was last weekend. Maybe that was three years ago and you have never told a single person what that drive felt like.

That is the grief this is for.

Not the grief the world makes room for — the kind with funerals, frozen meals, and a designated mourning period before everyone quietly expects you to be okay again. This is the other kind. The kind that lives in the quiet cracks of your ordinary life. The kind you carry into a Tuesday at the grocery store when you have to walk past the baby aisle and keep going. The kind that has no ceremony, no name in most conversations, and no timeline the people around you will ever quite understand.

The loss of a pregnancy, a baby, a child — a dream you had already begun to love in your body and your heart, long before the world ever got to know it.

Maybe it happened once. Maybe it happened over and over. Maybe someone said things like “at least it was early” or “God needed another angel” and you felt your grief get smaller in response — not because it was, but because you did not have the energy left to hold it up and argue for it.

So you learned to be fine. You learned to grieve in the margins — in the car, in the shower, in the three o’clock dark when everyone else was asleep and the weight of what you were carrying had nowhere else to go. When you were so tired of holding it that you just lay there, still, waiting for morning to make it manageable again.

June is Infertility Awareness Month. And yet for most of the women carrying this grief, there is still no parade, no ribbon, no moment when the world turns toward them and says: We know. We see you. Just another thirty days of watching everyone else celebrate things that feel very far away.

So let me say it plainly, and I hope you will let it settle:

You were never meant to carry this alone.
Not one single night of it.

I know this because I have lived it.

My name is Patti Schultz, and for over a decade I walked the road you are on right now — through the loss of almost ten pregnancies, through the grief that does not show on the outside, through the nights I just described, because they were my nights too, for a very long time.

I also know another kind of silence.

For years I stood at the front of sanctuaries, translating worship into American Sign Language for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community — week after week, standing in the gap between a person’s deepest need and the world’s inability to reach them. Making sure the ones who had been overlooked finally received what was always meant for them.

Somewhere in the space between those two worlds — the women who could not be heard in their grief and the community who could not be heard in their worship — something took shape.