Nine Weeks of Forever

I carried you for nine weeks. I’ll carry you forever.

We were nine weeks pregnant.

It all began right around the time I joined Substack. I never spoke of it, because it felt too sacred, too intimate, something just for me, for us.

I have PCOS and I’m 32, so the road to conception wasn’t simple. We took medical support. Hormonal treatments, ovulation tracking, follicular scans. It was supported and emotional.

We tried not to get attached to timelines.

And then, it happened, naturally, after three months of trying with help.

May 25th. We found out we were pregnant. 36 days in. My husband had once told me that 25.5.25 was a powerful date. He had a good feeling about it. And that’s the exact day we found out. Divine timing, maybe.

The next day, we went for a scan. It was confirmed. We were on top of the world. Or in another one altogether. I won’t try to explain the joy, it was a rollercoaster of surrender, disbelief, hope.

My first scan at 6 weeks and 6 days showed slow growth, lagging by six days. That’s common with PCOS pregnancies, they said. Nothing to worry about.

So we didn’t.

We were careful. We ate right. Walked gently. But no one told us how much extra care was needed - no lifting, no bending, no overexertion. We had no idea. We just thought everything was normal.

Then came June 10th.

After our evening walk, I noticed blood. Spotting. Google told me not to panic. “You’ll hear it everywhere,” it said. “Spotting is normal in early pregnancy.”

But something in me knew this wasn’t “just spotting.”

We rushed to the ER. I was told I was in the middle of a threatened miscarriage, a term I hadn’t even heard before.

They advised immediate hospitalization. We didn’t hesitate.

Three days, two nights. Every hour, the bleeding increased. More medications. Hormone injections. Still no clarity about the baby’s development.

We left the hospital still pregnant, technically. Still hopeful. Still in the dark.

Every other day, we returned for hormone injections.

And then came June 19th. Our next scan. The doctor looked at the screen quietly for too long.

And then she said the words - “The fetus hasn’t developed at all. It’s slid to the bottom of the uterus. The miscarriage has already happened. We need to terminate.”

I don’t remember how I breathed after that. I lost all logic. I lost my sense of space and sound.

My body was still pregnant. My soul was not.

We said OK.

I swallowed the termination pill that same day. The next day, another was inserted vaginally. And since then, I’ve been in this strange, hollow in-between.

Waiting for the release.

Of life. Of blood. Of the hopes and dreams that came alive in just nine weeks. The imagined seasons, birthdays, baby names.

The body that had already started making space.

And now — nothing. No bleeding. No pain. Just silence.

I haven’t felt this kind of love before.

I haven’t felt this kind of fear before.

I haven’t felt this kind of life before.

Or this kind of grief.

It hits in waves. Sometimes in the middle of a song. Sometimes when I hold my lower belly out of habit. Sometimes in the silence between one breath and the next.

Some hours, I remind myself:

This is not the end. This is the beginning of our parenthood. We are being prepared. Initiated.

But how do you convince a grieving heart of logic? How do you tell your body to let go, when it had just begun to believe?

And in the middle of this confusion, somewhere between rage and surrender — a whisper comes:

Even if it stayed for only nine weeks, Even if it never cried or breathed, Even if I never held it — It lived. And it chose us. We gave it something it needed. And it gave us something we may not even fully understand yet.

In Vedic terms, there was life. There was soul. There was purpose.

And now. There is release. There is grace. There is space for healing and remembering.

“Some children come through us. Others come to bless us by visiting.”

Your body is not broken. Your spirit is not denied. You were the perfect vessel for this soul’s journey even if it was brief. And now, you are being cracked open, not for loss, but for transformation.

I don’t know what I’ll be after this. But I do know that something has died. And something will be born.

In the dark, in the blood, in the silence I will meet myself again.

Not as the woman who became a mother. But as the woman who loved as one. And that, too, is holy.

So now, I’m resting. Recovering not just from what happened in my body, but from all the hope it held.

I’m learning to slow down. To let myself break a little each day. To pause without rushing to make sense of it all. There is no neat ending here.

Just space. To feel. To forget. To remember again.

Love,

Janki