Mommy Monday: Jessica’s Story

Each week, I’ll share the story of a mother. Not just any mother, but a mother that surpassed the odds, a mother that overcame, a mother that didn’t give up, a mother that believed that the Lord had plans for her family. These are the stories of mothers after infertility when her precious miracle entered her world. May these stories inspire you, give you hope, and encourage you to keep believing for your miracle.

I WANT TO INTRODUCE YOU TO THIS WEEK’S FEATURED MOMMY MONDAY. MEET JESSICA SEUBERT. THIS IS HER STORY:

The journey to our family was way different than we would have ever anticipated. However, as I hold our precious miracle baby boy, I couldn’t be more grateful for the journey that led us to him.

God showed His faithfulness, provision and grace every step of the way.

My husband, Chase and I were married in December 2013. We have always said we wanted four or five kids. We didn’t care how close together they were in age, we just knew we wanted a big family. We both came from bigger families and figured it would be easy to start ours. Chase is in the Navy, so he moved about 6 months after we got married to his first base. I couldn’t go with him because I was finishing up school so we knew we would be long distance for about two years.

In January 2015, we decided we wanted to start trying for a baby. We knew we were long distance but figured it couldn’t be that hard, right?! We would just plan flights for the “right time” and we would easily become pregnant. Well, 16 months later we had a lot of airline miles accumulated, but no baby to show for it. When I finally moved to be with Chase in May of 2016, we decided we would give it 5 months and then we would go in for more extensive fertility testing. I had seen my ob-gyn once during our long distance TTC journey and all of the testing came back normal so I really didn’t think we would need this appointment but at least we had it on the calendar.

On Labor Day, a few weeks before our scheduled appointment, we got our first positive pregnancy test! We were over the moon and couldn’t believe the perfection of the timing. We would be due May 15^th, the day after Mother’s Day. Chase and I are both May babies, and I was a Mother’s day baby. I quickly looked to see when we would find out the gender: end of December, right around our wedding anniversary! It all seemed so perfect; almost too good to be true. We were so excited and so thankful that God answered our prayers.

The first appointment came and we saw a perfectly growing baby and heard a beautiful heartbeat. We were so in love with this little blessing. The next week, the spotting started. The spotting brought about more appointments and scans which showed a bleed near the placenta. “A common finding,” they said, “something that rarely causes an issue.” We had weekly scans, which showed the bleeding was getting smaller each week and by our 12-week ultrasound they told us we were “in the clear”. We were ecstatic and so relieved!

On Saturday, November 12, two days shy of 14 weeks pregnant the bleed started again and caused the placenta to detach from the uterus. Our baby went to be with the Lord and to say we were devastated and heartbroken would be an understatement. Still to this day, I am haunted by this day and miss our baby more than words can say. A follow-up appointment with the doctor told us again how rare this was. He said it was like ‘getting struck by lightning’ and reassured us that we likely would be pregnant again quickly.

We took a few months to ourselves and then decided we were ready to start trying for our rainbow baby. This was a really dark and difficult time in our TTC journey.  I didn’t understand why we weren’t getting pregnant when we had already been pregnant before. I struggled daily with the loss of our first baby. I tried my best to draw closer to the Lord and remain grateful during this time. Six months went by and we still weren’t pregnant so we decided to seek out the opinion of a reproductive endocrinologist. All of our testing came back normal and the doctor diagnosed us with “unexplained infertility”. He recommended a few medicated cycles and we really thought this would work for us. When it didn’t, he recommended IUI so we proceeded with two cycles of IUI. We still weren’t pregnant and the doctor recommended IVF.

I was stunned. We had been pregnant before, why wasn’t this happening again for us?

IVF seemed like a huge step and I didn’t have peace with it. We felt like God was calling us to be still. I felt sure that this meant He was going to allow us to become pregnant without any treatment. This is when God really worked on my heart.

Isaiah 43:18-19 became my verse during this time. “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

The Lord kept bringing this piece of scripture up over and over again. What was this “new thing” God was going to do? Was it going to be a natural pregnancy? Or would it be IVF despite my hesitation? I sure felt lost in the wilderness and just kept relying on God to make a way. I knew God had a plan for us and growing our family and I just kept following what He was laying on our hearts.

After a few months, lots of tears and many prayers, we felt called to pursue the IVF consult. I had received three monthly bonuses at work that added up to almost exactly what we needed for IVF. I kept praying that if it was God’s will, we would become pregnant before having to start the process. The financial provision combined with not becoming pregnant on our own brought a lot of peace with moving forward. Maybe IVF was the new thing God was going to do for us.  This wasn’t my plan for growing our family, but maybe it was His.

We went through the IVF process and ended up with two beautiful embryos. The process was way easier than I had anticipated, and I had so much peace the whole time. We prayed through the whole process and decided to transfer both embryos. We kept relying on the Lord and truly believed that this would work. And that Isaiah scripture kept coming up, again and again. When we got the call that we were pregnant, we were over the moon! Our numbers were so high we were sure that both embryos had implanted.

Our first ultrasound showed one beautiful baby, with a perfect heartbeat and measuring a few days ahead. While we were sad that both embryos didn’t implant, we were so grateful for the one that did and knew that this baby had the sweetest angels watching over him or her. I had an incredibly smooth pregnancy, complete with the morning sickness I had prayed so hard for!

When you’ve been through a loss, you pray for these things! I took our pregnancy one day at a time and had so much joy each day. Being pregnant after loss is really hard but also really beautiful. I was so grateful for each day of pregnancy and all that it entailed! God continued to give me that peace that I needed throughout my whole pregnancy.

I delivered our perfect miracle rainbow baby four days past our due date. Our sweet boy, Mark Jeffry Seubert, weighed 10 lb 4 oz and was 21.5 inches of perfection. He has helped heal our hearts and has brought so much love, hope and joy to our lives.

He will forever be our tangible reminder of God’s love and faithfulness. I would go through it all again to have him. He was sure worth the wait, the heartache and the tears. And we will never stop praising God for our little (BIG) miracle!

“To God be the Glory. We get the joy, but He gets the glory.”