I Don't Do Resolutions
I Do Reckonings

I was cooking something. I don't remember what.

I remember the oil was hot. I remember Larissa getting up from the couch, walking to the restroom, and coming back holding not one — but several — tests. All positive. All saying the same thing.

Five years. Five years of trying, praying, waiting. Five years of wondering if the timing was us or God or both.

And there she was. Standing in the kitchen, holding the answer.

I ended up on the floor. Not because I fell — because my body didn't know what else to do with that much joy arriving at once. Tears rolling. Hands shaking. Asking her to stop playing. Begging her to stop playing.

It was April 1. A year ago today.

Anniversaries have a way of demanding an inventory. Not of what you planned — of what remains.

She wasn't playing. But I couldn't believe it. Not because I didn't trust her — because hope had been deferred for so long that fulfillment felt like a setup. After five years, even joy felt suspicious.

We never finished cooking that night. Ordered food instead and sat across from each other, barely eating, mostly just looking at each other like two people who had just been handed something too sacred to hold with steady hands.

Just over four weeks later, we lost the pregnancy.

Early enough for some people to minimize it. But there is no "barely" in loss. There is only before and after. We hadn't even had time to say it out loud, which somehow made the silence afterward even stranger.

I don't remember every detail of the hospital. But I remember the parking lot.

I remember "Gloria" by Kendrick Lamar playing through the speakers while I sat in the driver's seat and sobbed. Not quiet tears. The kind pulled from somewhere grief had never touched before.

Larissa asked me if I wanted to eat. She had just heard the same words, carrying the same loss in her body — and she asked me if I was hungry. I couldn't answer. I couldn't even look at her. I won't speak to her experience because her story is hers to tell. But I will say this: she held hope in her body that we both built in our hearts. And when it was taken, she still found a way to hold me.

"Gloria" was still playing. And as the lyric came through the speakers, she said the words to me.

She wasn't singing. She was saying it. Kendrick gave her the language, and she used it.

That's who she is.

We cried together in a bed that felt too big and too small at the same time. We prayed prayers that didn't have language yet — just sound. We blamed ourselves in whispers, wondering what we did wrong, what we missed, what we could have held tighter.

We learned that grief does not move through two people evenly. One of us could speak when the other couldn't. One of us could carry hope when the other was too tired to lift it.

I struggled to speak about it. Not because I didn't feel it, but because I had never known sorrow to live so close to joy. The two were neighbors.

I still see newborns sometimes. At church. At the store. In photos people send with good intentions and big smiles. And I'm genuinely happy for them. That's not a performance. That joy is real.

But communities are good at celebrating arrival. They are less practiced at sitting with absence.

And underneath it, there's a weight. A quiet calculation I didn't ask to carry — the math of what could have been. How old they'd be. What they'd look like. Whether they'd have her eyes.

That doesn't go away just because you don't talk about it.

Here's what I was supposed to do.

I was supposed to wait. Wait until we were pregnant again. Wait until the baby was born healthy and full-term. Wait until I could stand on a stage or behind a caption and say, "Look what God did." The story with a bow on it. The highlight reel. The after photo.

That's how we're taught to share, right? You struggle in silence, you overcome in public, and you give the glory once the story has a clean ending.

But I've been thinking about the people in the middle. The ones scrolling through announcements and gender reveals, genuinely happy for everyone else, but carrying something they haven't been able to say out loud. Not because they're bitter. Because unfinished stories rarely get airtime.

I don't have a baby to show you. I have a marriage that survived the worst thing it's been through. I have a wife who held me in a parking lot while Kendrick played and the world kept moving outside the windshield. I have a faith that didn't shatter — not because it's bulletproof, but because the cracks let something in that was already there.

My faith did not survive because it explained the loss. It survived because it refused to leave me alone inside it.

I almost missed it, though. Almost spent so long reaching for the thing I was praying for that I forgot to hold the thing I already had.

We're still trying, still hoping, still believing that one day the news will come again and this time the story will carry all the way through. Larissa and I have made one promise to each other about it — if we ever find out again, and it happens to fall on or around April 1, we don't tell each other. Not that day. That date has held enough. We'll give it rest and let the joy arrive on a different morning.

But I'm not waiting for that morning anymore.

I don't do resolutions. I do reckonings. A resolution reaches for an improved future. A reckoning tells the truth about the present. I look at what's actually here — grief, gratitude, a marriage that made it through, hope that won't die — and I choose to sow in it.

April 1, 2026. One year later.

The date that once marked our loss is now the ground I'm choosing to sow.

No highlight reel. Just the full human, documented.

That's the reckoning.

Maybe that's what I'm building here. A place for the things I keep coming back to — and the words I find when I finally stop looking away. Not because I've arrived at anything neat. Because what is buried is not always gone. Sometimes it becomes the ground from which something else grows.