I heard my mother’s sobs from the bathroom and knew something was wrong. I went to my parents’ room, where my father was sitting alone on the bed, his eyes wet and his head bowed low into his hands.

“Why is Mom crying?” I asked him.

“Because the baby in her tummy died,” he answered, at which point I joined in the mourning by bursting into tears.

I was about five years old when my mother miscarried. She had been pregnant long enough that we talked openly about my younger brother or sister, and she let me pat her stomach and talk to the baby inside. I was looking forward to my younger sibling; I had two older sisters and thought that being older than someone else would be nice, for a change.

Instead I would remain the youngest, and my parents would mourn quietly — only in our home, to my memory — the fourth lost pregnancy of their marriage.

Miscarriage is a hidden pain. Pregnancy is intimate and internal to the mother, and that connection to the child inside is most real to her. It is difficult for anyone outside the mother to understand or enter into her loss.

Abortion is much the same, compounded with additional violence against the child while still inside the mother’s womb.

There are stories of this pain in the friends and neighbors around us, if we open our ears to hear them. Once in a casual conversation with the guy who cuts my hair, it came out that I was involved in pro-life work. He told me that just the day before he had been cutting the hair of his friend, who had been upset because her husband had just pressured her to have an abortion. She had gone through with it “and it was just so sad,” he told me.

“She’s not really an emotional person, but she was weeping when I washed her hair.”

“It sounds like she had something she needed to release,” I said.

This hidden pain lies heavy in the heart of every woman who has lost a child, however it happened.

It’s a pain that many blithely try to dismiss, but anyone who ignores it and pretends to mothers that the loss of their children won’t hurt them is lying — and liable for breaking their hearts.

This includes one doctor I’m sure thought was doing the right thing by counseling my single friend to have an abortion.

My friend had come to our church alone and scared, and she didn’t want to be there — but someone who had been through what she had saw her and asked if they could pray for her.

We’ll call her Christine, but that’s not her real name. She had gone to see her doctor, who pressured her to get an abortion. Christine was estranged from her Catholic roots, but she remembered enough to feel uncomfortable with the thought of the procedure that would, in the old euphemism, “terminate her pregnancy.” She showed up for her appointment because she promised her doctor, but she couldn’t go through with it.

According to Christine, her doctor yelled at her and told her she was being stupid, throwing her life and her career away. Christine hadn’t talked to God in a long time, but she knew abortion was not the answer to her desperation.

By a miracle, she walked by our church, heard the music and, still full of anger at God for all that had happened to her, came inside. She wasn’t showing, but my friend had a strong impression of what was going on and prayed for her.

And by God’s grace, Christine had her baby boy baptized at our church months later.

Not every mother gets to have Christine’s story. But this Mother’s Day, let’s work and pray that more mothers would.