Guest post by Emily
When somebody is facing something that they cannot understand they often try to find comfort in writings and words. I tried that. I really did. The only words that spoke to me however were the deeply bitter ones, the angry ones, the ones that gave voice to my hell. Words that validated my pain and told me that this was good and natural and fine to feel because nothing else was telling me that.
There is no real dialogue to talking about miscarriage; the overwhelming response to the news by well meaning family and friends are those that are trying to push you and pull you out of your grief much too soon.
There is always adoption.
You just need to relax.
These things sometimes happen.
This is nature’s way of weeding out the bad babies.
You can always try again.
You are just trying too hard.
Next time. Next time it will be better.
You WILL have a baby, maybe just not when you want it to be.
I had a friend who was infertile for 500 years and now she has twins.
That is minimizing our pain, pushing it away and subtly letting us know that we should just get beyond it, rejoin life and skip happily to other people’s baby showers because soon enough it will be our turn if we just believe enough or pray hard enough or hand over just enough cash to a reproductive endocrinologist. What I want is for somebody to admit that I might never, ever be a mother. Even if there’s hope, that is my greatest and most pressing fear and I need to be able to say that, say it out loud and hear that that might be true and if it is that people will be there to help us navigate a life void of that joy. Miscarriage is less the loss of a child and more the loss of a million little possibilities.
I have been pregnant four times. I have been more or less told that twice it didn’t count; biochemical pregnancies- Making themselves known to us for a few hours, or days. I was made to feel that I was practically making it up; perhaps I had made a $80 worth of HPTs positive out of sheer stubbornness. Once, we saw a beautiful heartbeat and the fourth was just a snowy black dot on an ultrasound screen; the doctor cheerily assuring us that this, this was our take home baby for no other reason than I am only 25 and youth will somehow make a difference. I remember thinking that I was older now than I was the first time, the second time, and the third. What did my youth matter given my history? He patted my hand like I was just being a worry wart and assured me that he would “bet on us”. I hope he lost a lot of money.
The truth for me right now is this. “ Sometimes, you can cry until there’s nothing wet in you. You can scream and curse to where your throat rebels and ruptures. You can pray, all you want, to whatever God you think will listen and still, it goes on, with no sign as to when it might release you. And you know that if it ever did relent…it would not be because it cared.”― Jhonen Vasquez,
That is how I feel and I imagine that a lot of people do. If you could just let us have it, really have it, at least for a little while then maybe, eventually I will wake up, open my eyes and say to myself.
“Next time. Next time it will be better.”
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