My second miscarriage was so much worse.
I told my husband, as the shock and initial impact of the first started to ebb, “I’m feeling relatively okay but if it happens again, or we have any other issues next time, I think I might kind of lose it a bit.” And then it happened again. And no amount of bracing for it or trying to keep a limit on excitement seemed to help: after my second miscarriage, I did kind of lose it a bit.
I spent days on the couch, blanking out my thoughts with mindless Netflix binging and repetitive 4-string games on my phone. I couldn’t bear to stop and breathe or think or be mentally present in any way because the present I wanted, the present in which I was happy and pregnant, was gone.
Again.
So I watched TV. And cried. And cuddled our cat. I think it was a couple weeks before I went more than 24 hours without crying. And not just tearing up or weeping a little, I’m talking about full-on breaking down and sobbing. Sometimes it was specific triggers like the mention of pregnancy or babies or motherhood or something in any way related to any of those three things. And sometimes I just started crying, the grief and loss and hurt hitting me suddenly out of nowhere, slamming into my gut and leaving me gaping silently as sobs overcame me.
Eventually, it got better and the frequency lessened slightly. But I still cried. I still sobbed. When I finally started leaving the house again I’d hold it together as long as I had to, running an errand or visiting a friend, and then would sob on my way home alone in the car, so relieved to be back in my own head and not pretending I was okay. I wasn’t okay.
The irony in being that while I was pregnant, in those brief windows of a few weeks each time, I struggled to wrap my head around the idea that being pregnant meant I was going to be a mom, that I was going to have a baby. It felt unreal, detached from my actual existence; my lifelong dream wasn’t really possible, was it? It turns out that, in those instances, it wasn’t.
And as of writing this I still don’t know if it ever will be.
We still have no clue what happened in either case. My husband and I were tested prior to trying to conceive and we both came back with clean bills of fertility health. Was it my age? (Thirty-seven and just turned thirty-eight, respectively). My stress levels? I’m a worrier who doesn’t let go of stress easily. Did I eat something or do something that increased the risk of abnormal development for those little bundles of cells? Was it just bad luck in the complex process of fetal development, random biological glitches that were completely unrelated? We don’t know and, most likely, never will.
And so I’m left with only this gaping emptiness in my heart, twin holes of grief for little ones who never were, for the future and the lives we would have shared.
But it took me a while to acknowledge that pain, to understand just how deeply I felt those losses.
After the first time I went back to work relatively quickly, focusing on messages of how common it was ‘so early on’ and the idea that we’d just ‘won’ a really shitty lottery and that the incredibly blessed whirlwind we’d been living for the past nearly-two-years was going to bounce back with everything going right ‘next time’.
I consoled myself with the knowledge that this happened a lot more often than I’d thought, the online statistics confirmed in the looks of personal pain and compassion I now saw so often when disclosing my recent miscarriage to someone. And so I went back to work as an administrator at a midwifery practice thinking that getting back to routines would be helpful.
I was back at work for roughly three months before my next miscarriage and it took the second one to make me realize how hard that time really was for me.
I, literally, spent every working minute of those three months dealing with matters relating to pregnancy, birth, babies, and parenthood, and cried walking home almost every single day.
I fought back tears after finishing conversations with clients who called in, gushing with excitement to be registering for care for their pregnancies. I still don’t know how I managed to hold it together on the phone with the panicking client who called from her own bathroom where she was pretty sure she was miscarrying, but I did.
To get through it I tried to avoid the self-pitying thoughts, tried to keep focusing on the optimistic side like how I’d just had ‘bad luck’ and that ‘at least we didn’t have trouble conceiving’. But despite my best efforts, I couldn’t seem to keep myself from thinking of what would have been my due date each time I prepped a chart for a client’s appointment: ‘I’d be further along than her,’ or ‘she’s two months further along than I would have been’. Every single time with every single chart.
And whenever someone complained about anything related to their pregnancy, aching backs, nausea, trouble sleeping, all I wanted to do was to cry and tell them that they had no idea how lucky they were to be suffering like that, that I would give anything to be going through that rather than the alternative. My alternative. My reality. Writing it here it sounds so contrived and formulaic, those kinds of thoughts, but it was how it played out for me, how it was returning to work after my first miscarriage.
It was really hard and really painful, to go back to that world of babies and pregnancy, but what else was I going to do? I couldn’t just quit my job because it was kind of hard. You were supposed to be sad when this stuff happened, right? Hurting was natural. And if it was so common, lots and lots of women must have struggled with this kind of loss and still gone back to work, back to their lives, right? So I did. For weeks. And it wasn’t until my husband mentioned feeling emotional when a coworker brought his new baby into the office that I really allowed myself to see my own daily pain. But by that time we were trying to conceive again so I buried that pain under the tension and worry of pregnancy tests and hormone counts.
Things didn’t look great from the beginning of the second pregnancy but there was no definitive word of worry or concern from my primary practitioner so we tried to be optimistic. I did my best ‘not to worry’, trying really hard to just relax and enjoy the excitement.
For about two weeks we rode out series of waves: from negative pregnancy tests taken too early to the eventual positive one and then subsequent ‘less than ideal’ hormone counts in my blood work. I had repeated blood tests ordered by my GP because of the previous miscarriage and each one was its own roller coaster of hope and then fear because the numbers didn’t jump up exponentially like they ‘should’ but were still increasing and within the possibility of okay, as far as we could tell. We read websites and then admonished ourselves for it when they didn’t answer anything, just raised more worrying questions. We wavered between fear and cautious optimism.
It wasn’t ideal but it still seemed hopeful so, eventually, we told our moms and my heart broke because the conversations weren’t pure happiness and excitement, a thread of tension and worry undercutting everyone’s mood. A bit more time went by and I told a few other people, things seemed to be holding and I was just so excited to tell the people who knew about the first loss that this time it seemed to be going better.
And then I started bleeding.
Seeing that blood was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It was a bad sign, but it could mean nothing. Its vivid red was jarring and frightening but also somehow a sign of vitality and life in its organic presence.
And again, no one was able to be definitive. Some bleeding is normal. Some cramping is normal. Some women have heavy, ‘period-like’, bleeding and carry healthy babies to term.
Turns out I wasn’t one of them and by the time I went for an ultrasound a few days later, it was all gone. There was evidence that I’d been pregnant but all traces of the fetus had already passed. In my heart of hearts, I knew that was the case. Several days before that, hours before the first sign of blood, I’d felt different, felt not-pregnant, but had tried to tell myself it was just hormones levelling off or just another weird part of being pregnant, that it would ebb and flow. It wasn’t. It didn’t.
The bleeding didn’t stop for several days. The cramps were far worse than any menstrual cramps I’d ever had but I almost didn’t mind them. It felt perversely good to lie there, the grinding physical pain mirroring the wreckage of my emotional state.
I cried and watched TV and cried. And went to bed and cried in my husband’s arms and went to sleep. I cried when I woke up and cried in the shower. I ‘unfollowed’ Facebook friends who seemed to suddenly have a burst of pregnancy and birth announcements to share. I found catharsis in emotionally heavy-handed episodes of shows, giving myself over to more crying and revelling in the temporary relief from the weight of sorrow it brought.
And then two weeks after the second miscarriage, I was suddenly having to decide about a once-in-a-lifetime-trip that my mom and I had been planning to go visit my brother in Japan. Should I go? Could I go? The idea of leaving home, leaving the safety of my crying and couch-lying and television distraction was terrifying. The idea of leaving my husband was physically painful. But what was I going to do at home anyway? We’d agreed that I couldn’t go back to work and my husband had encouraged me to use this chance unemployment to once and for all launch my long-dreamt-of business pursuing my passion for alternative education.
So I’m unemployed and going to just fly around the world for a vacation? Would I enjoy any of it? Would I just cry the whole time? Or, worse yet, would I refuse to cry and cut short the beautifully excruciating grieving process I’d finally allowed myself?
In the end, I went. Tickets were paid for, I wasn’t going to be anything close to productive for a while, and I didn’t want to miss out on the chance that the trip might be okay, or helpful even. I went with no preparation, without my usual carefully researched list of sights and places to visit, but with plans in place that I could fly home for only a few hundred dollars if it was too much for me. It wasn’t. I stayed. It was hard and exhausting and the strangest travel experience I think I will ever have, but I’m glad I went.
Going, leaving home, gave me the space to breathe between the waves of grief.
At first, I didn’t see my pregnancies as lost babies, they were both gone before they reached anything near that stage of biological development. But at the same time, they were the possibility of a baby coming into my life. And each time, no matter how much I tried not to think about it, tried to focus on practical thoughts and acknowledge the slew of risks in early pregnancy, I couldn’t help but think of the potential future their existence made possible.
It was on a plane, in the middle of the night somewhere over Siberia (I kid you not) that I first admitted to myself that ‘I miss my babies’. My eyes flooded and my arms ached for want of their gentle squirming weight; in that moment I could see them and feel them, their little fingers and toes, their pudgy arms and legs clothed in soft sleepers. I reminded myself that they weren’t babies, they never were, that I don’t believe life begins at conception, but in the end, the biology didn’t matter because I wasn’t talking about literal, actual babies, I was talking about dream babies, hope babies. Despite my best intentions, my heart had gone ahead and fallen in love with them, with the idea of their possibility, and finally feeling that unfulfilled promise of motherhood opened a new scar of grief in me. Or rather, it allowed it to be, to exist wholly and fully as it needed to, and in doing so, allowed it to begin to heal.
I’ll never know what would have happened to my grieving process if I’d stayed home, and I still feel very guilty for leaving my husband at home on his own for those two weeks. I know it was really hard for him, and I’m not sure it was the right choice as a partner, but I am also glad I went. It got me off my couch, got me outside and walking and distracted and yet gently returned me to present mindfulness again and again as we visited shrines and temples and spiritually grounding spaces.
I stared at the gently blossoming plum trees awakening into their fertility, prayed and meditated and threw coins and clapped and bowed in shrines and temples. And once, after a long wait, walked barefoot down well-worn wooden stairs into absolute darkness to follow a string of oversized wooden beads into the heart of the maternal buddha to rest my hand on a dimly lit stone and ask for my ‘deepest heart wish’. I ate ramen and pizza and duck confit at my brother’s favourite restaurants, and pickles and rice and sweets at his partner’s house. We went on a mini vacation-within-a-vacation to an Onsen (Japanese hot springs) town, where we wore traditional robes and shoes, ate massive Japanese dinners and soaked naked in the healing waters. We watched Netflix in his apartment and laughed over games of Asshole in cafes, the card game we’d been playing all around the world in bars and trains and coffee shops since our adolescence. And I made it through.
It was hard and I think I would have probably been better off if I’d taken more breaks, more time to cry and rest, but I didn’t want to miss anything, didn’t want to stay behind. And, I think perhaps a little, didn’t let myself see that I could have used that. I kept going so that I could keep going and, in doing so, discovered I could move again.
And so life continued. I returned from Japan with a heavy spirit, burdened by thoughts of medical appointments and the terrifying uncertainty of unemployment-hoping-to-be-tempered-by-entrepreneurship, but a lighter heart, brightened by my return to activity, sunshine, exercise, and life.
And about a month later both my husband and I started laughing again. Really laughing. It’s one of my favourite things about him, the way he makes me silly-laugh with the joy and surprise of it filling my whole being. But I hadn’t really realized that it was gone until it came back. We started laughing and being together, really together, again and it was such a relief.
I still cry but not every day. And I still miss them, miss being pregnant, and miss the wonderful joyous excitement of that feeling and all that it could have led to.
But life is still moving on and for the first time in about ten years I’m not working in a job or on a degree that is a far cry from what I want to be doing with my life. I’m meditating on a regular basis and working on scheduling and organizational techniques to curb my anxiety and stave off the depression-triggers of inactivity and lethargy.
On the big picture scale, I feel good. I feel grounded. I feel hopeful. And underneath everything, every other emotion, I also always feel sad.
Now I understand the fleeting looks of sadness that show when I make my disclosure, I know the pain and longing I see there and didn’t fully understand at first. Just because it’s more common than I thought, that doesn’t make it any less significant, commonality doesn’t make these losses any easier to bear.
I miss my babies-that-never-were and I’m not sure that feeling is ever truly going to leave me.
