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Almost half of my friends who have had a pregnancy have lost a pregnancy. Maybe it’s that we know we are pregnant earlier these days. Maybe it’s that my friends and I started having babies in our thirties. Maybe something in our environment has made it harder to carry pregnancies to term.
None of the reasons why matter when a pregnancy ends unexpectedly.
Most friends who have had miscarriages have told me about them after they’ve let go of the initial shock. I was present for the immediate aftermath of one friend’s miscarriage. I still remember the barely coherent voice on the phone shouting “It’s gone, it’s gone!” I was in the parking lot of my company, getting ready to go to a meeting. I was pregnant myself.
I flew to her house after work and found her in a ball on the couch, her eyes swollen almost beyond recognition. “I’m just so sad,” she said. There was nothing I could ever say to give her back that six-week-old fetus. Nothing I could say to give her back those feelings of excitement and anticipation of becoming a mother, of having that baby – not any baby, but that baby -- to hold and soothe. The pit in my own stomach hurt – I can’t imagine what she must have been feeling.
Just because miscarriages happen often doesn’t mean we should minimize them or their effects on parents, particularly the mothers whose bodies were working hard to prepare the way for life. Though the stories are hard to read, I present them here for you.
The first involves a baby her parents called Sweetpea.
Sweetpea was our momentary bliss and likewise, our temporary heartbreak. She wasn't a missed abortion, which is what the doctors call it in the second trimester; she was a lost child. We saw her as a child long before anyone else might have considered her so; she was our baby from the day we knew of her existence. Yes, a fetus; a pair of gametes fused together; but in our hearts, our minds, and our actions, a baby to be loved, to be protected, to look forward to.
Miscarriages are odd things. Miscarriages are births not meant to be. We know so much earlier now when we are pregnant and so we know too about how exquisitely common miscarriages can be. Every miscarriage is different. They carry unique markers, identifiers like dates, moments, songs, things that associate and align themselves to that miscarriage: …the sunshine pouring through my car, warming me as I text-messaged Annie to tell her I lost Sweetpea...the spontaneous reaction of crying to assuage my grief…that strange, antiseptic smell of the hospital where I filled out pre-op paperwork.
This painful story came from emilibef:
Wednesday, still bleeding, I went for my appointment. Another exam. More blood. We were to hear the results in a few hours, so we stopped for a dinner.
On the way back, a cramp slowly grabbed my lower torso. I shifted in my seat, I pushed the cramps away with my mind. I refused to acknowledge them. Eventually I asked Josh to stop, which he did, at a Subway about 30 minutes from home.
At Subway the ending began.
I called the doctor and we headed back to Tupelo, to the women's hospital, where they were waiting for me.
It all blends together after that...the blood, the cramps, everyone's apologies. The doctor, telling me that the numbers I'd been waiting for had fallen instead of doubled, like we'd hoped. His kind face, the urgency with which he said I needed surgery to stop the bleeding. Needles. Anesthesia. An operating room. Waking with a stomach pump tube scraping its way up my throat.
The story goes on.
I never knew I could love someone so much, someone I never met. I never knew I could mourn something I hadn't even expected. I never knew, that even with two kids and a husband, I could still have so much love left to give.
The loss of miscarriage can lead to the joy of birth. Like Rachel, it’s my hope that each of you out there who has suffered a miscarriage may have all your baby dreams come true.
The past year has not been a good year for us, if I could have a “do-over” year, this is the year I would chose. The pain of losing a baby overshadowed the entire year and influenced everything. Only the few weeks preceding the birth of
