I Had a Miscarriage by Jessica Zucker (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

I actually felt. Mundane errands I’d done my entire adult life became disquieting. This unstructured time—when I wasn’t at work or with my family—allowed newfound anxiousness room to pierce, prod, and flirt without abandon. Time off—what most consider to be freedom, what my well-intentioned sister assumed would be beneficial—just created unlimited space for disquietude. These moments offered blank spaces for my mind, which slowly filled to the brim with excessive uneasiness. I felt incapable of deviating from my routine at all in those initial weeks. It was so vulnerable—so exposed—to be outside the plan.

I began to avoid errands altogether, but not every area of my life could be put on hold. I had to pull over to fill my tank with gas on occasion, for example, but these instances of necessity were not without a fair bit of bargaining. Maybe I can wait to fill up the car until tomorrow, I thought more than once. Maybe I can make it home and back to work again before the red light comes on. One more day without an errand, please! Just one more day. Jason and I had pretty much always shared the load of household chores, but in the aftermath of my loss he took over the stuff outside of the house: food shopping, dry cleaning, pharmacy runs, child pickup and drop-off. My cortisol levels needed a respite, it seemed. Home and work were all I could manage.

• • •

Therapy was a natural place for me to turn. I had been seeing my own therapist, Valerie, for just over a decade, and she’d seen me through so much in the time we’d known each other—graduate studies, career pursuits, relationships, my marriage to Jason, and Liev’s birth—so turning to her now was instinctual. The day after my miscarriage, I left Valerie a message. I called her reflexively, without thinking, almost the way one would call their mother after a seismic life event: “Valerie, it’s Jessica Zucker. Please call me back as soon as possible. I had a miscarriage. The baby fell out while I was home alone. I’d like to schedule a time to connect as soon as you can. Thank you.”

Click.

Numb.

Valerie is the one who absorbed all the pieces.

• • •

I had known Valerie since moving to Boston in my late twenties, when I was working at the Harvard School of Public Health, and during my studies of psychology and gender there as well. Back then, I wasn’t necessarily going through anything that had a pressing need for treatment per se, but I’d pretty much always welcomed therapy as a tremendously helpful and unlocking mainstay, and embraced the opportunity to benefit from it. So I had asked a relatively new friend, Aliza, whom I’d met at a yoga studio up the road from my third-floor walk-up in Cambridge, to ask her therapist for referrals. Aliza was smart, and I trusted that her therapist would know some quality professionals in the area. She did: she knew Valerie.

Valerie’s office was walking distance from my old apartment, crouched over the rhododendron trees just steps from Harvard Yard. I still remember that first session: I arrived early, clutching a small cup of coffee to warm my hands. I was not yet used to the bite of Boston’s fall weather and how it differed from what I had grown accustomed to in Manhattan. Still a newbie, I was prone to holding warm things whenever I ventured out, hoping to make the nip less intimidating. Even though therapy was far from unfamiliar to me, I caught myself feeling apprehensive about this first meeting. As I flipped through the magazines in her waiting room, I couldn’t help but wonder how much I’d share in that initial fifty-minute session—where would I even begin? There’s an inevitable awkwardness to the retelling of your life story.

But that session was deeply helpful, as were countless others that followed on a weekly basis. I credit therapy with providing the framework and the ultimate haven of safety—the place where I could lay it all out and sift through everything, piece by piece. Valerie became a source of unparalleled insight and a maternal beacon of sorts who has helped soften—dare I say relinquish—some of my festering childhood wounds. The word “gratitude” pales in comparison to how I feel about her and her important role in my life. Even though I moved from Boston to Los Angeles a handful of years after we first met in the confines of her cozy, book-lined office, where I would sit on her firm, hunter-green velvet couch in search of comfort, she seemed to understand me in a way I wouldn’t be able to replicate, so when I relocated, I continued seeing her over Skype and through phone calls. She was particularly helpful during my own studies to become a therapist myself a few years later. A therapist really needs a good therapist.

• • •

A few days after my miscarriage, that familiar face of hers crinkled in shock on my laptop screen as I spewed the horror of that fateful day: October 11, 2012. Valerie was there; to hold my story, the utter disbelief, that pulverized heart of mine, my unyielding astonishment, grief’s hangover. She was there through it all, a witness to the multifarious layers: the anger outbursts, the moments I clung to denial, and was there when I flirted with hope in fits and starts. She was there just as she had always been.

My seemingly disturbing, far-flung feelings (which I soon learned are the norm) were met with understanding, and it was here I could roll around in the grief, roar about resentments, shriek in horror of the events I’d navigated. Here I had permission to get messy in the heinous struggle I so badly wished wasn’t mine.

Over the course of our sessions, Valerie and I explored what it was like to live in a worn-down body and a fractured psyche after enduring this specific kind of trauma. Although she opts not to speak in clinical language