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

or diagnostic terminology with her patients—and therefore, I wasn’t formally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder—together, we began to see how this trauma changed various aspects of my life. The symptoms of my trauma accompanied me through my days (and nights) for too long to remember. This is, of course, not unique to my experience—research has found that approximately four in ten women experience symptoms of PTSD after miscarriage.3 And several of PTSD’s hallmark signs—intrusive memories, irritability, emotional detachment, severe anxiety, to name a few—became the territory I now navigated. But memorizing statistics and perusing scientific studies to better treat my patients turned out to be far different than coming face-to-face with an awareness of the precariousness of mortality firsthand. The me that existed before my loss could compartmentalize the science from the personal and separate lived experiences from the hard data in order to provide those in need with perspective and guidance. But the me that existed after could not. Now, I was a statistic. Now, I was stuck replaying the visuals and the physical feelings associated with death occurring in my body.

Valerie was there when I realized that I had thought I was okay, but I wasn’t. And because of the hour we spent together each week, I eventually puttered out and ultimately stopped moving. Through the consistency of her emotional presence and our extensive conversations, at long last, I allowed myself to stand still and fall apart.

• • •

On the other six days of the week—the days I didn’t speak with Valerie—putting pen to paper and leaking the trauma onto the page was a godsend. Typing away on my keyboard became synonymous with a semblance of salvation. It was there, on those pages—the published ones, the eventual Instagram captions, even the ones hidden away in a Microsoft Word file that never saw the light of day—that I connected with myself profoundly, in a sort of meditation on pain. Writing had been something I loved, always—be it journaling, working on papers during both of my master’s degree programs, undertaking my award-winning dissertation, or crafting published pieces—but during this time, writing became a true conduit for survival. The empty pages don’t judge; in fact, they are begging for emotions to be unleashed upon them. Blank pages were there to receive my stories, and by telling and retelling over and over again—whether the words were hesitant or free-flowing, whether they were simplistic or robust—I created pathways to lean toward my rawest self, no matter how distressing and befuddling the feelings I found there were. But soon my need to create in the name of self-preservation morphed into something new, something capable of encompassing far more than my traumatic loss. As I continued to write, I started to hope that my words would do for others what they were able to do for me: dig trenches and form pathways through loss, grief, trauma, and mourning, so that those who felt their own variation of the same trauma I had been enduring could also find a way to stop running from the person that miscarriage, pregnancy, and infant loss had made them to be. I started to envision a scenario in which the pages honoring my own loss would assist someone in finding a unique and personal way to honor their own.

By writing my way into the depths of my heartache and engaging in conversations with Valerie that acted as a life preserver, pulling me back to the surface, I was able to inch closer to a calling I had not yet yielded: a call to action that would unveil the crushing pain I was consciously and unconsciously attempting to ward off, and, in doing so, give silent permission for others to unabashedly do the same.

*Names and details of patients, community members, and friends have been altered to protect confidentiality and maintain anonymity.

3

“The strident trifecta: silence, stigma, and shame.”

Pregnancy and infant loss have been a constant since the dawn of time. And not just for humans. It’s been discovered that humans and nonhumans alike experience grief after the loss of a pregnancy or infant. One animal study found that chimpanzee mothers whose infants died carried around the mummified remains of their babies for up to two months.4 Similar behavior has been observed in elephants, giraffes, and marine mammals.5 In addition to observing marked behavioral changes in animal life upon losing offspring—such as listlessness, standing vigil, the refusal of food and companionship—researchers have pinpointed animal grief through hormonal changes in females who have lost a baby, namely an increase in stress hormones called glucocorticoids.6 Suffice it to say, this kind of primal reaction to sudden death is not a human construct. We do not have a monopoly on grief. It is the cultural associations and reactions around it that we are responsible for, and those have changed significantly over time.

As far back as ancient legends, the theme of losing a pregnancy or infant as a consequence for bad behavior, perceived failure, or generational transgressions is fairly prevalent. In many cultures, miscarriage and stillbirth are conceptualized, even now, as direct punishment for wrongdoing; affiliation with sorcery, supernatural elements, or evil spirits; or the breach of a taboo by the pregnant woman. I have extensively researched other cultures’ perceptions of miscarriage, wanting to explore those beyond my own as a Jewish American woman to get a sense of global patterns (or lack thereof). For example, the conceptualization of pregnancy and infant loss as being a direct consequence of negative actions has been seen in Malawi, among the Maasai community, and in western Kenya, where it is believed that a woman’s wrongdoing might result in pregnancy loss.7

Certain countries have a unique perspective on pregnancy and infant loss due to the prevalence of their infant survival rates. Faced with the high probability of losing their babies, these women fortify their emotions until they know the baby will last. In Nigeria, for example, where infant and child mortality rates are high, mourning is not a practice incorporated into culture.