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

grief (candidly and unabashedly—or any reaction, for that matter) can create a sense of community and connectedness during an otherwise isolating time. It also might inspire others to do the same. Grief, like all emotions, affects everyone differently, and sometimes we don’t have a clue what we need in the throes of our despair until we are forced to survive it. We cannot assume the stage of gestation will automatically determine the potential impact of a pregnancy loss—it does not. The pain of sharing or not sharing a loss that evokes feelings of grief, mourning, longing, or self-hate, whether it happens at five weeks or forty, is poignant and individual.

I was raised as a culturally Jewish woman and taught to believe that life begins at birth—that birth is the moment when a fetus is deemed a person. Because of that teaching, I found some comfort in the idea that I didn’t lose a life, but the promise of one. And as such, I didn’t initially relate to women who, for example, upon seeing a positive pregnancy test, immediately felt spiritually connected to the idea of who this future baby might be. Over time and after exposure to various perspectives and women’s stories, I’ve come to appreciate the myriad ways people feel about pregnancy and their connection to it. No matter how we interpret what is growing in our bodies, pregnancy, and/or its personhood, we have the right to grieve upon losing it and the boundless possibilities of a future that did not come to fruition. We also have the right to feel relieved, or even indifferent, about a loss without feeling judged. We have the right to mourn the milestones reached only in the most hopeful recesses of our minds—the first steps that were never walked, the first words that were never spoken. And we deserve to do so without assigning blame to ourselves or downplaying our emotional reactions, whatever they may be, as the result of society’s inability to sit uncomfortably in grief, or any other response to miscarriage discussed in hushed, whispered tones. We need to remind one another of this very fact—the fact that there is no one at fault here, and no one is defined by the ways in which they navigate the aftermath—by refusing to sit in silence.

Because regardless of what we feel as individual women, the end result of encouraging silence on a societal level is stigma and, quite possibly, shame. We gravitate away from what we do not understand; we cannot understand what we don’t discuss. And it takes an incredible amount of courage to break away from an accepted norm, making dialogues all the rarer. Because of our culture of secrecy, many of us believe that miscarriage is uncommon; one survey found more than half of respondents believed that fewer than 5 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage.13 And that survey shows just how widespread other related misinformation is: most respondents believed women could cause miscarriages by their actions, including experiencing stress or lifting something heavy, and nearly a quarter of respondents thought that the use of contraception, alcohol, or tobacco could result in miscarriage.14 These answers are so, so far from the truth, which is that most miscarriages are the result of chromosomal abnormalities.15 And this is where we’re starting from—a place of cultural misunderstanding amplified and perpetuated by solitude and shame. This is what we have to work with: a culture that thinks miscarriage is our fault. How can we fix it unless we talk about it?

Combine silence and stigma and you’ll inevitably reach the most personalized and arguably the most complicated spoke in the trifecta: shame. It’s a natural endpoint, the unfair result of having to internalize our thoughts when we can’t put a voice to them, and the fear that even if we did speak them, we’d be judged. Judged for doing something “wrong.” Or maybe we believe we did do something wrong. One of the reasons the grief from miscarriage is so complex is that our own bodies, which we believe we can control in so many aspects, are the very site of the loss. It is all happening within us, both literally and figuratively. This can make it understandably hard to translate the pain in a way others can understand. But that truth also increases the likelihood that we hold ourselves responsible. And shame is an incredibly difficult feeling to sit with. It devours from within, feeding on the guilt and self-blame it fosters in a never-ending cycle. It festers and overtakes our sense of self. Shame is perhaps best known for its propensity to spiral. I hear these thoughts all the time, both in the confines of my practice and in conversation with other women: “How could I let this happen?” “My body failed. It doesn’t work. I’m broken.” “If only I had/hadn’t exercised.” “I’m defective.” “I’m scared to tell anyone I was ambivalent about motherhood—they’ll think that’s why I lost the pregnancy.”

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Celeste’s gaze was averted as she lay on my couch ascribing blame to herself for her recent loss. “I am bad. This happened to me because of me. Something is deeply wrong with me. Everyone but me can get pregnant and stay pregnant,” she said as she stared at the ceiling, cheeks hot pink, blushing with strong feelings.

Celeste’s early life may have set the stage for this way of thinking. Her mother, she recalled, had been depressed and overwhelmed ever since Celeste could remember. When Celeste was in utero, her mother—pregnant with twins—was put on bed rest in the middle of her second trimester. During labor, one of the babies died. Celeste was born healthy and thriving, but her would-be sibling did not make it. Mourning through the transition to motherhood, her mother found it tough to fully engage, to be fully present with her living child, which presumably affected the basic mirroring babies require. Bonding and attachment were compromised. Without these elemental building blocks, the development of self-esteem can be