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

stymied. If not remedied, lack of maternal attunement can show itself as a shaky self-concept later in life, paving the way for habitual self-blame. For Celeste, this meant rampant shame burrowing its way into what she perceived to be personal failures. So, when she learned she’d had an ectopic pregnancy, she assumed it was her fault.

“You believe this happened because of something inside of you, because of who you are,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied, “I am flawed.”

Celeste’s expressed feelings of shame epitomize the self-blaming cycle. She loses track of herself in mazes of guilt and flagrant self-hate as she attempts to make her way in the world. Adulthood has proven tough. Shame rears its vicious head in various areas of Celeste’s life, but after losing her pregnancy, it seemed to sprout all the more. Pregnancy loss is a prime target for feelings such as these to emerge in spades. The lack of cultural discourse surely doesn’t help. Celeste felt alienated, isolated, and, most especially, ashamed by the dissolution of her pregnancy. After the loss, she found it even harder—impossibly hard—to connect with her partner, and people more generally, for fear of being fully known, since at the core of it, she believed she was bad.

Of course, there are multiple ways in which shame manifests itself post–pregnancy loss. One instance that is rarely discussed, but that I see often in my practice, is the shame that occurs when a woman does not feel sad about her miscarriage but instead experiences relief, gratefulness, or simply no profound feeling at all. While our society has long demanded those who’ve experienced pregnancy loss grieve in silence, it should be noted that the grief is also usually an expected, required component. Women should want to be pregnant. Women should want to stay pregnant. And if they either cannot become pregnant or cannot stay pregnant, they should mourn the loss of this so-called vital cornerstone of womanhood. At least, that’s what we’re told.

For Marta, a thirty-three-year-old newlywed, it was the guilt of not feeling sad about her miscarriage she’d experienced ten years prior that brought her into my office. During the intervening years, she felt conflicted about not being conflicted. She felt a pressure, one that emanated from culture, to be attached to the idea of having a baby even though she didn’t want to have one then. Now financially stable and in a healthy relationship, she wanted to build a family—to no avail. After two losses and one failed round of IVF, she began to wonder if her feelings of relief about her lost pregnancy a decade earlier had come back to haunt her. Were her struggles to conceive “karmic retribution,” she speculated aloud to me, for being grateful her body had saved her a trip to the local Planned Parenthood, where she had intended to have an abortion? Was her current plight a divine decree, proof from a force far greater than her that there was something innately wrong with her for not wanting to carry a pregnancy to term all those years ago? Not being able to get pregnant now, her mind led her to rewrite a narrative she felt comfortable with up until this point. Now, with a wanted pregnancy seemingly unattainable, she searched for meaning in past events and assigned retaliation where there was none.

“Maybe if I had felt badly then I would be pregnant now,” she said, unable to control her tears as they carved rivers down her face. “But I didn’t feel badly then. And I don’t feel badly about it now. I really don’t. The truth is: I was so relieved that my body knew what my mind had figured out instantly—I wasn’t ready to be a mom. And now that I am ready, this happens? This feels like a twisted joke. This feels like a punishment.”

The idea that a miscarriage is a punishment for a past “misdeed” is common. The loss happened because the woman ate something. Lifted something heavy. Went to work. Slept on her right side. Slept on her left. Historically felt mixed feelings about becoming a mother. And given Marta’s plans to terminate her unwanted pregnancy, it’s unlikely that she would have been spared these present-day feelings of shame and guilt if she had not had a miscarriage, but the abortion as planned.

“What do you imagine your life would have been like had you not miscarried ten years ago and carried that pregnancy to term?” I asked, shifting the focus to the undeniable aspects of Marta’s story—the valid reasons why a pregnancy, at that time, wasn’t ideal for her. And why one would be now.

She paused briefly, looking down at the tear-soaked tissue she had been fidgeting with in her lightly freckled hands. And it was then that I noticed an obvious shift in her physical demeanor. She looked back up at me and held my gaze.

“I wouldn’t be who I am today,” she said, almost defiantly. “There’s no way I would have been able to finish school or end up at the job I have now. I wouldn’t have met my husband. It’s so hard to imagine what motherhood would have been like for me then, when I was in a less than ideal relationship with someone who was as ill-prepared to become a parent. I wasn’t equipped, emotionally and otherwise, either. I wasn’t ready. I just wasn’t.”

Once Marta began trying to get pregnant and couldn’t, she eventually wondered if something about her was defective. Just like Celeste, she felt like a failure.

• • •

Attributing a miscarriage—and any response to it—to a personal character flaw or individual choice, rather than the basic comingling of chromosomes during fertilization and the profoundly unique ways in which we emotionally digest the happenings of our bodies, keeps us suspended in the past. In the absence of forgiveness and grace, understanding and ownership, self-blame and self-hatred are left to fester, causing far too many of us to relive these experiences and our responses to them over and over