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

shape and size of her body, even more than normal. The intimacy of therapy provides a ripe opportunity to comment all the more, making it that much harder to escape these exchanges. Pregnancy asserts the therapist’s presence and shatters her privacy in a way that nothing else does. I had no road map for it—none of my colleagues had so much as mentioned that this might happen, particularly my colleagues who had never been put in a position remotely like this, where the inclusion of their personal lives was unavoidable. My baby bump represented different things to different patients: an active sex life, a certain relationship status, a desire to raise a family. People pondered these elements of my life aloud, especially as the weeks pushed on and my body morphed; it became a very central part of the therapy sessions. And as my patients often told me, it stimulated longings that stemmed from their own maternal lineages.

• • •

Upon my return to work after my maternity leave with Liev, interactions with patients who’d mentioned struggling with my baby bump seemed to resume quite effortlessly, now that the visible reminder of my pregnancy had dissipated. We revisited their expressed feelings and made sure to sensitively acknowledge the transition that occurred in my personal life, which invariably affected my work life. But the newly established rhythm of working three full days and spending the others with my son felt mostly effortless.

So there was no reason for me to think my ability to merge my personal and professional life would in any way be altered by another pregnancy. I figured, I’ve done this once before, surely I can do this again. In fact, the ease of my pregnancy with Liev and my ability to navigate the subsequent “work-life balance” factored heavily in my decision to have another child. I could do this. Of course, there was no way for me to know that I would only be pregnant for four short, albeit physically uncomfortable, months. I had no idea that at the very moment when it would become physically obvious to my patients that I was pregnant, that pregnancy would cease to exist.

I emailed my patients to inform them that I’d lost the pregnancy and rescheduled their sessions. In writing, I assured them I was okay and that I looked forward to seeing them the following week. But when I returned, I was inundated by questions. I answered almost always in concise yet honest detail. I didn’t want to incite fright; I also didn’t want to be dishonest. “So you mean you went to your regular checkup at sixteen weeks and there was no heartbeat?” I felt compelled to reply candidly, “No, that’s not how it happened. The baby actually fell out while I was at home. The day before, the heartbeat was there and everything looked fine.”

I wondered how the change in my physical and mental presence would be experienced by my patients. Penelope, for one, chose not to return to therapy for a while. She said that my second-trimester miscarriage was a real-life manifestation of her “biggest nightmare.” “If a later pregnancy loss happened to you,” she explained, “it means it could happen to me.”

Processing this particular type of trauma was not something I had learned about en route to completing my doctorate. Even the textbooks that I’d read about pregnancy complications—the medical ones, the psychological ones—never mentioned the therapist—her pregnancy—or how to address within the therapeutic dyad her obvious loss of a pregnancy. I would have to learn this as I went along.

I speculated that my miscarriage might potentially strengthen some of my patient interactions, because I now understood their grief from a corporeal, and not simply a theoretical, perspective. But I also recognized that my miscarriage might accentuate my vulnerability in ways that could hinder the therapeutic process. Would my patients be inhibited from freely discussing what might now, in the face of my fresh pain, seem like mundane details of their daily lives? I feared that they might want to protect me, comfort me, run from me, or shield themselves from my anguish, if only to fortify themselves against their own.

And they did. I felt uncomfortably center stage. Though I continued on in my empathy, I was invariably bogged down by my life, my loss, my all-too-pervasive grief. Some of my patients were forthcoming about the fears my loss provoked: “I had never really considered you as someone that bad things could happen to.” “What if you had died? Then what of me?” Another common refrain: “If you’re grieving, how will there be space for my grief here too? How can you support me if you are presumably in need of support yourself?” I needed time and space to deliberate each question, valid in its own way. We addressed their concerns each time they arose. Like grief, their newfound articulated fears of my humanness—their therapist’s vulnerability—deserved keen attention and the inevitable softening of time.

In juxtaposition, other patients picked up where they left off in their previous sessions, resuming reflection on their own lives, seemingly unscathed by my sudden absence from the office and lack of a bulging belly. The truth is, though, I will never really know if they (consciously or even unconsciously) inhibited themselves for my sake. Personally, I felt zero judgment as they shared their struggles, of course, and was relieved to focus on someone other than myself as my body and mind reconfigured without a baby. But it was impossible for me not to contemplate the very real possibility that they were caught up in worrying about me, and perhaps to the detriment of their own therapeutic process. I invited them to share anything on their minds, most especially questions or concerns about my abrupt and recent change in pregnancy status, and in the end I have to trust my patients in the same way they trust me—I must err on the side of credence. I will likely never know what went on (if