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

and a newborn (me) on the reservation, about a mile down the road from the clinic on Route 66.

Life events and pursuits ultimately led to differing yearnings for my parents. I would not be surprised if the strain of these circumstances contributed to the end of their marriage. They met at a party a handful of years before my older sister was born in Jerusalem in 1965 and married two years later—just a few weeks before my dad started medical school—and I think it’s safe to say they grew apart as they each grew up. Our family moved to Los Angeles while my father undertook his residency at UCLA. By the time I was four years old my parents had split up, and my sister and I lived with our mother, seeing our father on weekends and Wednesdays. I have no concrete memory of my parents being married. I have no memory of their divorce.

My most vivid memories during my early childhood were the stretches of time between my father’s visits. I remember Carly Simon and James Taylor blaring on the turntable in the living room, their gorgeous, plaintive voices wafting across the house while I anxiously waited for my dad to come get me.

• • •

My father was the person I turned to when tweenhood commenced. When the time came, we discussed growing pains, breasts, pubic hair, menstruation, and fledgling boy crushes. I’m sure my girlhood ease in discussing such intimate things with my father was partly because he is a physician, but it was also because he took me seriously. He was matter-of-fact about the big questions of each successive milestone. He normalized these maturational seismic shifts just by being himself, and in doing so, validated my ability to be myself. His quick wit and deep, smiling eyes inspired certitude and steadiness, even while talking about ephemeral things like bras and girl gossip and tampons.

On the one-year anniversary of my miscarriage, my father’s was the voice I wanted to hear. I sobbed on the phone, replaying the details to him as my very pregnant belly jiggled with new life. He wept, too, as we reflected on my pain and he described what it was like to hear his “baby” go through this traumatic loss. He said he admired my courage to enter pregnancy again and provided me with a resting place to lay my grief.

Two months later, my father came straightaway to see me in the hospital after Noa was born on a drizzling night in mid-December. Watching him hold his brand-new granddaughter while he retold the story of my birth felt like something out of a movie. He recounted that long-ago night: how he and my mother had zoomed like the speed of light in their beige Volkswagen bus from the Laguna-Acoma Reservation to Presbyterian Hospital in Southeast Albuquerque. My dad likes to half-jokingly throw in that he thought he might have to deliver me in the back seat of the car because my mother’s contractions were quickening and the van simply couldn’t go any faster. He talked about my mom’s unmedicated birth with me, just moments after my unmedicated birth with my daughter, and marveled at the passage of time and the awe that hangs in the balance.

• • •

“Oh my goodness, you still look pregnant!” my mother said, scanning my body up and down. It was two days after my miscarriage. I don’t know what I expected her to say, but it wasn’t that. I instantly regretted letting her visit while the trauma was still fresh.

My mother’s comment landed with a dull thud. Her words felt like a critique, an admonishment. Why was she talking about my appearance?

The comment burrowed in me the same way my conversation with Sara did—this culturally mandated bad habit women have of reducing one another to our bodies’ shapes and sizes, then calculating our worth based on these measurements. It rarely, if ever, makes us feel good, so why do we do it? Why do we persist in commenting on women’s bodies—be they pregnant, unpregnant, post–pregnancy loss, or post–pregnancy with baby? Why do we cling to this cultural obsession with women’s bodies in times of duress, as if the size of our jeans can somehow mitigate the grief of a loss or smooth over the edges of trauma?

• • •

Was the obsession with my size my mother’s way of deflecting the reality of the situation? Was she trying to distance herself from the suffering that was radiating off me in waves? It all just felt so … inadequate. I was overcome by disappointment and surprise, feelings I experienced in a multitude of ways in the aftermath of my miscarriage. An unwillingness or inability to confront the pain of what had happened. I felt it from loved ones and even some colleagues. But from my mother? Mothers are people we hope—dare I say expect—will love us wholly, protect us, know how to comfort us, and rush toward their children in moments of crisis, not avert their eyes or talk about body shape. Not rely on harmful messaging as a way to, inadequately, see us through trauma.

I didn’t respond immediately, but the unintentional cruelty of my mother’s comment sat with me all day. Unable to set it aside, I called her that evening hours after she’d left my house.

“What you said today really hurt my feelings,” I blurted out when she answered. “Commenting on my body days after a miscarriage is completely inappropriate. I just lost a baby. At home, alone! I saw a dead baby! My dead baby.”

My rational self knew that my words would probably be met with an impenetrable wall of bricks. But I was not in a rational state.

She was on the defensive immediately. “Oh, you are so sensitive, Jessica! I just never know how to get things right with you.”

She hung up.

With the angry click of the phone, and the sound of nothing but a dull dial tone, my grief swelled. I burst into tears. This wasn’t