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

the first time I had been besieged by one of my mother’s off-handed comments. This interaction, however, marked a turning point. For years, I made excuses for these kinds of exchanges. But this time, I expected—I needed—more. I couldn’t unknow the decades of mother-daughter disappointment, just like I couldn’t unknow the devastation of seeing my dead baby dangling from me.

I called back. She refused to speak to me. With my anxiety spiking, I persisted. I called again. Finally and reluctantly, she listened.

“Of course I still look pregnant, Mom! I wish I were still pregnant. How can you not see the cruelty in what you said?”

• • •

The truth about that conversation is that it revealed many things. It wasn’t just about my complicated relationship with my mother. It was a reflection of something more pervasive. In my many years of working with patients who had lost pregnancies, I understood on an intellectual level that our society wasn’t equipped to deal with this topic, even among mothers and their daughters. But it wasn’t until I was confronted with my own loss, and my own mother’s inability to find the right words, that I felt the sting of our cultural inadequacies.

Months later, my mother and I revisited what happened between us. What I came to learn was that my mother had not known anyone who had miscarried—or, put more accurately, because of the silence around miscarriage, she wasn’t aware that she knew anyone.

She hadn’t been confronted with having to find the “right” words until now. Though her comment was unfathomable, it opened my eyes to a larger cultural issue: our lack of conversation surrounding miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant loss.

I was left to wonder if my mother—and others who have floundered in the face of this kind of trauma—would know what to say if we refused the current state of silence. I am not minimizing my mother’s transgressions. Instead, I am calling for a cultural framework that aims to normalize, destigmatize, and provide tools for mothers and daughters (and others) to empathize more wholly.

I wish my mother had supported me differently after my miscarriage. My hope is that by attending to our cultural patterns of communication with regard to pregnancy loss, we will all have access to more loving, less fraught interchanges.

7

“The body and failure become conflated. It’s a complicated coupling.”

Our bodies prepare for parenthood during pregnancy. Milk ducts swell. Bellies expand. The uterus rises. Muscles stretch. If that pregnancy is then lost, the next course of action is decided by the body, and the body alone. Depending on where we were in pregnancy, our bodies might take some time to fully comprehend and adjust to the nature of the loss. Milk arrives for a baby that did not. Hormones plunge us into the depths of the postpartum experience without an infant to serve as a breath of fresh air.

In my case, I don’t know what I thought would come of my tender breasts, which had become swollen over the sixteen weeks of my pregnancy, but it shocked me to find them engorged with milk following my miscarriage. How is the body to know when “liquid gold” no longer has purpose—that it can’t one day sustain the little being that no longer inhabits the womb? Our bodies don’t know, until they know.

The unexpected sensation began as I was on a drive just two days after my miscarriage. I peeked under my shirt and into my bra as I felt my nipples abuzz. What is going on? I thought to myself. Why are my breasts hard as rocks? My breasts began to leak—milk streamed down my now-softening belly. There was no hungry newborn to receive it. No need for a pump to collect it. No point in lamenting its waste—who it was meant for was gone. Another unforeseeable layer of grief. Another reminder of what was and then what wasn’t.

Of course, no one else saw me in that moment alone in my car. What the world around me saw instead was another choice my body made of its own volition: to rapidly shrink back to its prepregnancy state. Other people saw a woman who was, as Sara had pointed out, back in her prepregnancy pants just a few days later. I’ll admit, I was genuinely troubled by how fast my prepartum body returned. It seemed not only odd but cruel—as if my body was trying to erase a pregnancy my mind hadn’t yet let go of, even after my body had.

I suppose other people at the very least found my body’s return to “normal” noteworthy as well—as it happened, Sara was not the only one who commented on my size. “You don’t even look like you were pregnant,” they’d say. And what they perceived was true. I didn’t. But I still wanted to be. I assume these people thought they were saying something … nice? As if acknowledging my body had already rid itself of the physical evidence of a pregnancy that did not last would aid my mind in purging itself of its memory too. But their words hardly registered as a compliment. What people didn’t see was how this speedy size change of mine added yet another dimension to my grief. Having been pregnant for four months and so suddenly having no outward evidence of that time seemed to erase for others the excruciating pain I was in. But I wanted proof. At the very least, I needed proof.

I wanted to look pregnant. I wanted to be pregnant.

• • •

Sometimes women want to maintain their newfound pregnancy shape so much so that they mourn each and every crevice as it morphs into something else. They want to be pregnant still—to hold on to the form that housed a life for however long—and maintaining the size of a pregnant body becomes part of both the longing for a pregnancy that was lost and a vital part of the grieving process too. Shape change, another complex element of the bereavement process, can be poignant.

Keiko