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

came to my office when she was freshly pregnant, at seven weeks along. She reported a recent rise in anxiety—steadily increasing ever since she peed on a pregnancy test and those parallel lines appeared. I asked if there was a history of mental health issues in her family, and she shared that her maternal side is dotted with depression, anxiety, and an aunt who was recently diagnosed with bipolar I. Keiko had struggled with anxiety symptoms since her twenties, manifesting in a variety of ways socially: in intimate relationships and in her career trajectory. This was also Keiko’s first pregnancy.

Throughout her life, Keiko had been apprehensive about becoming a mother. She spoke of her fears of being “overbearing,” “underloving,” “perfectionistic,” and “hypercritical” in motherhood, and hence, wasn’t sure she wanted to enter the maternal arena at all. She didn’t expect she’d have an easy go of getting pregnant once she decided she was open to it. So when she became pregnant quickly, she found herself all the more inundated by worry about how she’d fare as a mother. During our time together, we traversed childhood issues, examined familial bonds, and unpacked relationship concerns. We explored her equivocations—their roots—and what she imagined the maternal role might entail. We were making progress.

When Keiko went in for a routine visit at the start of her second trimester, there was no heartbeat. Her devastation was far-reaching and she soon found herself engulfed by previously unexperienced levels of anxiety. Cloaked in a cocoon of sadness, Keiko upped her sessions with me. We began meeting twice a week.

Keiko focused on her physicality. “There’s so much confusion going on in my body,” she shared. “I mean, about my body. Well, both, I guess …”

Understandably, Keiko found it hard to pinpoint the words to capture this particular grief. This full-body shift. This one-day-pregnant, the-next-day-not transition. This instant transition from pregnant to not pregnant without the grueling-yet-often-rewarding hours of labor, and a newborn, to show for it.

“Yes, there is so much change going on in the body during pregnancy and when it’s lost. Tell me more about yours,” I said, hoping to encourage further exploration.

“I see changes I don’t want to see. I feel changes I don’t want to feel. How can I miss a baby I didn’t even know and barely thought I wanted?”

As Keiko’s size morphed from being on the precipice of robust to a postpregnancy state, she scrambled to maintain a semblance of the past. Her guilt had internalized, folding in on itself with reckless abandon, and in an effort to maintain what she thought made her a “good woman,” she yearned to appear pregnant, even though she no longer was.

“I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve been trying to keep the weight on. I’ve been eating my feelings. I’ve eaten nothing but carbs since the D&C. In search of comfort, I guess, and maybe to help pad the anxiety. I want to hold on to that puffy belly. I want to keep it close. I don’t want to see it go,” she shared.

“You want to be pregnant still,” I said, with great understanding.

“I really, really do! I ask my boyfriend to rub my belly every night, still. I find it soothing. It makes me feel like something is still growing in there, like he’s nurturing it.”

In our next session, Keiko shared body-image concerns she’d navigated in her teenage years and how pregnancy—and the loss of it—stirred these visceral memories. She thought she’d “made peace with the past” but found that her miscarriage reignited ancient, loaded feelings, setting off even more anxiety.

“I grew up being compared to my sisters,” Keiko shared. “I was usually the one who came up short. I wasn’t as pretty, or as good in school, or as comfortable in my skin. Or at least that’s what my mother always used to say. The thing is: being pregnant made me feel so beautiful and womanly, so purposeful. The change in my shape made me feel more confident. It’s weird because I didn’t even think I wanted to be pregnant, but now I realize how much I took to it. I’d look in the mirror and feel proud—things were changing, and it was all me.”

• • •

She’s right, of course. It was all her. The blossoming. And then the receding. It’s all us. Keiko’s point eloquently underscores why it can be so challenging to accept that we are fully at our bodies’ mercy during pregnancy and its subsequent loss.

At twenty-seven-weeks pregnant, Hannah, an Instagram community member, messaged me after I put out a call on the @IHadaMiscarriage account saying that I’d like to talk to people about their feelings toward their bodies following pregnancy loss for an article I was writing. (I occasionally put out calls like this when I am working on a piece.) She had received news that her baby had a rare congenital condition. Her baby wouldn’t make it to full term. After seeking advice from specialist after specialist, she settled on termination.

Her body had bloomed while pregnant—and still now, no longer pregnant, comments rushed in about its shape and size, including a coworker who carelessly asked when her baby was due. Salt in wounds. We want to still be pregnant, but we’re not. So how do we make sense of and live on in our nonpregnant bodies, bodies that may still feel or continue to look pregnant?

Hannah reflected on her body in the wake of her termination. “Now I just feel like I look gross,” she shared, defeated. “This now-empty body—with nothing to show for it, except for these newly etched-in stretch marks, a misshapen, deflating baby bump, and dripping boobs—has got to be some sort of cruel joke. And the fact that everyone thinks I’m pregnant. And the fact that I should be. I hate my body for this. It’s all so twisted, my whole situation. All of it.”

“It really is one of the worst feelings,” I wrote back. Because I empathized. “To be in a body that expanded