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

“ours.” And then we didn’t. I wanted to climb into his arms and sob for hours—days, even—to nestle in and breathe together, but instead I found myself adrift, feeling like Jason was elsewhere—there but not there.

Between loved ones, I felt such a confounding sense of isolation. A feeling so searing, no one should know it. A feeling that should be rendered obsolete.

Jason, for his part, meant well, of course; I sensed his attentiveness, and I could see the concern in his soft, blue eyes as he intentionally focused on me for the first time all morning. I knew he wanted to help, but I was too lost in myself to help him help me. I didn’t have it to give. Perhaps some semblance of tenderness or vulnerability on my part could’ve bridged the unforeseeable growing gap between us, but my evolving resentment and head-to-toe exhaustion shut me down. Like a clam, I slowly folded into myself.

A part of me wanted to school him on the myriad ways I’d been irreparably transformed—to plead with him about the fact that there was absolutely nothing he could do that would make any of this better. Not yet, anyway. Didn’t he feel this? He’d lost a baby, too, after all. And, like me, he had seen the tiny body. So why did he appear so composed and unaffected? It was all I could do to keep from bawling. It scared me to feel this alone alongside him. Engulfed by my fresh trauma, fear hovered here and there, seemingly everywhere. Alone I wasn’t, but alone I felt.

Against my better judgment, I started to see my husband as one of the many oblivious strangers walking around me as I bled into towels and held the remains of my baby in a bag. I was living out a nightmare in real time, while my husband seemed to simply live. He traipsed off to work like the people who bustled around me as I described my miscarriage to my sister. He had the capacity to revel in distraction and find solace in the creativity facilitated by his job, while I was left reckoning with this seemingly pregnant, yet hollow postpartum body of mine, and no newborn to show for it. Vacant, I was, of both baby and puissance. Witnessing the disparity between our situations was unnerving, and even though I knew that comparing his suffering to mine and mine to his was useless, I didn’t make much of an effort to stop.

“You can’t fix this,” I mustered, slumped over my lukewarm coffee. “I wish you could, but this simply can’t be fixed.” I needed him to understand, but as much as I wanted to educate him on my current emotional status and attempt to find the words to express just how abhorrent I felt, I didn’t have it in me. I was angry, but even more so, I was empty. Pulverized. Without.

Finally, though, I leaned in to my overwhelming anguish and wept. My head burrowed into Jason’s comforting shoulder. His skin smelled like home, delicious and familiar and sweet. We held each other in the quiet of our kitchen.

I felt his unarticulated pain intermingling with my mounting misery as I watched him gather his belongings and head toward the door. He told me he’d text me periodically throughout the day, we said our I love yous, and then he was gone.

• • •

In those initial weeks, Jason and I processed our loss differently. Grief has that potential: to disorient and rip you from your usual place in the world, and fling you and your partner into separate and uncharted territories. There’s no playbook for individuals amid this kind of grief and there surely isn’t one for couples either. No warning. No shortcut.

I missed him profoundly. My lifetime partner, my love, my best friend.

It wasn’t as though I couldn’t see that he was sad; I knew he was hurting by the periodical downtrodden look in his eyes. His usual cheerful demeanor had dimmed, no doubt. But I was confused by—dare I say envious of—the way in which he was able to skate through the day seemingly unscathed.

I’d sit back and watch the way he easily moved from home to work and back again, how he cared for our sweet little Lievy, curious as to whether there were hints of his grief that I was missing. I wanted so badly to know how he felt; I wanted to see some tangible proof that we were traveling down this road together, but it seemed as though he was only ever skimming the surface of this earth-rattling pain. Or was he in fact drowning, but attempting to keep it together for us, for our son, for himself? For the sake of survival?

• • •

Another common thread through miscarriage’s aftermath (as though the loss itself weren’t enough): people frequently report feeling a growing emotional distance in the context of their partnership. Feeling alone in grief alongside one’s partner is another pain entirely. I hear about this often.

Recently, I connected with Simone, another woman who responded to a query on @IHadaMiscarriage after her third miscarriage. Simone explained that she and her wife, after having an in-depth discussion about how they would become parents, agreed that Simone would be the spouse to carry any future pregnancies. Her wife felt that experiencing a pregnancy would not align with how she felt about her gender, while Simone felt no such discordance. After fourteen months of trying to conceive, three miscarriages—including the loss of a twin pregnancy—and no children underfoot, Simone described a substantial rift developing between her and her partner, who “never” seemed to know the “right” thing to say. With this most recent loss, Simone and her wife didn’t even know they were expecting until Simone miscarried. “It’s so confusing. We’re not mourning the idea of having a baby, but, we are,” she told me. It was only made harder by the fact that she couldn’t find the words to describe this type of grief, let