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

alone her wife. “She’s not very articulate emotionally sometimes,” she told me. “It makes me not want to talk about the losses at all. I hate hearing her spout clichés. It’s infuriating.”

And so in lies one particular cycle that can come about as couples navigate grief: One partner shuts down and then shuts the other out, or vice versa. The rift invariably grows. And each might feel misunderstood or alone, even in the presence of the other.

Other times, however, it is the partner who instigates conversations about loss, and pines to connect in grief. This is the case with Maeve, an Instagram connection I made some years ago—after her first of two stillbirths and a miscarriage. I’ve talked to Maeve occasionally, through the highs and lows in her marriage. Initially plunging headfirst into the depths of despair after her first stillbirth, Maeve just as soon popped out of it. She wanted nothing to do with the topic, and told her husband as much.

“Talking about grief isn’t helping it go away. I just don’t want to talk about it anymore, but it seems it’s all he ever wants to do,” she shared with me. Maeve wanted to “go back to the life they had before” and shuddered whenever her husband spoke of their babies, gone. Though she remains sad, her hushed mourning process feels more comfortable to her than speaking aloud about all of the emotions that arise on any given day. “I honor my babies in my own way. Quietly,” she wrote, and expressed a hope that her husband would do the same. “There’s a part of me that just wants to pretend like none of this ever happened. I’m tired of being tired. I’m tired of talking.” Fed up with grief, Maeve longed for respite. A hiatus from it all. Yet another prevailing feeling I hear about throughout my days: a desire for grief’s reprieve.

For Raven, the grief of her pregnancy losses hearkens back to the untimely death of her mother. Her mom died suddenly just after Raven’s twenty-first birthday, and the pain of this significant loss remains palpable, resurfacing most poignantly upon receiving the news of her missed miscarriage. Raven shared with me about her complicated ectopic pregnancy and her missed miscarriage over direct message on Instagram, when I was working on a piece about relationships. She and her boyfriend met soon after her mother’s death, and his not having known her mother seems to compound the pain of each successive pregnancy loss.

Raven described her relationship with her boyfriend as loving and effusive. They talked openly about their respective fears, which her pregnancy losses had cemented. She worried, though, that if these pregnancy losses continued and they couldn’t have a baby together, somehow the relationship wouldn’t last. She hid this worry from him, and told me that this is the first time she’s ever not been direct with him about issues in the relationship. Raven’s careening feelings took her out of the present and into her head more often than not.

“I don’t blame myself but I also do, and I wonder if he does too. He says we’re in this for the long haul, but what if these losses undo us?” Raven said. “What if the love fades? I want him to be with someone who can have children. If I can’t, I feel like I don’t deserve him.”

There are myriad ways grief affects couples, and we see here some universal themes as well as some very specific examples of how loss impacts coupledom, communication, identity, and interpersonal connection. Because loss stirs a range of individual as well as collective feelings—perhaps born of childhood experiences or much more recent events—and because there exists no reference book for navigating loss, we are left to break ground on our own. Together.

• • •

Instead of shutting down, I revved up: I became angry. It wasn’t fair or justified, but I was confounded. I was torn apart, and I was equal parts jealous and frustrated that Jason seemed to be so coolly surviving a loss that had nearly snuffed me out altogether, both in body and in mind. And truthfully, my temporary vitriol felt like a welcome reprieve from the heartache that had taken center stage since my miscarriage. Whereas that deep sadness wore me down, my rage served to bolster me with supposed strength and a focused resolve.

I look back now and see quite clearly that my anger was actually a weapon of hope in the midst of what felt like a hopeless experience. The fuel that propelled me forward was only available in an active emotion like anger, and nowhere else in those fraught days following our loss. I was scared to crumble—to let the vulnerability consume me—and to be soft through it all, so I clutched onto anger, which in retrospect served as a wedge. Unproductive though it was, I was doing my best.

At hints of my glaring disappointment, Jason would work to allay the hostility radiating off of me. “We’re in this together,” he would say. But unfortunately, these utterances didn’t penetrate. After all, were we really? I couldn’t find evidence of that companionship and connection that had up until this time existed effortlessly between us. His breasts weren’t swelling with milk, seemingly taunting him. He wasn’t constantly changing blood-soaked pads: a visceral reminder of what my body had previously shed. He wasn’t watching his body erase the physical evidence of a pregnancy that ended far too soon.

It didn’t feel like we were “in this together” in those early days. Instead, I found myself wondering whether or not he was even capable of meeting me in the depths at all, since it hadn’t physically happened to him. I wondered whether he was opting out of taking that deep dive in an attempt at self-preservation. Either way, it was painful. I envied that he seemed to have the choice at all.

• • •

Jason tried assuaging my fear by telling me we’d make it through this. “We’ll have another baby,”