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

he’d say. He assured me that when we did, things would be different. But I had a tough time believing in visions of some hopeful future that lay on the horizon. The concept of having another baby was no consolation at all, really. This was apples and oranges. The conception of another baby would in no way erase the trauma of how things unfolded, and what was more, this loss was mire I had to wade through before I could even begin again.

One night about a month after the loss, after Liev had long since gone to sleep, I pulled out some ice cream from the freezer and expressed my concern and disappointment over our emotional distance, and over the way in which Jason seemed largely unfazed by what was surely the most devastatingly formative experience of our marriage, much less our lives.

“I’ve felt so alone,” I told him, crying. “I wish we’d been in this together more. Have you even been sad about this?” I asked, sounding at once desperate and frustrated.

He was taken aback. Understandably thrown by my query, he responded indignantly. “Of course I’ve been sad! But it’s not like there’s an instruction manual for how to navigate this!” he said, clearly baffled at my gall.

He went on: “You’re making it seem like this experience didn’t happen to both of us. It’s not fair. We both lost this baby. We both lost what we hoped would be our larger family. A sibling for Liev. A joyous event.”

Relief overtook me. I was reassured to hear grief was on his mind and that he’d been considering our lives and how they’d changed. It’s not that I wanted my husband to be in emotional pain—to feel what I had been feeling. I would not wish that on anyone. But I wanted—needed—to feel as if this pregnancy and the subsequent, traumatic loss of it mattered to him as it mattered to me. I needed to know that it was as real for him as it was for me. I needed to know that my grief was valid, and could be touched and felt by someone else.

“Thank you for letting me in,” I sighed with gratitude. “I’ve wondered where you’ve been. I have missed you. Us. I just wasn’t sure how you’ve been feeling, since you haven’t been talking much about it.”

His point was wholly valid. He was right; I’d had an impossible time trying to grasp an understanding of his experience, because he so rarely shared it with me. I couldn’t read his mind, nor could he read mine; and the ways in which our respective pain had manifested itself had quickly turned us into virtual strangers.

“I want to know how you feel,” I reiterated. All the hours that I’d spent in mourning and anxiety manifested themselves in the tears that began rolling heavily down my cheeks. It might sound curious, but what a breath of fresh air this was, to be going deeper together.

The rest of that night unfolded in a long-overdue, free-flowing discussion of Jason’s feelings, his experience, his perspective, and his grief. “I am sad. I’ve been sad. Somehow I feel hopeful, though. I feel like this won’t happen again; that the next pregnancy will go smoothly.”

Lucky you, I was tempted to say, but resisted. My resentment threatened to take hold again as I considered what a place of privilege a sentiment like that came from. He wouldn’t have to be the pregnant one. He didn’t have the blood-stained underwear, the tingling nipples, the altered waistline. He didn’t live in the body that expelled the pregnancy; didn’t feel abandoned by it, confused by it, tormented by it. He trusted things would be okay based on hope and fantasy, not facts or peering into a crystal ball.

But I withheld; I was so tired of fighting against both him and myself, and I knew I needed to relent and give him room to process safely in my presence. So I proceeded in giving him the space to explain to me the form his grief had taken in the minutes, hours, and days after he’d flown through our front door only to find me bleeding and in shock on the toilet, a dead baby on the brown hand towel a few feet away on the turquoise-tiled counter, lovely and lost.

He’d been terrified, I learned. He’d seen me in a pool of my own blood, shaking and hemorrhaging. He’d heard my voice, uncannily focused, as I instructed him to put our baby in a bag to bring to my doctor’s office for testing. He’d watched me somehow brave the unfathomable pain during my unmedicated emergency D&C procedure. And all of it was so otherworldly, so far from anything he could’ve imagined, that retreating within himself was all he could do to keep from falling apart. He had been doing exactly as I had been: we had each subsisted on parallel tracks of pressing forward by any means necessary. I had been so focused on mine, I hadn’t realized how similar his really was.

What he saw unfold in his mind’s eye was the instantaneous unraveling of our family—his wife and baby lost (because what if I had died there in our bathroom that day?), his son motherless, and a carefully mapped-out future gone in an instant. His mind had been firing on all cylinders. “What’s happening? Why us? Not us. Not us. This can’t be real,” he’d pleaded internally. It was a panicked, desperate narrative that played steadily on repeat in his mind. He was exhausted and afraid.

In the madness of it all, I let my own devastation become deep disdain, to the point that I hadn’t seen or understood that Jason had retreated deep within himself in order to find the tools and strength he needed to process his pain and put one foot in front of the other with resolve. When Jason saw both the physical and emotional effects this miscarriage had on me, he did the only thing he could