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

to her crib at home. Bereft, my mother-in-law shuffled through the subsequent months in a fog.

A year to the day of the birth of her daughter, she gave birth to twin boys. My husband was one of them. My wonderful Jason. I am married to a rainbow baby.

• • •

I wonder how many people are rainbow babies and don’t know it. Pregnancy loss is a quiet epidemic—a circumstance that too many sequester. Since research has given birth order so much weight, I think it would be fascinating to widen the scope to include rainbow babies and the losses that came before. To investigate the impact previous losses have on the way we survive the subsequent pregnancy (if there is one) and make our way into parenthood. Are these children then treated differently than they might have been had their parents not undergone such a profound disappointment, resulting in pain and fear?

• • •

Claudia was thirty-eight weeks along, awaiting the arrival of her rainbow baby, when we began talking about the fact that she hadn’t bonded with the baby in utero. Too scared to fall in love with the idea of actually raising this child, she held back. “What if she doesn’t actually make it?” she said on countless occasions. “I’ve got to protect myself from the potential pain of losing this baby too. I just don’t want to get too attached. Too close.”

I hear about similar declarations daily in my work, as women make their way toward parenthood with understandable trepidation. There are times when the fear looms so large it gets in the way of the mothers connecting with their babies. Their hopes are shy—tentative even—but typically exist nonetheless. The fear of loving and losing once more feels untenable. Claudia is a single mother by choice and became pregnant through insemination. Her previous pregnancy abruptly ended at the tail end of the first trimester: a missed miscarriage. She’d fallen hard for being pregnant, having always wanted to be a mother. To make matters more complex, Claudia desperately wanted to raise a son. Her heart was set on it, as she imagined raising a feminist boy who’d be a kind and fierce leader in the world, helping to change concepts of stereotypical and toxic masculinity in subtle but important ways. This was her vision for a boy; a boy who didn’t make it. Her loss was indeed a boy. Conflicted by feeling letdown upon learning her subsequent pregnancy was a girl, Claudia felt guilt burrow in, furthering the difficulty in bonding with her developing baby.

I’ve heard from many women about post-loss next-pregnancy “sex disappointment.” This is yet another aspect of loss that seems to be shrouded in silence—shame, even—because the response women typically receive when they share their disappointment is something along the lines of “you should just be happy this pregnancy is healthy” and “at least you were able to get pregnant again quickly.” We should be grateful. We should keep things into perspective. After all, things could be worse.

These dismissive statements often yield isolation and self-doubt, anger, guilt, or confusion. It’s common to, when and if we find out the sex of a fetus, to imagine raising that boy or girl: fantasies that often rely on outdated gender stereotypes and the lingering gender binary, sure, but can serve as a bonding exercise nonetheless. We see what we hope to one day experience, and in doing so feel closer to the life growing inside of us.

If one has fantasized about raising a son, like Claudia had, for example, is one not allowed to experience sadness at no longer having the chance for that imagined future to come to fruition? Shouldn’t parents be allowed to have and express their mixed emotions about this sensitive and deeply personal aspect of pregnancy and infant loss, and life after? Shouldn’t anyone who has experienced a loss be given the space, and grace, to continue to mourn a future that was only given a chance to exist in their mind?

Claudia was met with bewildering responses when she dared to share her sadness and anxiety around having a daughter. What’s worse is that some of these comments not only judged her disappointment in the baby’s sex, but also skimmed the surface of her fear around being pregnant after her loss. She’d try to talk with loved ones about her reticence of bonding in case this pregnancy were to go away, and with no exception, she would be met with flowery, oversimplifying platitudes. Statements that completely missed the point and even served to minimize her fraught experience of pregnancy. “But it’ll be different this time. Just be grateful.” A statement that landed with a crass thump each and every time. And so, Claudia quieted her manifold, legitimate feelings, which quickly led her to feel ashamed of them. Anger scaffolded and led to an isolation previously unknown. “I feel like some of these people also judge the fact that I’m choosing to have a baby on my own. My family is very supportive, but it’s been shocking that some of my friends think it’s an out-there idea.”

These same friends inadvertently misspoke after her loss as well—promising a concept that’s actually faulty and unfounded: “You’ll be okay, there’s always a rainbow after a storm!” Is there, though? We all know this is not an unequivocal truism. Born of hope, this sentiment is simply not something one can ensure and therefore, we do better to shy away from blanket statements like these that don’t always hold up. Perhaps people rely on these untruths in order to help themselves feel better amid the unknowns. In most instances, these declarations of certainty steeped in platitudes are well-meaning and the unavoidable outcome of people simply not knowing what to say in the lingering aftermath of loss. As a culture, we’re woefully ill-equipped to handle even the concept of death, let alone discuss it outright or linger in the myriad ways in which it shapes us. So, in the absence of understanding, people