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

block—which I perennially used as an excuse—was breastfeeding. I half joked that Noa might’ve wanted to nurse until heading off to college—that’s how much she enjoyed that bonding time. I didn’t want to stop. I loved our time snuggled up together like that too. Noa had been eating solids for a long time—she was in no way reliant on my milk for sustenance—but I knew that if I were physically near, she’d inevitably yearn for the breast. For comfort and closeness. And I’m sure I would’ve wanted that, too. I thought that push/pull might rev up my anxiety all the more. Although SSRIs and breastfeeding can safely happen in tandem, considering this option became yet another source of anxiety for me. My chorus of what-if what-if what-if played on loop about this too. About traces of medication she’d possibly be exposed to, about what this could mean for her health, about my role in it all. It felt too delicate and too difficult to decide.

Finally, sick and tired of gritting my teeth to get through it, I asked friends how they’d gone about this transition (since Liev weaned on his own at sixteen months), and promptly took their suggestion to step out for a couple of days to change up the pattern. I booked a hotel room and, after twenty months on the breast, I weaned her over my birthday. It worked. Not without its associated feelings, of course, but it did work. And it was then—when my breastfeeding days were up—that I started an SSRI, with the hope of puncturing the what-if cycle once and for all. It took time, but it happened. The softening of my senses and my perceptions of them was palpable, and like Claudia, I felt much more like myself again.

Anxiety has the capacity to temporarily steal joy. It can wrangle the mind—baiting it to singularly focus on negative possibilities, whether true or false. In so doing, anxiety surreptitiously stomps out a spectrum of other feelings that actually exist simultaneously. A tough way to mother, it was quite a relief to have nuance back and to reconnect with ease and calm once more.

• • •

Opal came to see me after learning she would not be able to carry a baby. She’d been diagnosed with a unicornuate uterus—a type of congenital uterine abnormality. She found this out the hard way. She was twenty-four weeks along in her first pregnancy when her baby’s heart stopped beating. After several doctors’ appointments and an eventual X-ray, it was clear she wouldn’t be able to safely proceed in getting pregnant again. As if grieving the loss of her son wasn’t difficult enough, now she was faced with a whole different kind of grief entirely: the loss of future pregnancies. “You’d think losing my son would make me exempt from additional heartache, but no, now I’ve been slapped with this other horrific piece of information about my body that means grieving pregnancy and the chance to give birth altogether. Loss piled on loss. It’s all just too much. I can’t win. It’s so unfair.”

I’ve heard similar thought processes numerous times over the years: the notion that a major hardship should somehow prevent future ones. I could relate, as I felt a variation of this way, too, after my loss and into the next pregnancy with Noa. There’s no way I can endure more. Lightning does not strike twice. It just can’t. But it can. And sometimes it actually does. And it’s quite clear that no one is keeping score on the severity of trauma or the amount of it that each individual can endure.

“I used to think God had a plan, but how could all of this be part of my plan? Or his plan for me? What could I have done to deserve this?” Opal wondered, simultaneously enraged and defeated. Sometimes religion and spirituality seem to anchor people as they attempt to make sense of their tragic losses—providing a belief system amid the chaos, a sense of connection and community, or a linear pathway for thinking about life and death. But what happens when the betrayal of one’s body, as in the case with Opal, feels so incongruous with these long-held beliefs, or upends a lifetime of thinking that things were one way, then they turn out to be something else completely?

Opal has been dead set on being a mother ever since she was little. She talked about her childhood with fond memories, filled with daydreams about mothering in her eventual adulthood. As a kid, she practiced. When she played with dolls, she almost always appointed herself as the mother among them. And within her family of origin, Opal had taken to mothering her younger siblings ever since she was old enough to change diapers. When she grew older, Opal was a conscientious student and relished a fruitful career, but she shared with me that motherhood was the role she wanted more than any other. Several months after her stillbirth and the subsequent news about the shape of her uterus and its implications, she and her partner began researching surrogacy. An option previously not on her radar—not in her wheelhouse. She didn’t come to this easily, as she sorted through conflicting feelings—based on her faith—about creating embryos she may have to destroy. “I feel like I’d be playing God and that just isn’t right. It goes against my beliefs. What if we get loads of healthy embryos and we only use two? Then what?” she said as she reckoned with next steps.

She proceeded with the injections, supplements, acupuncture, and two rounds of IVF. From these, she got five healthy embryos. She’d envisioned having three children, and this remains a thorn in her side: having to—at some point—decide what to do with the extras. Opal’s grief hovered over her through this period of her life, as she desperately missed the son she didn’t get a chance to mother. But she tried to convert this energy into hope during the “two-week wait.”