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

shame strangulates. I’ve learned that community might be the very antidote to these insidious vestiges. I’ve also learned that magic lies in allowing ourselves to lean in to our pain. We don’t drown. We have one another to buoy us. Several years ago, for one of the installments of the #IHadaMiscarriage campaign, I gathered a diverse group of women, and one of the things I asked them to reflect on during our time together was what they pictured when they envisioned a world where we have achieved the mission, where we have finally replaced silence with storytelling. The responses should come as no surprise to anyone who has read this far: “I’d feel safe.” “I’d feel at peace.” “I’d feel inspired.” “I’d feel empowered.” “I’d feel liberated for the women ahead of us.” “It would be so freeing.” I’ve heard every iteration—the ongoingness of hope for a shifted loss landscape. It’s unequivocal. We want the reproductive-loss conversation (and lack of it) to palpably change. It’s indisputable. We want it. Millions of us. Whether it’s one story at a time, or a slew of them shared all at once—we want to see cultural change.

Through normalizing the conversation around what is in fact a frequent outcome of pregnancy, we work toward never again hearing a woman in the aftermath of miscarriage say, “I feel alone.” We know there is a way to meet heartbreak with abundant support and free-flowing dialogue, eschewing antiquated things like self-blame, guilt, and notions of body failure. If the pregnancy-loss conversation was all-encompassing and capable of holding space or nuance, and if the various expressions of grief were embraced as acceptable reactions to miscarriage and infant loss—if we, as a culture, would simply trust those who experience pregnancy to name, express, and own the many outcomes of gestation—more of us would feel empowered to give a name to our complex feelings of loss, and less of us would feel as if these losses were somehow a fault of our own.

I think of all the change I’ve seen with my own eyes, and I well up and teem with hope when I imagine what it could mean for future generations. For our families. For my daughter. And my son. And their offspring. And onward.

• • •

These perspectives would not have arrived without my would-be daughter. I didn’t know trauma firsthand, and heartbreak wasn’t something I knew intimately, until I did. Until that inauspicious day: October 11, 2012. Declared the first International Day of the Girl, this was the day I lost mine. The day when cramping morphed into full-blown labor, and then my pregnancy precipitously ended. And then she was gone.

Invariably, this hit hard. It fractured an imagined dream, and so much more than that. Nothing had prepared me for this. Nothing. Nothing had prepared me for grief’s labyrinthine complexity, its enduring nature, its serpentine permanence. Nothing. Nothing had previously educated me about the fact that grief can’t be bypassed or replaced with platitudes, “positivity,” or psalms. Grief commands attention. Grief demands time. And grief isn’t to be tamed or tampered with. It is to be traveled, investigated, lavished, even. Studied. It doesn’t give us much of a choice in the matter. It didn’t for me, at least. In fact, the enormity of my loss lingers still, sometimes. How could it not? There are particular times of year when I feel that much more beholden to my grief. Or when it beckons. Shades of light, time of day, smells that waft: all things that can transport me back to that poignant period. October, most of all, tends to yield these feelings more than any other month, as the fall light escorts me back into the mood of that momentous experience.

On the anniversary of my loss, no matter the passage of time, every year, my heart burns. It stings to the core as I sift through the unbearable details. On a cellular level, I remember. The trauma of my loss remains palpable. In fact, nearly seven years later, I can still hear the D&C machine, loud with purpose, and the violent tugs that pulled my placenta from my body. I wonder if time will eventually evaporate this scene. I’m not so sure trauma works like that. Time helps ease the piercing intensity, but I don’t necessarily believe that experiences this profound are meant to be forgotten, or that we can expect ourselves to disband grief altogether. Trauma, heartache, grief, and all the various other feelings that come along with these are, instead, integrated and remembered in no uncertain terms. We aren’t necessarily meant to “move on” from these life-altering moments in a linear way. It is in fact normative, natural, and okay—more than okay—to sit in our grief, even when it feels as sharp as the day it first touched us. We aren’t supposed to “move on,” “be positive,” or “push ahead” overnight. Perhaps there is something cathartic about feeling the pain, still—for when we don’t feel it at all, we might worry we’ve lost all connection to that pregnancy. That somehow memory has faded. Perhaps we don’t want to lose touch with this ache altogether because it is the last link to what we’ve lost.

A few months back, on my way home from work, I decided to take a detour, to swing by our first home—that window-clad house of ours tucked high in the Hollywood hills. The place we planned our destination wedding, brought Liev home from the hospital, where he took his first steps, and the place of my miscarriage. Less than a year after our loss, while I was very pregnant with Noa, we moved from the house where I lost Olive. Not because of the loss itself; simply because it was time. We had been searching for a while for a house with a flat yard and a one-level communal living space. This—our first nest—is the place where so much changed in an instant. The creation of life and its demise. And where I hemorrhaged after