More readers join the intimate thread:
I had two miscarriages before we tried IVF. The first one occurred on the same day I got a positive on the home pregnancy test. Both were physically quite painful and emotionally draining. My third miscarriage was my daughter’s twin. They were IVF babies, so I was being monitored via ultrasound through the first trimester. I lost the twin around nine weeks. I saw on them both during the ultrasound, my daughter blinking brightly and the sibling a dark silent mass.
I remember exactly the due dates of what would have been my first and second child’s births, and I am very aware that had they lived, I would not have had my awesome mini-me daughter. Every year on her birthday, I remember that there should be two cakes for two children. But now, as then, I am supposed to simply be grateful for her alone. I could have lost them both after all. Count your blessings and all of that.
I haven’t told my daughter she had a twin. Perhaps when she is older. I have mixed feelings about sharing this grief with her. Why should she grieve for someone who was never more than a possibility? Of course that begs the question – why do I?
Another reader:
This thread has meant a lot to me. I will not tell you another miscarriage story, but I would like to share something that might help your readers. After my first miscarriage, what helped me most was giving my lost baby a name. It didn’t occur to me until a week after I was in the hospital to do so, but it made such a difference in my recovery. I did the same with my second miscarriage. Although I am politically pro-choice, I am also an observant Catholic and I think of myself as having five children (two in Heaven). Just that decision to acknowledge what I had lost as real, a person to be named, made the pain easier to bear.
Another:
My first child – a daughter, Lola – was stillborn on Christmas Day, 2008. It was completely unexpected. We went to the hospital as scheduled, planning to bring home our healthy child. Instead, we brought home a box containing a photograph of a dead baby and a pamphlet about grief.
It sent me down a spiral of rage and despair. The tiniest little setback was debilitating for a while. I’d fly into a rage at not being able to find my keys in the morning. Many nights I’d wind up on the floor in my closet, exhausted at having spent the night shouting in anger and frustration because we hadn’t cooked the rice properly or something equally trivial. I hope that it’s the hardest thing I’ll ever have to go through.
All of it – her death, my rage, the sadness that utterly consumed us for a while – was something I was totally unprepared for. The masculine side of grief wasn’t something we understood at all and it took us several years to get past it. We have a beautiful two-year-old boy now who is like a healing balm. We’re just scarred now, no longer wounded.
I want to let your readers know about HAND, an amazing organization that helped us. They are nothing short of amazing, providing space and counseling for us to heal. Imagine what it would be like to “hold grief support group meetings for parents who have experienced the death of their baby through miscarriage, stillbirth, interruption of a wanted pregnancy after prenatal diagnosis, or death in the first year of life,” week in and week out. Friends and family often can’t really understand what you’re going through after something like that happens to you, and groups like this can provide space to come to terms with grief and despair. I’m an atheist, but I know that Chris Lehr, who runs the program, is a saint.
Thanks for shining light on this dark place.
Another:
I know you must have been slammed with responses to your miscarriage thread. I’m so glad it came up. I want to respond with my own experience to the woman who commented on the insensitive comments that people make when they find out about a miscarriage. She said, “For a time I felt like the tainted one. Friends who were getting pregnant for the first time didn’t want me around because I was living proof of what can go wrong.” For me, it wasn’t about taint at all. I still wanted to share with my friend, and give her as much support as I could. For me, it was about feeling guilty at accidentally making someone’s grief worse simply by being in the same room.
A friend and I got pregnant around the same time, myself a month ahead. It was a complete surprise to her. She could not have been happier. She announced her pregnancy well before she was even eight weeks along, absolutely glowing – much happier than I was, since I had aggressive morning sickness that didn’t seem to touch her. She gushed to me about how our babies would bond us closer together.
You can guess the rest.
She lost hers at 10 weeks and was absolutely devastated. I did my best to say I was sorry, and to continue communicating with her, but I can’t describe to you the look on her face the first time she saw me after her miscarriage, with my pregnancy clearly showing. Our other friends there were clearly a comfort to her. I was not. I felt like my pregnancy – the visibility of it, the reality of it – were a knife in her. It clearly upset her greatly, and just as clearly she was trying not to let it, or at least not to let it show. I tried to avoid platitudes, tried to pick up the tone she seemed to want while her grief was still fresh, as I would for any grieving friend – but it seemed to me that the best thing I could do was to step back and not act as a reminder every time she saw me.
I don’t blame her for her reaction. She was trying to be happy for me while dealing with massive grief. My sister-in-law’s reaction (having gone through several miscarriages herself) was nearly identical when I told my brother I was pregnant – happy for me, but sad, with an immediate new emotional distancing from me. I don’t know what the answers are – if there was even anything I could have done better to make it easier. Grief is always tricky, since everyone experiences it differently. But what exactly can be said to a grieving family, except, “I’m sorry”?
Another:
I’m not sure that my miscarriage story fits the thread because although I certainly empathize with all the people who have written, my miscarriage experience was a little different. My husband and I had been trying for two and a half years to get pregnant. We tried most everything and finally discovered that he had a problem. The doctor prescribed some medication for him and a couple of months later, I thought I was pregnant.
We had no time to take it in because all of a sudden, I miscarried. My husband took me off to the emergency room and the young resident was so nice. When I started to cry, he reassured me that just because I had had one miscarriage, the odds of having another were no different – if I remember correctly, 1 in 15 or so. I smiled through my tears and said, “I’m not crying because I miscarried. I’m crying because I know now that I can get pregnant!” He looked a little surprised but smiled back and took me off to have a DNC.
Two months later I got pregnant with our first child, a daughter whom we both celebrated and are so pleased that she is in our life. She was followed by our son, who after a few trials and tribulations, we feel exactly the same way about. There are times when I wonder what that other child would have been like, but would I trade either of my children for that unknown one? Absolutely not.
The Dish 