*Some names have been changed, to protect the privacy of those from whom I did not ask permission. If you see your story presented here, and would rather your name be affixed within, let me know, and I will make the necessary changes.
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know that miscarriages exist.
I’m sure there was a time. I probably learned of it in a book, or from a tv show, or from some conversation that probably went over my head at the time. This must have happened when I was very young, and I’m sure I had a lot of questions then, but by the time I was making lots of long-term memories, I already knew. I knew that some pregnancies didn’t make it all the way, but the chances of that were very small. I mean, there are so many people around me, so many people in the world! Obviously, their own gestation went all the way, or they wouldn’t be here.
I do remember the first time miscarriage was real. I was probably 17, maybe 16. I worked for a small law firm, filing documents and occasionally vacuuming and watering the plants. The lawyer’s wife was the secretary. (I meant it when I said it was small.) They brought their two adorable sons in to the office frequently. I know so many things about that family. I know what Nathan felt like (so warm, so dense, so mildly confused) in October when he woke up from his nap, and I carried him to the neighbors who were in charge, before their second was even born. I know that Will didn’t want to take a bottle, so Kelli couldn’t leave him at the daycare with Nathan, so he was at the office a lot in those early months. He finally took a bottle, and Kelli was relieved. I saw Kelli and Shane’s great patience first-hand as I struggled again and again to make the copy machine work properly. I carried things for Shane when his gout was too painful to walk around. I remember once even getting them coffee or something from a new shop across the street. And I remember finding out that they were expecting their third child, and being very excited, because I knew just how great of parents they were going to be. I remember seeing drawings that Nathan made, stick-figure drawings with “Patricia”, a tiny, sideways stick baby “inside mommy’s tummy”, which was a large crayon circle. They weren’t going to name her that, of course, that was just what Nathan called her. And I remember when my parents got the phone call, and asked me to sit down. I didn’t, being a teenager and thinking “I won’t be one of those weak people in movies whose legs cease to function when given bad news.”
When they told Nathan, he apparently laid his head on Kelli’s stomach and said “But I really wanted a baby sister.” That broke my heart. Patricia was buried in the regular cemetery, after a small funeral.
While I was in college, in 2013 (though I’d swear it was earlier), I saw a blog post from a girl I’d known in high school, taken a few classes with, been in DI with. We were “facebook friends”, but I didn’t talk to her very much at all. I knew she had gotten married, and had one really cute kid. But this blog post told a tragic story, of two miscarriages back-to-back, of deep grief, of isolation, of friendship, and of hope. I felt sad for a few minutes, maybe as much as a day, but by the time a week had passed by, I had moved on. It was sad, yes, but I didn’t really know Russia anymore, I certainly didn’t know her husband, and it seemed like she was okay, was handling things well. I read this blog post again this last September, and I wish I’d reached out, and offered support.
The third one, I didn’t know about until months after it happened. Yemen had gotten married in secret, started Trying in secret, and hadn’t even had the chance to tell her husband (who was in the military) about the baby. She told a couple friends, and I wasn’t one of them. But she and I didn’t talk much in those days, and the friends she told are really good at keeping secrets. Yemen got pregnant again, and I changed friend-groups, and joined the one she was a big part of. I learned of her secrets, and saw that she didn’t talk about them much. Yemen is a wonderfully peculiar person, and I don’t know if I’ll ever understand her. I learned about her first pregnancy on its due date, when she was abnormally moody and quiet, and our common friend told me the story later. At the time, I was sad for her, but in a really abstract way. It was in the past, and she was pregnant again, and this pregnancy was out of the risky time, so everything was probably okay.
I got engaged that year, and learned of miscarriage number 4: my mother-in-law, Panama, in her last pregnancy, actually had four fertilized eggs. Only one made it, and the others never grew past being a small white dot. They named all 3 of them, and buried them in the yard. That was over fifteen years ago, and nobody seemed to talk about it anymore, and I was really new to this family, so I put it away with all the other things we don’t talk about.
Then I graduated, got married, and learned of miscarriage data point number 5: my sister-in-law Haiti had been Trying with her husband since they got married a few years earlier, and had not yet succeeded, a rare thing in the very large family I had joined. As far as I know, they had had one miscarriage, and hadn’t gotten pregnant again, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. Haiti lived out-of-town, and so I hardly saw her, and it was easy to forget about her loss, just like all the others so far.
At some point early in my marriage, one of the ladies in our church, Romania, had a miscarriage in her second pregnancy. I don’t remember much about it, just that it occurred, and that a few months later she was again pregnant, and this pregnancy eventually yielded an infant. They had announced the pregnancy, if I remember correctly, and the church grieved. But most of it fell out of my head, as the complications with their current pregnancy (and later, baby) overshadowed anything prior.
Then it was my birthday, in May, and I’d asked the coordinator of my party (!) to invite my new best friend at church, Minnesota, and her wonderful family. They came, and I sat on the couch talking with my friends, marveling at how good a life I have, how somebody actually threw me a birthday party (a thing that never happened in college, despite the promises of my friends), and I hear Minnesota say something. Her first pregnancy was a miscarriage. It was in passing, not really part of the topic, but relevant enough to say, and then move on. I do the math: their oldest is maybe 7, so this would have been around 8 years ago. I make a mental note of it, as I’m doing with all tidbits of information about the people I know. I see Minnesota every Sunday, and I cannot forget, though she doesn’t speak of it often; when she does, it’s calmly, and matter-of-factly. I can see how she is a very strong woman, and I am glad that I’ve decided to be friends with her.
In mid-late June, my husband and I have been married a year, and are almost finished buying a house. We’d been house-hunting since February, and been in negotiations for this house since March. We’ve decided that we’d be ready for a baby in 9 months. I feel behind schedule. A friend from college got married a week before we did, and they already have an adorable baby; another friend from college got married half a year after us, and she had just announced her pregnancy. Serbia, a friend from church, had had her fourth baby half a year ago, and another is pregnant with her first, and Minnesota is pregnant with her sixth. Three of my sisters-in-law have had babies this year, and another (who got married less than a month after we did) is already pregnant. We had decided to wait until after we had a house, but the closing date has been determined, and that’s in 2 days, so we can go ahead and start now. So we do. We decided that we weren’t actually trying, just not not-trying, accepting the risk, and happily.
I wasn’t thinking about those seven miscarriage data points, spread out over six years (by when I found out) or sixteen (by when they happened). I was thinking about the five babies and four pregnancies I’d known just in the past six months. Miscarriages don’t really happen often. The risk is very low. I mean, look at these odds! Obviously, most pregnancies make it all the way.
I began to treat myself like I was pregnant. I abstained from alcohol (not like I drank it anyway, but now it was intentional). I had started taking prenatal vitamins a couple weeks earlier, to give the not-yet-existent baby the best chance. A few days in, we’d bought the house and were packing things up. Toby had taken these few weeks off work, to enable moving to be easy, casual, and slow. We loaded the attic and garage into two vans the Saturday after we closed, and moved it over. We packed all our other things over the course of the next five days, and moved it all over ourselves. I began to feel increasingly ‘pregnant’, as if I could feel the little life inside of me growing, reaching out, existing. The next Saturday, we loaded our big furniture into a van and a pickup, and we were finally done moving, and we lived at the new house. Two days later, Monday, we were no longer tenants of our old house, and were brand new homeowners. We imagined giving tours, and reaching the last bedroom on the second floor: “And this will be the kid’s room, in March” and seeing the happy reactions slowly spread across their faces. We said things like “after 3 kids, we’ll have to build an addition” as if a “kid” was a measurement of time, because why wouldn’t it be? It was going to be great. And in less than a year, I’d have a little baby to distract me from dishes, dusting, and laundry.
It was ten days after my estimated ovulation, the second Saturday of moving, the day after the last night that we were going to sleep in our old house, and when I woke up I noticed a little bit of blood in my underwear. I had been doing a lot of reading the last ten days, and implantation was supposed to occur 10-12 days (nearly a week before the expected period) after ovulation, if the egg was fertilized, and you could expect a little blood. This was it! I called Toby to the bathroom, to show him, grinning. We’d done it, on the first try! This was fantastic! I refrained from telling everybody who was helping us move, but I couldn’t resist texting my mom. Her first grandchild! I said “I think I might be pregnant, maybe”, so that way, if I was wrong, it wouldn’t be to much of a let-down. But I wasn’t wrong, that much I knew. I was ecstatic. If it was a boy, then we’d already named him, but I tried to not think of the baby as a “he,” because we obviously didn’t know yet, and it’d be perfectly alright if it was a girl, but he’ll be a boy, but don’t count on it.
But the bleeding didn’t stop. Saturday afternoon I did a lot more reading, and found that sometimes the bleeding is a bit longer, but as long as it doesn’t last more than 3 days, things could still be okay. I resolved to panic Monday, and to stay calm until then. Things were going to be fine. They’re always fine. They have to be fine.
Saturday night, I was still scared. I didn’t want to sleep, and Toby stayed up with me for a while. It was Sunday by the time we decided to actually try to sleep, and I went to the bathroom one last time.
And there it was. A little red glob of uterine lining (“baby food” as I affectionately call it during the period), and in it a small white dot. A small white dot. My small white dot.
I shoved the offending piece of toilet paper in the toilet, and flushed, and immediately wished I hadn’t. But I couldn’t look at it, couldn’t believe, couldn’t understand. It was the reality of the day’s intense fears. It was the thing that was never supposed to happen, not to me. It was the erasing of so much potential, of everything I wanted, of my hopes and dreams from the past 10 days.
I cried. Toby cried. And I couldn’t stand. Toby had to help me get back to the bed. I was one of those people whose legs cease to function when they get bad news. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to exist anymore. I didn’t want this, no, this was not what I wanted at all. I was very glad that Toby already had this next week off of work.
We learned that, actually, 50% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, most of them in the first 12 weeks.
We went to the library, sat on the hill behind it, looked at the pretty trees, and looked up baby names on the internet. We picked a gender-neutral one.
We learned that what happened is called a “chemical pregnancy”, which to me makes it sound like there wasn’t life, only chemicals, so I don’t like to call it that. I like to call it “Neriah”, or when that’s too difficult, “June 27”.
We told my parents and brother, and Toby’s mom, and asked them not to tell anybody else. We didn’t want to have to tell very many people about the miscarriage, if we hadn’t told them about the pregnancy; it seemed like a lot of effort, just to inform somebody of a death of a person they never knew existed.
We wrote the name on cardstock, and buried it in the backyard. I wondered why it hurt so much to lose someone I’d never met, something that could never even be confirmed by a medical test.
I thought of Minnesota. Minnesota, my new friend, who had had a miscarriage in her first pregnancy. I needed to tell her; she could tell me what to do to fix it. The next week at church, 8 days since, I tried to get alone with Minnesota to talk to her. There wasn’t a good opportunity to speak the hardest words I’d ever known, so I waited. The week after, an opportunity arose as I found myself alone with her. I cried, she cried, she hugged me, and while she couldn’t fix it, she gave me encouragement in direct opposition to all the fears she didn’t know I’d been wrestling. Yes, the baby was real. Yes, you’re a mother. Yes, it definitely counts. Yes, life will go on.
I learned that her first baby is named Zambia, and that Zambia was a blessing, because Minnesota and Japan had been told that conceiving was impossible, before they even got married. I’m trying to see Neriah as a blessing. But I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have Minnesota, a beacon of real hope in the seemingly eternal darkness that is losing a child.
I learned of two other people that had miscarriages, ones that I never knew about because I wasn’t in the family yet, one of which is Serbia, another of our good church friends. I didn’t know, because we don’t talk about these things, especially when they happened a while ago. When I met Serbia, she had three kids, one of which was born after her miscarriage.
We got care packages from my parents, and they texted and called and facebook-messaged all the next month to see if we were okay. Toby’s mom asked whenever I saw her (which was once a month) how I was doing, and when I indicated I was doing poorly, promised to come visit. But the status checks stopped, and the visit never came. We saw my parents in August, and my dad called afterwards to ask why I had been melancholy. I told him “June 27”, and he said “I thought so,” but I knew. I had been forgotten, just like all the others I had forgotten.
I’d been forgotten because we don’t talk about these things. When I’m chasing after two little kids, a stranger will ask me how many I have, and I won’t say “three”. Our new neighbors have each asked us if we have any kids, and we don’t tell them the full truth. My sister-in-law France and her daughter often ask me when I’m going to have kids, why I’m not pregnant yet, why I don’t keep the baby stuff that was given to me to sell at my garage sale. She doesn’t know, and I haven’t told her. It was a little annoying before June 27, but after, it was painful. I wanted to tell her, but I knew she’d feel bad then about bringing it up, and that would certainly not be my intent. So I laughed a little and shrugged, and she will probably ask me again, and I probably still won’t tell her.
At the end of August, Serbia asked if I was going to my sister-in-law Egypt’s baby shower, and I didn’t want to go. But I said that I did. I wasn’t on the “invited” list, so I hoped that maybe I’d be able to cancel, but Serbia had called the host and gotten me added. I went, and only cried once, and then only a little. I was sitting too close to the gifts; the sharp dichotomy between the gifts and pastel blues and streamers and congratulatory messages, and the intense grief I was still feeling, was too much. I changed seats, and felt slightly better, but then Egypt sat near me anyway, so the presents were still very close. I felt very alone, there, celebrating the very type of thing I had lost not quite two months prior. But I didn’t say anything, because it wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have, and it wasn’t the time. It felt like it would be seen as attention-seeking, to bring it up randomly, that long after the fact. I learned that one of the other mothers there had lost a baby after it was born, and I wondered how she lived. I definitely couldn’t bring up Neriah now; my loss seemed miniscule compared to hers. I hadn’t gone through nine months of hard pregnancy, just 10 days. I hadn’t had to go through labor, just heavy bleeding. I had it pretty easy, by comparison. How dare I grieve for my child, when somebody else had a bigger loss? But also, should my loss be seen as any less than somebody else’s? We both lost a child, hers was just a lot older. But anyway, it’s complicated, and I still don’t have all the answers.
Strangers will likely never know. My parents’ friends will probably never know. I haven’t told any of my friends from school, as much as I would like them to know, just because I don’t want to have to have the I-was-pregnant-but-now-I’m-not conversation five times. On tax forms, we can’t declare our first, because as far as the law is concerned, he doesn’t exist. There is no birth certificate, no death certificate, no obituary, record of his existence. But Neriah existed for 10 days, 10 glorious days, and I’ll see our child again, one day. And I want people to know about Neriah. I want people to know that miscarriages happen, more frequently than anybody says. I want people to be able to talk about miscarriages in general, their own miscarriages, and mine. I want people to understand the bitter-sweet fear that will be my next pregnancy. I want people to know that while I desperately want to hold their infant child, it will always be a little difficult, but I promise not to cry.
I couldn’t feel happy for weeks. And when I finally did, just a little, it felt like betrayal, like I was cheapening Neriah by being happy ever again. Seeing all the pregnant women at church physically hurt me, and there was one Sunday I skipped, because I just couldn’t handle the prospect of seeing them, all together, having the thing I didn’t. I was insanely jealous of the two people I knew who had recently gotten pregnant by accident. We’d walk by the baby section in Wal-Mart, and I’d have to look away. I was caught in a conundrum, wanting to hold all of the babies I knew, but being in physical pain whenever I saw one. I cried when my next period came, and reminded me of what it looked and felt like. I cried on the day that I’d be entering the second trimester. I’ll cry on March 10, and I’ll probably cry next June 17 and 27.
But now, three months later, the pain has lessened. I can enjoy being excited for the coming babies in church. I was so excited when Egypt and Minnesota were going into labor, just one day apart. I can hold my newest nephews Brazil and Quebec, and I’m fine. I can watch my extended-niece Estonia in church, and not get caught in the fantasy of what might have been. I can be genuinely happy. I can walk by the baby clothes in Wal-Mart, and not feel like I’ve been robbed. I can talk about the miscarriage without bursting uncontrollably into tears. Though sometimes late at night, and when writing this, I do still cry.
Kelli has two sons and two daughters.<br> Russia has a son and a daughter.<br> Yemen has a beautiful daughter.<br> Panama has 13 grown-up kids, and 17 grandkids, and 1 on the way, because<br> Haiti recently announced her pregnancy.<br> Romania has two daughters.<br> Minnesota has six very well-behaved children.<br> Serbia has three daughters and one son.
Combined, they have at least eleven other children, children that we’ll never meet on Earth.
And I have Neriah.
Addendum:
I wrote the above article on September 18, but delayed in publishing it. I had planned to use this post to announce a positive pregnancy test, a nice, convenient, rounded happy ending to my story. Then, just as I was getting okay, just as I became comfortable enough to go public, just as the pain had grown more dull and less frequent, when I began to have hope, in a flash of blood and tears and doubt, September echoed June.
Once again, I’m thrust into the world where things I enjoyed are made painful, things I looked at with joy are now bitter; but this time, I can remember when that pain had slowly morphed into anticipation, and the bitterness had given way to hope. If it’s at all possible, the second time hurts even more. All the positivity and acceptance and optimism of last week seems impossible to regain. My world has been shattered yet again, and this time I don’t know if it can ever be glued back together.
But still, I won’t shy away from my original plan to make all this public. Not for sympathy, not for condolences, not to make you sad, but to start a conversation. We need to talk about these things. We need to be able to talk about these things.