The pain will soften
And that might feel bittersweet.
I spend a bit of time discussing pregnancy loss in this post — feel free to skip if you need. <3
Last week, I checked my calendar to schedule workout classes for the rest of the month. This is me being the best version of myself — usually, I’m signing up an hour before, after begrudgingly dragging myself off the couch — but the weekend classes fill up quickly, so planning ahead is necessary. I didn’t have anything on my calendar this Saturday other than a reminder to take my medication, but the date stuck out to me. June 20. I started to yell upstairs to my husband to ask if he knew what I was forgetting when it hit me. June 20, 2019. The day it happened.
Whether you share a personal tragedy with strangers is your decision, but I can confidently say that doing so the day after you find out about said tragedy is something I cannot recommend. I was in bed bleeding with a heating pad on my belly, rapidly responding to comments on Instagram. I wish someone had yelled PUT DOWN THE DAMN PHONE, but alas. The messages were constant — most of them comforting, some bland, a select few offensive. The platitudes we rely on when someone dies don’t hit the same after a miscarriage. There are no memories that provide comfort. You aren’t grieving a person, but a future you’ll never know.
It was too soon. I gave people too much of myself and divulged specifics that should’ve stayed between my therapist and me. I didn’t know what else to do but to talk about it, to spill all the specifics in excruciating detail. People tell me I helped fight the stigma. It’s a generous thing to say, but I wonder what I sacrificed in the process. I look back at that year with conflicted emotions. I’m proud of myself, maybe, but I’m also a bit embarrassed. I recently deleted the Instagram highlight of my experience. It all feels like too much.
I received a Facebook message from a high school acquaintance who’d experienced multiple pregnancy losses right after I posted about it. This is overwhelming right now, she said. But eventually, you’ll reach the end of a day and realize you didn’t think of the baby at all, and you might feel guilty, and that’s okay, too. I thanked her for her kindness but secretly felt incredulous, maybe even insulted, at the idea that I’d one day forget my heartache for even an hour. But here we are, seven years later, and that day feels only vaguely familiar. It’s only when I look at pictures and social media posts from that spring and summer that I am reminded of what I lost.
A relative and I had near-identical due dates; before, I wondered whether our babies would share a birthday. Seven years later, I still feel a pang when I see her kid, knowing that if life was fair, I’d have a little boy the same age. I balance thoughts of the baby I lost with my fierce love for the two children who wouldn’t be here if the original plan worked out. The first pregnancy sometimes feels like something I dreamed up, the baby more of an idea than a tangible thing. If things had turned out the way I expected, my life would be dramatically different. Worse, maybe. If I think about it for too long, I have to turn away. There’s a part of me that will probably always wonder what everything would look like if not for trisomy 18.
One particular cruelty of the whole thing is not knowing when the grief should’ve started. June 20 is the day I found out the fetus I was carrying no longer had a heartbeat, but my medical record estimates that growth stopped before — around when we celebrated my husband’s first Father’s Day, cruelly enough. I spent the days in between tracking my caffeine and ordering cooked sushi for no reason. In my memoir, I say I felt like a walking cemetery when I found out. I can’t think of a better way to word it. Those minutes spent peering at my stomach and imagining how it’d swell and ordering too-expensive gender neutral onesies were pointless. I grabbed dinner with a friend and confessed how glad I was to be nearly done with the first trimester. (I was thirteen weeks pregnant when everything unfolded.)
We impulsively booked a beach trip a few days later. I remember staring at my body in the resort mirror and feeling like I was looking at a stranger. I gained more weight than you’re supposed to while I was pregnant, which I felt vaguely insecure about but, for once, didn’t obsess over. The self-doubt nearly crushed me as I looked at myself in a swimsuit. I remember reading that moles and freckles can darken in pregnancy and methodically examining my body, hoping for a change that would say yes, something happened here. I came up empty.
For a long time, I worried I was insulting our almost baby by not being properly sad about the loss. I lived in a prison where I berated myself for not acting sad enough while also feeling like I’d overreacted to the miscarriage. We chose a name for the baby, and I shared it publicly, a decision I later regretted. I poured a glass of wine three days after the procedure and felt guilty for savoring it. I was feeling everything so deeply, and I couldn’t do it right.
When I shouted about it, it was because I craved attention. When I didn’t talk about it at all, shouldn’t I speak up to help others? When I felt like I couldn’t move on, I wondered if it’s silly to expend so much mental energy on a baby that was only the size of a lemon. And so on. I have changed a lot in the years since I approached life this way, but the old thought patterns sometimes find me.
I count myself extraordinarily lucky that this weekend will almost certainly be spent refereeing sibling disputes (who knew a one-year-old could be so opinionated?) and bemoaning the reality that my house stays clean for approximately three to five minutes before the kids wreck it again. My mind could wander to the trauma seven years prior, remembering the way I screamed when I realized there wasn’t going to be a baby. Or how I cried before the surgery to remove the product, as one doctor unhelpfully called it.
There’s a chance I’ll think about the only thing I could say the next time I saw a positive test: “I’m scared.” Maybe I’ll reflect on why it feels like I always get the short end of the stick when it comes to pregnancy and postpartum. Or I might find myself so focused on my mundane day that I don’t spend much time thinking about it at all. This grief is wild and messy and heavy, and I wish I didn’t know it so well.
I’ll never forget looking forward to ultrasound appointments and jumping in glee with friends after I told them, and I can imagine an alternate reality where everything turned out the way I expected. But I also think I’ve healed in a way I didn’t know was possible. I used to feel the anniversary in my bones, and my winter due date hung over me every December. This June 20 feels different than the others. No dread, not a ton of sadness. The pain has loosened its grip. I’ll never forget what I lived through — how could I? — but it doesn’t consume me anymore.
That’s something I never thought possible.
beautifully written!
Oh how I relate to this: “ I’ll never forget what I lived through — how could I? — but it doesn’t consume me anymore.” ❤️❤️❤️