I Had a Miscarriage

by Jessica Zucker

  I thought I was okay, but I wasn’t.

  Still, I kept moving.

  • • •

  “I’m concerned, Jess. I really feel like you should give yourself more time,” my sister said lovingly but determinedly upon hearing that I was planning to return to work just four days after my miscarriage. Her concern was clear as we spoke on the phone that evening. She knew what I couldn’t seem to surmise on my own: it wasn’t yet time. Of course, it wasn’t. But I was not convinced.

  “I feel like I can handle it,” I pushed back gently, in the hopes I might sway her. “Also, I can’t just leave my patients in a lurch. I don’t want them to worry about me, after all. Sitting around isn’t helping ease this pain either.”

  If I sat in silence for too long, I could still hear the sound of my own piercing scream as it reverberated off the glass walls of our house. I needed a raison d’être, a purpose, or basically anything that would pull me out of my own poignancy. And I needed it badly.

  “It’ll have only been four days.” She repeated herself. “Four days! Your loss happened Thursday; you can’t just return to your office on Monday. You can’t. It makes no sense. Your patients will understand, and it’s best for you and for them that you take a few more days to recover.”

  She was right. I knew she was. I just hadn’t given myself the space to really think through not only my options but the potential ramifications of whatever I decided. It was clear that I wasn’t considering my own needs, my recovery, my drained body and mind. And I appreciated her compassionate attention to this very important detail of my life postmiscarriage. What a loving act this was, to care for me when I clearly wasn’t able to do so for myself. So while I dreaded sitting in my grief, and navigating whatever that would inevitably look like, I was forced, through my sister’s grace, to slow down.

  “I hear you,” I replied, both scared and relieved that my sister stuck to her guns and saw the light when I couldn’t. “I’ll email my patients now and explain that I’ll return to the office next Monday instead of this coming Monday. And thank you, sis. Thank you for guiding me here.”

  Agreeing to slow down did not mean I would stop moving entirely though, and my sister’s concern could not convince me that I didn’t have to remain in a perpetual state of motion. Spending time alone in my head replaying the dreaded details of that day seemed untenable, cruel, even. If I kept moving, maybe the trauma wouldn’t catch up to me and swallow me whole.

  I didn’t see it then, and it took me a number of years to properly identify that I had failed to give myself what I needed most in the moments following my pregnancy loss: the space to fall apart. Despite my professional poise, this painstaking grief was unraveling me, slowly but surely, and no amount of driving power to push forward could keep me from eventually crumbling.

  Looking back, I realize my attempts to press on were an effort to reinhabit my pre-loss life, as it were. I wanted order, predictability, and peace—the antithesis of the psychological chaos my miscarriage yielded. And in my mind, I could find it all again safely inside my office. Getting back to my patients and those meaningful sessions with them felt like exactly the balm and the rich interaction I’d been craving. I wanted to dive back in—to sit with my patients, and to foster some semblance of regularity. On some level, I probably knew that in the grander scheme, taking only a week and a few days to recover from the physical and emotional trauma of what had occurred was nowhere near enough time, but I needed to reengage—to dive back into my purpose-driven work. This is an act of self-preservation, I told myself. This is the work of rebuilding.

  But when I returned to work, it became increasingly clear just how affected I was and how ineffectual my attempts at outrunning my grief had been. Before I returned to sitting in my therapy chair, it didn’t seem concerning to me that my work was inextricably linked to this type of trauma, that the kinds of exercises I had to put my mind through in my office would offer no escape from what was already echoing inside it. Only the week before, I had been able to sit and listen, as my job called for, without having any thoughts about myself. But in a race to sidestep the emotional aftermath of my pregnancy loss, I had sprinted toward a space where loss, grief, trauma, mourning, and the complex ways in which we process it all were discussed at length. I could no longer keep thoughts of my own life siloed from what my patients discussed with me. I had been exposed to the anguish and experiences of my patients’ journeys through very similar traumas. Once again, there was no going back.

  • • •

  I will not soon forget the first session I had upon my return to work; sitting across from Kate,* a thirtysomething patient I’d been seeing for several years. It just so happened that our meeting coincided with her first trip back to my office in months; our sessions had been on intermission, as she’d recently given birth to her third child.

  We sat together in my office, aglow in the fall light, and remarked to each other how nice it was to be together again. As the session began, I felt present, measured. Sitting across from her felt familiar and warm, and I was thankful to be back in my seat and once again facilitate vulnerable moments with people brave enough to reveal buried aspects of themselves. I also welcomed the opportunity to continue concentrating on something other than my own grief. I was focused on Kate, and wholly glad to be.

  “How have you been?” I asked.

  “Um …” Her voice wavered as she stammered through her answer. Judging by her body language, I could tell that she was struggling. “I’ve been okay, I guess. Well, sort of.” She trailed off, then changed her answer: “Sometimes, actually … no, I haven’t. I don’t know.” Tears welled up in her eyes and started falling down her rosy cheeks. “I’m sorry …” she whispered. “I didn’t want to start crying so quickly. My hormones are all over the place, and I just don’t feel like myself these days. I feel pretty low, confused, even.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear this,” I said reassuringly. “This is such a tender time. Such a big transition. Another big, life-changing transition.”

  As soon as those words escaped my lips, I heard them—I mean actually heard them. They knocked the wind out of me. Or rather, I knocked the wind out of myself.

  As Kate wept and spoke about those complicated feelings that can inevitably accompany the fourth trimester after a newborn enters the world, I worked to remain present and calm. Beneath the surface, though, I noticed the pace of my breath shift ever so slightly. I also noticed a warmth overtake my weary body. Not a comforting warmth though, more like a here-come-the-cold-sweats-post-body-heat-up from my postpartum hormones, but with no baby to show for them. Feelings resembling—though not quite manifesting as—an anxiety attack. Because there, across from me, sat a woman in exactly the position I’d thought I was working toward: deep in postpartum adjustments, new baby, full breasts, hair pulled up as an afterthought into a messy top knot. Her hands were full in a psychological sense, and her arms were full in a literal one. Three children.

  Her. But not me.

  Somehow, I made it to the end of my workday, although I couldn’t say how I managed given the complexities that surfaced in my mind, time and time again. And when I finally climbed into my car and closed the door, all I had been running from finally caught up to me. It took over my body, seared my insides, and then poured out of me with reckless abandon. I tossed my purse onto the passenger seat, slumped forward, and held my bereft face in my hands. I cried great, heaving sobs until I exhausted myself of all emotion. My tears fell from my eyes like rain. I longed to go back in time, to undo this grand loss, to return to the before-loss me. Now, there was only post-loss me to familiarize myself with, and I didn’t want to know her at all. I knew it wasn’t possible to go back and live whatever life I was headed toward, before the blood and the bathroom. But I also knew there was so much I didn’t know about what was to come, what I’d have to soldier through in the months to follow, or how this unknown would change me in ways both big and small. Loss divided time into �
�before” and “after,” and I felt suspended between them both.

  With nowhere to go—no way to move forward or backward—I sank into an unnerving sense of vulnerability. Why me? I thought. Why me? But then again, I challenged myself, why not me? I knew the statistics of pregnancy loss, just as I knew the complexities of grief and reproductive trauma. I had studied them in depth. I had incorporated them into my daily life. I had dedicated my career to them. How could I have allowed myself to be so surprised by an outcome I had spent countless hours assisting others in traversing?

  At some point along the way, I must have compartmentalized my professional life and my personal life, putting them neatly in two distinct places in my head. The result, it seemed, was that it never quite dawned on me how swiftly and deftly they could become tangled up with each other. This was a level of vulnerability and raw exposure that I’d never imagined. My heart had been pried open, and I was swelling with emotion so profoundly it hurt.

  Retrospect can be such an astute teacher. I’ve learned this the hard way (as if there’s any other way to learn this). In the initial days and weeks that followed my miscarriage, I think it was primarily adrenaline that powered me through. Must survive. Must continue. Must do. But then, when I finally grasped just how eviscerated I really was, I couldn’t dodge the eventual downfall. This was only the beginning.

  • • •

  A couple of weeks after my miscarriage, I ventured out to my usual place in Hollywood to get a pedicure. I had been confined to my office and my home, and I was just trying to do something that felt familiar. Prosaic. Normal. I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to it, but it seemed like a smart step to take. Self-care, I figured, was a good thing to add to the to-do list, especially at a time like this. I thought I’d do something mindless and comforting and be okay. After all, it was just a twelve-minute drive from home down the winding hill of Laurel Canyon to Sunset Boulevard. When I arrived at the upbeat nail salon, predominantly filled with older women, I was greeted by Joanna, a heavyset Romanian woman who has been painting my toes since before my pregnancy with Liev. We had shared much with one another during those years, and whether we were swapping prideful parenting milestones or commiserating in frustration about Los Angeles traffic, I was always happy to see her. “What’s the matter?” she queried lovingly. “You look sad.” Apprehensively, I shared my news. Tears reflexively began to roll down my freckled cheeks as I spit out truncated pieces of the atrocious experience I barely survived. I didn’t want to overwhelm her with all the gory details, or gross her out by telling her about the stream of blood or the baby in a plastic bag or the sickening feeling, housed permanently in my bones, of the placenta being yanked out during the unmedicated D&C procedure. But I felt comforted by her and comfortable sharing the gist of my story with her. We held eye contact as her tears welled up in astonishment. An empathic droplet fell from her squinty blue eye as we held hands in solidarity. She’d lost a pregnancy, too, she explained. Decades prior to my own. I hadn’t known about her miscarriage until I shared mine, but why would I have? We’re conditioned to not share these stories. We’ve become accustomed to living parallel to one another, oblivious of the pain we’re all trying to overcome.

  As we held on to each other, I couldn’t help but worry that I had inadvertently wounded her in some way with my proverbial reproductive war story. Or perhaps triggered her own tough memories unexpectedly. But I couldn’t hold on to this thought long. It vanished as quickly as it had seared my mind’s eye. In a split second, I lost my steadiness. I felt awash in confusion, suddenly unsure of how I had even gotten there. Another one of trauma’s unforeseeable effects: briefly succumbing to overwhelmingly intense emotions, promptly followed by full-body exhaustion and a disengagement so severe you can practically disassociate. Taken over by bodily sensitivity and what feels like an emotional storm, you realize that trauma is a depleting game of mind-body pinball.

  I called my husband from the spa chair, disoriented. I was buzzing with an uncanny sense of fear. What is going on? This became my unwanted mantra. Almost all I could think, on repeat: What is going on? “Please come! Jay, I need you to sit here with me,” I pleaded. “I don’t know how I got here. I’m not sure if I can get myself home.” By the time he arrived, I was trembling with head-to-toe chills, despite having my feet submerged in the warm, soapy water Joanna had prepared for me. As the anxiety continued to carve ruthless paths inside my body, I felt miles away from the water, the chair, Joanna, and myself.

  Jason’s mere presence shifted my energy almost immediately, but I needed his words too. Words of reassurance, and maybe even a wild guess as to why I was feeling so disoriented and foreign in my own body. Not that he would actually be able to pinpoint the reason why—how could he?—but his sheer attempt at wondering aloud with me about the why now? brought me calm. This exchange—of words and tenderness—eventually ushered me back to the present. To the chair. To the water. To Joanna. To my life.

  • • •

  Disassociation became my norm. I was an active participant and a bystander in my life, at various moments, and without so much as a warning.

  Places that I used to go without a second thought became triggers—I couldn’t stand to be in the supermarket, or the dry cleaner’s. Doing the regular day-to-day things we all do suddenly heightened my anxiety, and my eventual awareness of it, alerting me to just how altered I was—how off I actually felt. Mundane errands I’d done my entire adult life became disquieting. This unstructured time—when I wasn’t at work or with my family—allowed newfound anxiousness room to pierce, prod, and flirt without abandon. Time off—what most consider to be freedom, what my well-intentioned sister assumed would be beneficial—just created unlimited space for disquietude. These moments offered blank spaces for my mind, which slowly filled to the brim with excessive uneasiness. I felt incapable of deviating from my routine at all in those initial weeks. It was so vulnerable—so exposed—to be outside the plan.

  I began to avoid errands altogether, but not every area of my life could be put on hold. I had to pull over to fill my tank with gas on occasion, for example, but these instances of necessity were not without a fair bit of bargaining. Maybe I can wait to fill up the car until tomorrow, I thought more than once. Maybe I can make it home and back to work again before the red light comes on. One more day without an errand, please! Just one more day. Jason and I had pretty much always shared the load of household chores, but in the aftermath of my loss he took over the stuff outside of the house: food shopping, dry cleaning, pharmacy runs, child pickup and drop-off. My cortisol levels needed a respite, it seemed. Home and work were all I could manage.

  • • •

  Therapy was a natural place for me to turn. I had been seeing my own therapist, Valerie, for just over a decade, and she’d seen me through so much in the time we’d known each other—graduate studies, career pursuits, relationships, my marriage to Jason, and Liev’s birth—so turning to her now was instinctual. The day after my miscarriage, I left Valerie a message. I called her reflexively, without thinking, almost the way one would call their mother after a seismic life event: “Valerie, it’s Jessica Zucker. Please call me back as soon as possible. I had a miscarriage. The baby fell out while I was home alone. I’d like to schedule a time to connect as soon as you can. Thank you.”

  Click.

  Numb.

  Valerie is the one who absorbed all the pieces.

  • • •

  I had known Valerie since moving to Boston in my late twenties, when I was working at the Harvard School of Public Health, and during my studies of psychology and gender there as well. Back then, I wasn’t necessarily going through anything that had a pressing need for treatment per se, but I’d pretty much always welcomed therapy as a tremendously helpful and unlocking mainstay, and embraced the opportunity to benefit from it. So I had asked a relatively new friend, Aliza, whom I’d met at a yoga studio up the road from my third-floor walk-up in Cambridge, to ask her th
erapist for referrals. Aliza was smart, and I trusted that her therapist would know some quality professionals in the area. She did: she knew Valerie.

  Valerie’s office was walking distance from my old apartment, crouched over the rhododendron trees just steps from Harvard Yard. I still remember that first session: I arrived early, clutching a small cup of coffee to warm my hands. I was not yet used to the bite of Boston’s fall weather and how it differed from what I had grown accustomed to in Manhattan. Still a newbie, I was prone to holding warm things whenever I ventured out, hoping to make the nip less intimidating. Even though therapy was far from unfamiliar to me, I caught myself feeling apprehensive about this first meeting. As I flipped through the magazines in her waiting room, I couldn’t help but wonder how much I’d share in that initial fifty-minute session—where would I even begin? There’s an inevitable awkwardness to the retelling of your life story.

  But that session was deeply helpful, as were countless others that followed on a weekly basis. I credit therapy with providing the framework and the ultimate haven of safety—the place where I could lay it all out and sift through everything, piece by piece. Valerie became a source of unparalleled insight and a maternal beacon of sorts who has helped soften—dare I say relinquish—some of my festering childhood wounds. The word “gratitude” pales in comparison to how I feel about her and her important role in my life. Even though I moved from Boston to Los Angeles a handful of years after we first met in the confines of her cozy, book-lined office, where I would sit on her firm, hunter-green velvet couch in search of comfort, she seemed to understand me in a way I wouldn’t be able to replicate, so when I relocated, I continued seeing her over Skype and through phone calls. She was particularly helpful during my own studies to become a therapist myself a few years later. A therapist really needs a good therapist.