“Are you okay?” I asked, concerned their headspace was descending.
“I don’t think so.” Taylor’s words barely made their way out of their lips. “I can’t absorb another disappointment. I need this to happen without drama.”
I understood, as I’d heard this sentiment vocalized so many times. It was then that I urged myself to gently press them to consider the possibility of this process going smoothly. For sometimes it does. So far, there was no proof it wouldn’t.
“Why do you think it might not happen? What information do we have that indicates pregnancy won’t happen the way you hope it will?” I wasn’t attempting to shift or erase their feelings, but instead expand on them. Reveal nuance. When someone’s go-to mantra is “I fail,” I gingerly work to interject other possible options and outcomes.
Taylor sat quietly, mulling things over. “I don’t know,” they eventually said, defeat rising in their voice. “My body has let me down so many times. It’s like my body and mind fail to sync up, and I want more than anything for this to be different. I deserve to have something come easily. I deserve to have an experience so many people do.”
As Taylor awaited news about the outcome of their IUI, we continued on in our discussions about their fear of “failure,” “not being good enough,” and bubbling “self-hate.” Interspersed with moments of forecasting what parenthood might look like, Taylor was pretty unequivocal about things not working out.
The following day I received a voicemail first thing in the morning. “Hi Dr. Zucker. It’s Taylor. I’m not pregnant. I knew it. I knew this wouldn’t happen easily for me. My body doesn’t work. Any chance I can come see you today?”
Click.
This disappointing outcome is a loss of another sort. The loss of potential. The loss of control. The loss of plans. This loss—the loss of what could have been—is yet another type of reproductive loss that American culture is not adept at speaking about with candor, nuance, or compassion.
I worried about the ways in which Taylor might use this opportunity to flagrantly heave harsh comments at themselves, further driving home the historical narrative that was already so firmly embedded. “My body fails”: the refrain.
Though Taylor’s exact experience is not necessarily common, their line of thinking absolutely is. After any kind of loss, or multiple losses, it’s completely understandable how one could go from seeing their body as working the way it “should” to being downright traitorous. The body and failure become conflated, and as a result, a sense of alienation ensues. It’s a complicated coupling.
But these bodies are our homes—whether we like it or not—and they are the only ones we have. I choose to believe my body works, that my miscarriage in no way was evidence that it doesn’t. In fact, my body proved it was working the way it should be by releasing what it did. My body housed my babies, including the one I did not have the chance to know. It has labored to bring children into the world, and it has weathered the storm of a sixteen-week loss. My body also went on to become a home to my rainbow baby. If we say our bodies have failed us, we leave out all the wisdom, all the health, the transformation.
Whenever I hear about feelings of bodily alienation, failure, or body-image struggles pre- and post–pregnancy loss from patients, I listen for historical information or clues from the past that might better help me understand what’s informing their current impressions. I know culture is complicit here, too, of course. And I am also keenly aware that explaining to a bereaved patient that they mustn’t hate their bodies, or breaking down the very science of conception to prove these losses are no one’s fault, is futile. Feelings aren’t facts, and so I go where they are, while holding the hope that these feelings will evolve compassionately in time and with effort. I also know that urging someone to feel positively about their body when they simply don’t can be harmful. The pressure to embody something that is not authentic—like forcing body positivity—can impede the healing process. If and when people feel like they can’t disclose negative feelings, be it about their bodies or anything else, those feelings are left to fester.
We can’t control how our bodies will respond to a pregnancy, nor can we dictate how they will react to a loss. All we can do is try to treat them with compassion.
8
“Why did it feel as though this loss had only happened to me?”
“So, what are your plans for today?” Jason asked as he haphazardly shoved a sesame bagel toppling with lox into his mouth before taking off for work.
The nonchalant way in which he spoke stung to the core; it had been all of six days since losing the pregnancy, and I couldn’t quite understand how he was able to wake up fresh-faced each day and approach the ensuing twenty-four hours with such relative ease and familiarity. As if nothing had happened. As if I hadn’t been fundamentally changed.
“Not sure. Bleeding, I guess,” I replied insipidly.
Of course, I probably had a laundry list of things I needed to get done—“plans” for my day that I have no doubt my husband would have much rather discussed than the blood still being collected between my legs. But each of those daily tasks felt more insignificant than the one before it. Grief’s disbelief hovered full-time, and that alone was enough to manage. I was visibly defeated.
“What can I do to make this better—or at least easier—for you?” Jason asked as he moved toward me, his eager words rich with care and concern.
I was grateful for this moment of recognition. Of connection.
He seemed so himself, so normal. It didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem to make sense—not to me, anyway. It certainly didn’t seem fair. There I was, entangled in this wretched grief, all my usual energy oozed from my worn and weeping body, and Jason’s demeanor was so seemingly unaffected. I desperately longed for the partner I knew Jason to be—loving, connected, there. And perhaps selfishly, I wanted him to ache as I was aching—to feel as if I was not alone in my despair but had a partner who could feel, to some extent, the physical ramifications of a pregnancy lost, of a trauma endured. I needed us, now more than ever, in these newfound depths of mourning.
So why did it feel as though this loss had only happened to me? It didn’t, of course, it happened to us. Together, we had a vision for our imagined family of four; a vision now marred. We had an “ours.” And then we didn’t. I wanted to climb into his arms and sob for hours—days, even—to nestle in and breathe together, but instead I found myself adrift, feeling like Jason was elsewhere—there but not there.
Between loved ones, I felt such a confounding sense of isolation. A feeling so searing, no one should know it. A feeling that should be rendered obsolete.
Jason, for his part, meant well, of course; I sensed his attentiveness, and I could see the concern in his soft, blue eyes as he intentionally focused on me for the first time all morning. I knew he wanted to help, but I was too lost in myself to help him help me. I didn’t have it to give. Perhaps some semblance of tenderness or vulnerability on my part could’ve bridged the unforeseeable growing gap between us, but my evolving resentment and head-to-toe exhaustion shut me down. Like a clam, I slowly folded into myself.
A part of me wanted to school him on the myriad ways I’d been irreparably transformed—to plead with him about the fact that there was absolutely nothing he could do that would make any of this better. Not yet, anyway. Didn’t he feel this? He’d lost a baby, too, after all. And, like me, he had seen the tiny body. So why did he appear so composed and unaffected? It was all I could do to keep from bawling. It scared me to feel this alone alongside him. Engulfed by my fresh trauma, fear hovered here and there, seemingly everywhere. Alone I wasn’t, but alone I felt.
Against my better judgment, I started to see my husband as one of the many oblivious strangers walking around me as I bled into towels and held the remains of my baby in a bag. I was living out a nightmare in real time, while my husband seemed to simply live. He traipsed off to work like the people who bustled around me as I describ
ed my miscarriage to my sister. He had the capacity to revel in distraction and find solace in the creativity facilitated by his job, while I was left reckoning with this seemingly pregnant, yet hollow postpartum body of mine, and no newborn to show for it. Vacant, I was, of both baby and puissance. Witnessing the disparity between our situations was unnerving, and even though I knew that comparing his suffering to mine and mine to his was useless, I didn’t make much of an effort to stop.
“You can’t fix this,” I mustered, slumped over my lukewarm coffee. “I wish you could, but this simply can’t be fixed.” I needed him to understand, but as much as I wanted to educate him on my current emotional status and attempt to find the words to express just how abhorrent I felt, I didn’t have it in me. I was angry, but even more so, I was empty. Pulverized. Without.
Finally, though, I leaned in to my overwhelming anguish and wept. My head burrowed into Jason’s comforting shoulder. His skin smelled like home, delicious and familiar and sweet. We held each other in the quiet of our kitchen.
I felt his unarticulated pain intermingling with my mounting misery as I watched him gather his belongings and head toward the door. He told me he’d text me periodically throughout the day, we said our I love yous, and then he was gone.
• • •
In those initial weeks, Jason and I processed our loss differently. Grief has that potential: to disorient and rip you from your usual place in the world, and fling you and your partner into separate and uncharted territories. There’s no playbook for individuals amid this kind of grief and there surely isn’t one for couples either. No warning. No shortcut.
I missed him profoundly. My lifetime partner, my love, my best friend.
It wasn’t as though I couldn’t see that he was sad; I knew he was hurting by the periodical downtrodden look in his eyes. His usual cheerful demeanor had dimmed, no doubt. But I was confused by—dare I say envious of—the way in which he was able to skate through the day seemingly unscathed.
I’d sit back and watch the way he easily moved from home to work and back again, how he cared for our sweet little Lievy, curious as to whether there were hints of his grief that I was missing. I wanted so badly to know how he felt; I wanted to see some tangible proof that we were traveling down this road together, but it seemed as though he was only ever skimming the surface of this earth-rattling pain. Or was he in fact drowning, but attempting to keep it together for us, for our son, for himself? For the sake of survival?
• • •
Another common thread through miscarriage’s aftermath (as though the loss itself weren’t enough): people frequently report feeling a growing emotional distance in the context of their partnership. Feeling alone in grief alongside one’s partner is another pain entirely. I hear about this often.
Recently, I connected with Simone, another woman who responded to a query on @IHadaMiscarriage after her third miscarriage. Simone explained that she and her wife, after having an in-depth discussion about how they would become parents, agreed that Simone would be the spouse to carry any future pregnancies. Her wife felt that experiencing a pregnancy would not align with how she felt about her gender, while Simone felt no such discordance. After fourteen months of trying to conceive, three miscarriages—including the loss of a twin pregnancy—and no children underfoot, Simone described a substantial rift developing between her and her partner, who “never” seemed to know the “right” thing to say. With this most recent loss, Simone and her wife didn’t even know they were expecting until Simone miscarried. “It’s so confusing. We’re not mourning the idea of having a baby, but, we are,” she told me. It was only made harder by the fact that she couldn’t find the words to describe this type of grief, let alone her wife. “She’s not very articulate emotionally sometimes,” she told me. “It makes me not want to talk about the losses at all. I hate hearing her spout clichés. It’s infuriating.”
And so in lies one particular cycle that can come about as couples navigate grief: One partner shuts down and then shuts the other out, or vice versa. The rift invariably grows. And each might feel misunderstood or alone, even in the presence of the other.
Other times, however, it is the partner who instigates conversations about loss, and pines to connect in grief. This is the case with Maeve, an Instagram connection I made some years ago—after her first of two stillbirths and a miscarriage. I’ve talked to Maeve occasionally, through the highs and lows in her marriage. Initially plunging headfirst into the depths of despair after her first stillbirth, Maeve just as soon popped out of it. She wanted nothing to do with the topic, and told her husband as much.
“Talking about grief isn’t helping it go away. I just don’t want to talk about it anymore, but it seems it’s all he ever wants to do,” she shared with me. Maeve wanted to “go back to the life they had before” and shuddered whenever her husband spoke of their babies, gone. Though she remains sad, her hushed mourning process feels more comfortable to her than speaking aloud about all of the emotions that arise on any given day. “I honor my babies in my own way. Quietly,” she wrote, and expressed a hope that her husband would do the same. “There’s a part of me that just wants to pretend like none of this ever happened. I’m tired of being tired. I’m tired of talking.” Fed up with grief, Maeve longed for respite. A hiatus from it all. Yet another prevailing feeling I hear about throughout my days: a desire for grief’s reprieve.
For Raven, the grief of her pregnancy losses hearkens back to the untimely death of her mother. Her mom died suddenly just after Raven’s twenty-first birthday, and the pain of this significant loss remains palpable, resurfacing most poignantly upon receiving the news of her missed miscarriage. Raven shared with me about her complicated ectopic pregnancy and her missed miscarriage over direct message on Instagram, when I was working on a piece about relationships. She and her boyfriend met soon after her mother’s death, and his not having known her mother seems to compound the pain of each successive pregnancy loss.
Raven described her relationship with her boyfriend as loving and effusive. They talked openly about their respective fears, which her pregnancy losses had cemented. She worried, though, that if these pregnancy losses continued and they couldn’t have a baby together, somehow the relationship wouldn’t last. She hid this worry from him, and told me that this is the first time she’s ever not been direct with him about issues in the relationship. Raven’s careening feelings took her out of the present and into her head more often than not.
“I don’t blame myself but I also do, and I wonder if he does too. He says we’re in this for the long haul, but what if these losses undo us?” Raven said. “What if the love fades? I want him to be with someone who can have children. If I can’t, I feel like I don’t deserve him.”
There are myriad ways grief affects couples, and we see here some universal themes as well as some very specific examples of how loss impacts coupledom, communication, identity, and interpersonal connection. Because loss stirs a range of individual as well as collective feelings—perhaps born of childhood experiences or much more recent events—and because there exists no reference book for navigating loss, we are left to break ground on our own. Together.
• • •
Instead of shutting down, I revved up: I became angry. It wasn’t fair or justified, but I was confounded. I was torn apart, and I was equal parts jealous and frustrated that Jason seemed to be so coolly surviving a loss that had nearly snuffed me out altogether, both in body and in mind. And truthfully, my temporary vitriol felt like a welcome reprieve from the heartache that had taken center stage since my miscarriage. Whereas that deep sadness wore me down, my rage served to bolster me with supposed strength and a focused resolve.
I look back now and see quite clearly that my anger was actually a weapon of hope in the midst of what felt like a hopeless experience. The fuel that propelled me forward was only available in an active emotion like anger, and nowhere else in those fraught days following our loss. I was scared to
crumble—to let the vulnerability consume me—and to be soft through it all, so I clutched onto anger, which in retrospect served as a wedge. Unproductive though it was, I was doing my best.
At hints of my glaring disappointment, Jason would work to allay the hostility radiating off of me. “We’re in this together,” he would say. But unfortunately, these utterances didn’t penetrate. After all, were we really? I couldn’t find evidence of that companionship and connection that had up until this time existed effortlessly between us. His breasts weren’t swelling with milk, seemingly taunting him. He wasn’t constantly changing blood-soaked pads: a visceral reminder of what my body had previously shed. He wasn’t watching his body erase the physical evidence of a pregnancy that ended far too soon.
It didn’t feel like we were “in this together” in those early days. Instead, I found myself wondering whether or not he was even capable of meeting me in the depths at all, since it hadn’t physically happened to him. I wondered whether he was opting out of taking that deep dive in an attempt at self-preservation. Either way, it was painful. I envied that he seemed to have the choice at all.
• • •
Jason tried assuaging my fear by telling me we’d make it through this. “We’ll have another baby,” he’d say. He assured me that when we did, things would be different. But I had a tough time believing in visions of some hopeful future that lay on the horizon. The concept of having another baby was no consolation at all, really. This was apples and oranges. The conception of another baby would in no way erase the trauma of how things unfolded, and what was more, this loss was mire I had to wade through before I could even begin again.
One night about a month after the loss, after Liev had long since gone to sleep, I pulled out some ice cream from the freezer and expressed my concern and disappointment over our emotional distance, and over the way in which Jason seemed largely unfazed by what was surely the most devastatingly formative experience of our marriage, much less our lives.
I Had a Miscarriage Page 11