“I’ve felt so alone,” I told him, crying. “I wish we’d been in this together more. Have you even been sad about this?” I asked, sounding at once desperate and frustrated.
He was taken aback. Understandably thrown by my query, he responded indignantly. “Of course I’ve been sad! But it’s not like there’s an instruction manual for how to navigate this!” he said, clearly baffled at my gall.
He went on: “You’re making it seem like this experience didn’t happen to both of us. It’s not fair. We both lost this baby. We both lost what we hoped would be our larger family. A sibling for Liev. A joyous event.”
Relief overtook me. I was reassured to hear grief was on his mind and that he’d been considering our lives and how they’d changed. It’s not that I wanted my husband to be in emotional pain—to feel what I had been feeling. I would not wish that on anyone. But I wanted—needed—to feel as if this pregnancy and the subsequent, traumatic loss of it mattered to him as it mattered to me. I needed to know that it was as real for him as it was for me. I needed to know that my grief was valid, and could be touched and felt by someone else.
“Thank you for letting me in,” I sighed with gratitude. “I’ve wondered where you’ve been. I have missed you. Us. I just wasn’t sure how you’ve been feeling, since you haven’t been talking much about it.”
His point was wholly valid. He was right; I’d had an impossible time trying to grasp an understanding of his experience, because he so rarely shared it with me. I couldn’t read his mind, nor could he read mine; and the ways in which our respective pain had manifested itself had quickly turned us into virtual strangers.
“I want to know how you feel,” I reiterated. All the hours that I’d spent in mourning and anxiety manifested themselves in the tears that began rolling heavily down my cheeks. It might sound curious, but what a breath of fresh air this was, to be going deeper together.
The rest of that night unfolded in a long-overdue, free-flowing discussion of Jason’s feelings, his experience, his perspective, and his grief. “I am sad. I’ve been sad. Somehow I feel hopeful, though. I feel like this won’t happen again; that the next pregnancy will go smoothly.”
Lucky you, I was tempted to say, but resisted. My resentment threatened to take hold again as I considered what a place of privilege a sentiment like that came from. He wouldn’t have to be the pregnant one. He didn’t have the blood-stained underwear, the tingling nipples, the altered waistline. He didn’t live in the body that expelled the pregnancy; didn’t feel abandoned by it, confused by it, tormented by it. He trusted things would be okay based on hope and fantasy, not facts or peering into a crystal ball.
But I withheld; I was so tired of fighting against both him and myself, and I knew I needed to relent and give him room to process safely in my presence. So I proceeded in giving him the space to explain to me the form his grief had taken in the minutes, hours, and days after he’d flown through our front door only to find me bleeding and in shock on the toilet, a dead baby on the brown hand towel a few feet away on the turquoise-tiled counter, lovely and lost.
He’d been terrified, I learned. He’d seen me in a pool of my own blood, shaking and hemorrhaging. He’d heard my voice, uncannily focused, as I instructed him to put our baby in a bag to bring to my doctor’s office for testing. He’d watched me somehow brave the unfathomable pain during my unmedicated emergency D&C procedure. And all of it was so otherworldly, so far from anything he could’ve imagined, that retreating within himself was all he could do to keep from falling apart. He had been doing exactly as I had been: we had each subsisted on parallel tracks of pressing forward by any means necessary. I had been so focused on mine, I hadn’t realized how similar his really was.
What he saw unfold in his mind’s eye was the instantaneous unraveling of our family—his wife and baby lost (because what if I had died there in our bathroom that day?), his son motherless, and a carefully mapped-out future gone in an instant. His mind had been firing on all cylinders. “What’s happening? Why us? Not us. Not us. This can’t be real,” he’d pleaded internally. It was a panicked, desperate narrative that played steadily on repeat in his mind. He was exhausted and afraid.
In the madness of it all, I let my own devastation become deep disdain, to the point that I hadn’t seen or understood that Jason had retreated deep within himself in order to find the tools and strength he needed to process his pain and put one foot in front of the other with resolve. When Jason saw both the physical and emotional effects this miscarriage had on me, he did the only thing he could think of in order to stay afloat. He adopted the I. Must. Survive. narrative and kept moving.
• • •
Ten days after the loss, my doctor rang with the results of the pathology tests. She had thought it may take a bit longer, so her call was unexpected. I anxiously awaited her words and hoped there was something to learn, as I knew it was possible the tests wouldn’t necessarily point to the reason why. Her voice had energy in it and her tone was purposeful, which gave me a smidge of hope she had news that might solve this mystery.
“A chromosomal abnormality—47 XXX or trisomy X—was identified,” she reported.
Anxiety lifted almost immediately, as this information indicated there were concrete medical facts—biological reasons—elucidating why this pregnancy ended as it did.
She explained in detail what this meant. Triple X syndrome is a genetic disorder that affects approximately one in one thousand female fetuses. Females typically have two X chromosomes in all cells—one X chromosome from each partner. In triple X syndrome, however, a female has three X chromosomes.
It was unnerving and paradoxical to feel such intense relief amid this gooey, tar-like heartache I’d been stranded in. But this news gave Jason and I the data we needed to understand that this death was not without reason or rationale. It gave me the space to understand my body; it had known what I didn’t, and had used that information in a way nature had intended. It made sense now, though emotionally it all still felt so nonsensical, of course. But in some very important ways, this news allowed for a welcomed shift in our thinking, particularly about our reproductive futures. In essence, this definitive news was a (re)affirmation of what I’d felt: that my body had not failed; that it was working as it should.
• • •
I hung up the phone.
“Look; I know we’d both been keen on you having an unmedicated birth, but this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Jason joked as he gently cupped my face in his hands. And at once, we were laughing, kissing, and bantering; that bridge that joined us together began to form, and I felt those old familiar feelings of intimacy and ease. I’d missed him, wanted him, and so desperately needed him; and here, at long last, was an emotional reunion. Here was my partner, my best friend, and the man who’d experienced all of this horror right alongside me, tortured at the idea of losing everything he loved in the blink of an eye.
Haggard but hopeful, we made it through together. Though our grief flung us apart for a short stint, it ultimately served as common ground. It was, after all, our only way forward. In the end, born from the loss of our daughter was an ability to exercise compassion for each other at new heights, to respect the other’s humanity and deeply personal emotional experience and reaction to grief.
Through our loss, we realized exactly how much a marriage holds the ability to endure, how strong a union between two people can be, and the extent to which we can learn multitudes about ourselves and each other. We welcomed, at long last, a renewed connection and a hard-won understanding of what resilience we possess in the face of death.
9
“Can pleasure and grief coexist?”
As I’ve combed through the various elements of life after loss, I’m struck by the ways in which loss can upend even our very personal and often complicated relationships with our bodies. Pregnancy can leave us intimately connected with them one moment, then feeling as if we’re veritable strangers the next. Or wo
rse yet, despising or rejecting the very body we’ve been assigned, the one we must continue to live in.
Pregnancy loss can and often does serve as a reminder that our bodies, regardless of shape, size, color, or function, behave outside our control. Our bodies can become the key source of our discontent and grief, especially when we cannot will them to become or stay pregnant. Considering the feelings of betrayal that so often invade the minds of people who’ve experienced pregnancy loss, we might become prone to reassessing exactly how we feel about our bodies, how we feel in them, how we touch them, and, critically, how we like them to be touched.
We find ourselves reckoning with a coupling that is deeply troubling in nature: the intermingling of death and desire. Even though a woman may feel adrift after a pregnancy loss, she still exists as a sexual being—but how do you balance the two? Desire might wane in the face of loss. It might increase. It might remain relatively unchanged. I would like to think we can all agree that we deserve tenderness amid grief, and that such a thing can certainly come about by way of sexual intimacy. And in many instances, expressing sexual desire can serve as a coping mechanism. So as we begin to acknowledge our ability to possess the potential to soothe and rebuild from loss, sex can act as a conduit to elemental connection. Then again, maybe not.
Maybe our genitals or bodies themselves become specifically associated with loss, making it difficult to return to pleasure, as either a form of healing or simply for the sake of it. Does this site then become a source of anxiety, comfort, fear, dread? Toss some unanticipated grief into the mix, and, bam! The footing you thought you had is likely no longer. Sex and intimacy present one crucial question that we must reckon with post-loss: Can pleasure and grief coexist?
Pregnancy and everything surrounding it already has the power to change sex—its meaning, its purpose, its function, its feeling. Sometimes, once couples begin trying to conceive, the mood shifts, especially if it isn’t an easy road to conception (but this can also occur when conception happens fast). And because returning to sex after pregnancy loss also carries the potential of getting pregnant once again, hope and heartache might intertwine in a place previously uncomplicated by these notions. I’ve talked to so many women about this, because, as you can see, it is layered and intensely complex.
For some, sex stops being a bonding point or a way to experience pleasure, and starts becoming rote, or even unpleasant. This happened to one member of my Instagram community, Yael, who messaged me when I asked for stories about this issue. “I didn’t really want to have sex. We only did it to try to conceive. I used to like sex a lot—we had a really great sex life. But when we were trying to get pregnant again after the loss, it just became a task. I didn’t even physically enjoy it anymore. I think my fear got in the way.” This is not an uncommon reaction.
Pregnancy loss has the power to affect the way some women feel in and about their bodies, and how they want to share (and not share) them sexually.
I remember talking to Jade, one of my patients who experienced this shift in her sexual desire—and the many ways in which it impacted her relationship—after she lost a pregnancy at nine weeks along. “Some days things feel totally copacetic between us, and others it feels like we’re on different planets. He’s just so … unchanged,” she said. “Making it through to the end of a day feels like a feat in itself, emotionally speaking. So when it comes time to go to bed, all I want to do is sleep. Not cuddle, not talk, not kiss. I just want the day to end so my grief can finally take a beat. And yet time after time, Ben will crawl in next to me and press his body against mine.” She continued, “It’s a loving act, I know, he just wants to reconnect physically—to bond—and … it’s just too soon. It’s the last thing on earth I want to do right now.”
Later in our session, Jade articulated feeling badly about her lack of interest in returning to sexual intimacy. She worried that her lack of interest was hurting her partner somehow, but her primal need to retreat took precedence. As it sometimes must.
My patients and the people in my communities continually reflect on the fact that among the grieving, there exists a recurrent theme: for so many, sexuality shifts, increases, gets lost, or, at the very least, is mired in the weeds of reproductive complications. Its meaning changes. Desire contorts. Some divest in physical connection altogether. I’ve heard stories of people retreating from their partners, burying their sexuality deep beneath their grief, oftentimes feeling undeserving of or wholly disinterested in pleasure. I’ve also heard stories of women wanting more than their partners can provide; of new fantasies taking hold and of the desire to experience more than one sexual partner—a want often rooted in the need to feel in control of the body and the ways in which it can be used.
These potential outcomes exist partially because there are so many conflicting thoughts firing simultaneously in the mind, affecting the body. Some berate their bodies, others divorce them, some are tender and loving to them. Those who come to pregnancy loss with an already complex relationship with their bodies can find a newfound appreciation for the way their bodies work; burying themselves in the science of it all and becoming fixated on the statistics, the medicine, the intricate cogs of procreation. And others take that troubled relationship and, in the wake of a miscarriage, destroy any fragile appreciation they had for their body entirely.
This happened to Yael too. “I generally dislike my body. I’m very self-conscious, but usually my husband makes me feel really good about my body,” she said. “After my loss, I hated my body all the more. Despised it. And now it wasn’t about how it looked, but the fact that it failed. He couldn’t help me with that.” Her feelings spiraled. “I hated my body so much. It was hard to want to experience pleasure, because I didn’t even want to look at myself, touch myself, be touched. I was so angry at my body because it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. ‘Why is this happening? What is wrong with me? What is wrong with my body?’ It was a whole-new realm of body loathing that I still haven’t really gotten over. These feelings trumped my negative feelings about my body image, but I constantly felt like it was failing me. And in turn, it was failing everyone I touched. I thought, ‘Look at how many people my defective body is impacting. Look at how my body is causing grief for others.’”
In sessions, women wondered how they’d pick up the pieces of their now-fractured lives, including how they’d return to sex. “How can I even think about having sex right now?” This question would float around with regularity, the women asking themselves just as much as they were posing the question to me. Women who’d gone through miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant loss would come to me expressing how sex was the last thing they wanted—how their desire for intimacy had tuckered out. “I don’t feel it. It’s lost, and I don’t even know if I want to find it again,” they’d say, inadvertently turning their backs on the basic concept of sensuality. As with Yael, their sex drives may have existed healthily before their trauma—thrived, even—but post-loss, the idea of being sexual felt invasive, sometimes disloyal, scary, offensive. Entertaining the idea of personal sexual arousal, let alone pleasuring another, felt like a confusing betrayal—a lewd form of disrespect to the pressing issue at hand: their grief. This is, of course, common in many individuals in the throes of mourning a death or a loss. But the difference with pregnancy loss specifically is that the body—the sex organs—is the physical site of the grief. “My vagina was a constant reminder of the loss,” came a response from Sasha, another member of my online community. “Because this place was a site of pain, I wasn’t able to just click back over to pleasure or wanting to have sex freely.”
Women in this mindset see sex—and masturbation, for that matter—as a self-indulgent act that symbolizes an erasure of their grief in favor of emotional or physical or personal gain. These feelings are, of course, compounded by societal messaging that pigeonholes women as maternal, not sexual. In a culture that already discourages women—especially moms or those who will one day become moms—to
embrace and express their sexuality, how can we possibly feel free to return to our sexual selves in the midst of our grief? We are judged under the best of circumstances.
Aliyah, a member of my online community who had a stillbirth at thirty weeks, said her sex life with her partner was difficult for the next two years. But she couldn’t be alone either. “Masturbation felt selfish. Something so sacred [my stillbirth] happened there, so it felt selfish to not include my husband there too. I felt alienated from my body. I had to rebuild a relationship with my body all over again.”
In contrast, for some women, masturbation was the only available kind of sexual expression. Libby messaged me after her termination, which was due to life-threatening preeclampsia, and we discussed this exact reaction.
“Masturbation was the only way I could reach orgasm, actually, because I wasn’t performing, it was just for myself,” she said. “After my loss, it was very difficult for me. My husband had taken care of me in a new way—taking me to the bathroom, helping me out. It was so vulnerable and—not in a sexy way—very intimate. Masturbating, I didn’t have to think about him or his thoughts. I could cancel out the noise of what he might be thinking or seeing after watching me lose our baby. I was too afraid to ask him what he saw. What he thought. My self-esteem was already so compromised. And I was worried that my anxieties would become his too. But I had a lack of self-consciousness when it came to masturbating. It was a step toward self-care to masturbate.”
This is not to say that anyone should feel inhibited, embarrassed, or guilty if they do want to have sex. As Libby points out, masturbation and sex can be compassionate acts of self-care and restorative for romantic relationships. Take this message from Trina, a member of the Instagram community: “I felt like my body had failed me in losing my son three days after he was born. I’m single, but I sought out sexual partners because sex was a way to gain that back—to feel powerful in my body again. There was some guilt that came with the pleasure in the early days, but finding joy while navigating the self-facing, negative self-blame helped me navigate in a more clear-minded and balanced way. Sex helped me remember who I was.”
I Had a Miscarriage Page 12