i had my fourth miscarriage 18 days ago. i am not ready to talk about it. but here i go.
miscarriage is the crappiest most pointless thing in the world. it sucks more than anything. having a miscarriage is horrifying, humiliating, confusing, gory, outrageous, and exhausting.
and even trying to talk about it is so hard to do.
ideally none of us would ever go through this enough to "get good at it." the worst part of talking about miscarriage, i learned in 2017, was that it wasn't actually possible to talk about without it ending with "at least." even for someone like me who is very confrontational and wears their heart on their sleeve. i just had no idea how to TALK honestly about the pain of it, exactly as it was and is. i didn't know how to say what i was feeling without qualifying it, that i know it could be so much worse and i should be thankful. but i've grown past that.
now that i've been through it several times, i've learned how to talk about it. how morbid.
brene says shame lives in the dark. hopefully, talking about pregnancy loss, blogging about it, will help someone out there. it seems like it would be a waste to have learned something from the loss and not use it to help others.
**for context: i had a baby in june 2014, another baby in january 2016, three early term miscarriages in 2017, and my third baby in november 2018. i am currently 30.5 years old and just lost a pregnancy for the fourth time. i first talked about miscarrying in september 2017 in my instagram stories.
here's what i've learned:
- miscarrying is physically very painful. all of my miscarriages happened before the 8 week mark, but the pain reminded me a lot of postpartum recovery.
- the emotional drain following a miscarriage takes a long time to get through. i normally get over things by the weekend. kind of my life rule. but a miscarriage is not a paper cut. it's more like a motorcycle crash. parts of it heal faster than others, and some of the emotional wounds last a really long time. some of it scars.
- no one is ever going to ask you if you had a miscarriage. YOU have to tell them. you have to send them a text and say, i have really bad news, i've had a miscarriage, everything is the worst and i don't want to talk about it [or maybe you do], please check on me tomorrow and make sure i haven't died of sadness.
- i needed to stay off of instagram.
- i needed nate to take a day off from work.
- i needed to scream cry.
- i needed to scream pray.
- sometimes i needed to distract myself with stupid pop culture podcasts, and sometimes i needed to weep on the couch and say every thought i had in my head.
- i needed nate. bless that man.
- i needed to stay in my sweatpants all day. and i'm a person who never, EVER wore sweats outside of bed until 2020, and even in 2020 i never ever went a whole day without putting on human clothes at some point. but then it was sweatpants for breakfast lunch and dinner. i needed to signal to my household and myself that mom needed to take it easy.
- i needed to treat this like it was a big deal. because i knew that if i didn't, no one else would. and because it was a big deal to me, i needed others to help me get through it. (and they did.)
at the first sign of miscarriage all i could feel was dread. crashing into me like a wave of oh no. oh no oh no oh no oh no. please no. like the moment before you get a test score you know you failed, and then you look at it, and you did even worse than you thought. times a thousand. the worst, lowest, saddest, most heartbroken feeling.
several days later, i've learned to live with it. i know that if i do have the great blessing of getting pregnant again, i won't be able to relax until i have a screaming baby in my arms. the creeping feeling of tragedy lurking is a feeling i know well now. i know that any minute, the other shoe could drop. i know that feeling will never go away.