I will always remember my first.
How I survived the experience of my first miscarriage.
Parenthood
I will always remember my first.
I was young and very naive. I had just gotten married. The wedding ceremony was held in Toronto and a homecoming a month later was held at my husband’s home in France. Everything was going fantastic except for when I burst into tears in front of his grandmother one luncheon and for a bout of sea sickness on the ferry heading from France to Ireland.
This is the story of a miscarriage, my miscarriage.
The unease continued for several weeks until it occurred to us to take a pregnancy test. First time lucky! We had a baby on board. All my dreams tangled together and thoughts of a PhD were replaced by the desire for a home and life worthy of a child.
My husband traveled a lot during that time for conferences and guest speaking events. He was in Italy for the week so my friend Alexandra accompanied me to my 12 week scan. I was full of joy at the prospect of seeing my little bean.
In the weeks running up to this day I had felt a great deal of fatigue. I would stop half way on my walk home to rest on a park bench. I would spend this time talking and singing to myself. I felt high in the knowledge that this was uncharted territory. Life felt like it was about to start.
As I worked in a university laboratory, I became super sensitized to strange smells and potential exposures. Forget about food and drink when you can be exposed to a known carcinogen because an unskillful graduate student decides to carry out their experiment outside a fume hood. I couldn’t tell anyone I was pregnant, so I had to walk out of the lab and just hope that any exposure was minimal. Such is the life of a Scientist. Until you are expecting you don’t give any thought to your own mortality and taking risks is commonplace in favor of getting the experimental results. Think Marie Curie glowing in the dark. The same could be said of a hedonistic lifestyle.
I had made the mistake of watching Batman, The Dark Knight. The cursed movie featuring a soon to be deceased Heath Ledger. I physically jumped out of my skin and clutched my husband’s arm when the Joker’s corpse swung and hit the camera. Clutching my belly I thought maybe this was not a good idea. Many things left me feeling tired or uneasy but that was the one that I would remember.
On the day of the 12 week scan I was excited. The nurse squirted cold blue gel on my abdomen and waved her magic wand. Within a few minutes she grimaced.
“I am sorry love. ”
What?
“There is no heartbeat.”
Are you sure?
I was stunned. I do not remember many of the details. All I know is the baby had stopped developing at 8 weeks. I was finding this out at the end of 12 weeks. I was given a picture of the scan showing something resembling a bean only several weeks before. I had taken the prenatal vitamins. I had taken rest and precautions.
I had allowed myself to dream of the future life inside me. How could it not be?
But I am pregnant. Or my body is still pregnant. Or my brain needed to know that I was no longer pregnant. Or I simply was not pregnant and my body had to catch up to the news … but 4 weeks later? Such was the nature of my thoughts.
I was given the option of a D&C or of allowing my body to run its course and expel the miscarriage by end of week. I was still trying to grasp reality. I just took option B and left.
My body is not broken. Maybe the scan is wrong.
My friend who had accompanied me did not know what to do or say. We had only known each other a short time. Perversely, I found myself smiling and telling her to go back to her work, that I was fine. She took the offered exit and was gone. I was not fine.
My mind reeled. I walked home. What now? I went to bed. I felt numb.
I was not sure how to tell my husband. His response over the phone and the miles was to respond with an “okay”.
My universe has collapsed. Okay.
I would later find that he was as crushed as I was. Knowing him as I do now, I understand how he had no idea how to respond. He especially could do nothing over the distance. It was easier for him to push it aside in that moment. Nothing could be said. Nothing could be done.
Something should be said of a man’s experience of miscarriage. I can compare it to the Chicken and the Pig fable as they serve up breakfast. The Chicken lays the egg which is then fried but the pig is carved up for bacon. Such is it that the chicken is the man’s experience. There is definite heartbreak. There is definite pain. But he’s walking around and able to continue with his day. Women, we are the pigs. We are the ones who are carrying the entire experience from conception to loss. We are the ones violated when we miscarry.
And as a pig, I was living it.
I received a call from our choir director in whom I had confided the early pregnancy. While on the call, I gave her the news. Somehow admitting it to someone made it suddenly all too real.
I have never cried so much, not even when my heart was broken by my first boyfriend. Once the tears started I had no one and nothing to hold onto. There is no grief stronger than heartbreak and betrayed dreams. The depths of misery and self loathing take you down through passages of self blame and envy. I was drowning.
What had I done to deserve this? Why me? Who or what was to blame? Why couldn’t I be the heroine instead of the loser? Why was life so easy for others and so hard for me?
At this time in my life I knew of only one other person who had had a miscarriage. Given that she was a GP, her attitude towards miscarriages was that it was a fact of life. She had perhaps through study and experience understood what I did not. Miscarriage is common. It is as common as birth. It is caused by many things but usually it is that the baby just did not have the genetics or functioning nature to survive. It could be that in a first pregnancy the body needs to prime. It could be PCOS or any number of things. For some women their entire life is full of miscarriages. For the blessed few, like my mother, they would experience none.
There is a reason every culture has insane traditions towards pregnancy. It’s usually in the belief of protecting both baby and mother. Pregnancy is a dangerous business that has been going on since the beginning of time.
But here I was in my innocence before the internet could provide advice and support. Here I was alone in my suffering thinking that I was the only one.
Warning: the next part gets graphic.
I do not remember if it was later that night or the next night when the contractions started. I felt I had the worst cramping for a period that I had never had. Thick clots of blood the size of a plum were expelled from my body and I shuddered. I was entirely alone in the apartment I shared with my husband. My emotions were raw as the physical act of miscarriage completed the trauma of losing my first child.
In the days that followed I was changed forever.
I had once thought that having my heart broken by a boyfriend was enough to create a lasting trauma that would never end. I was incorrect. A breakup with your first love initially teaches you to be bitter, to mistrust, to be cautious with your heart and your love. But you will fall in love again, and again, and again. It takes time but there is no physical reminder and each time the boy or girl is a new person, a new experience, a new passion. The subsequent aspirations and dreams on falling in love are unique. You remain yourself: confident in your abilities and your personality. Okay, maybe you are a little more bitter from time to time but time heals.
When you have a miscarriage, you can not help but immediately blame yourself. For one, you are the one carrying this baby. You are the one who walks and eats, and breathes to feed this baby with the energy and nutrition it needs. You have read all the books and taken all the precautions. You have given up alcohol and become an ascetic. You are the incubator so by right, when something goes wrong — are you not to blame?
I later learned the answer: No.
No. You are not to blame.
It took me more than 6 months to learn this answer. For one, I did not have the right women around me. I had women who like the aforementioned GP either saw miscarriage as a thing that happens and were emotionally removed from the event or worse, women who had never experienced a miscarriage and as a result could only stipulate that it must have been my stress level or my actions or ME that had caused it.
Within months of a few people finding out about my experience I started to hear whispers.
A German researcher who looked like a modern day Beethoven, who spent his nights adopting the neighborhood cats and days researching science at the university, who-I-to-the-life-of-me-can’t-remember-how-the-subject-came-up, told me about how when he was younger every Aunt or older lady he knew had had a miscarriage at least once and that it was very common.
It was like I had joined a club of sorts. If someone got wind of my miscarriage and they had known someone or they themselves had had a miscarriage, they immediately told me about it. However, all would go quiet again if someone who had not had one walked in.
Unfortunately, a lot of this happened too little and too late. I went a little crazy back then. I stopped speaking to my parents for two weeks. I went on a silent meditation retreat. I got a tattoo (Triskele, by Daisy Bisley). I decided to quit my PhD. I took up web design. The foundation of my world shook.
My marriage was not immune either. My husband spent time coping with the change both in our expectant status and in me. It was the first real obstacle in our relationship. The first time we did it, I am not convinced I was ready yet. For the first time I had become distant from him. He too did not know whether it was my fault and I felt that blame like a hot coal pressed into the palm of my hand.
We had no body to mourn when he had returned from his trip. We had a dream to mourn. I needed to mourn. So we took the one sad shoe that I had knitted and placing it in a cheese box, we let it float from a bridge on the River Corrib. We had given him the name Yohan.
Fast forward
Ten years have passed since that horrible tragedy, and yet writing this piece I have been able to relive aspects of it as if it was yesterday. The path to healing was a long one. Every year on the anniversary of my miscarriage I light a candle. I am probably now the only one who remembers. I have a heavy iron statue of the Japanese guardian Jizo who protects lost children. I was also comforted by the Buddhist belief that miscarried children are blessed beings who simply touch down on Earth to burn the last remnants of their karma before being reborn in the celestial worlds.
Through all of this the thought that miscarriages happen has never been a comfort. You can not say that “Everything happens for a reason” without implying the bearer deserves the suffering. Yes, this is my Karma to bear.
It took us two years before we conceived our first son. I was a broken woman by that time. Every month for two years and I had my period, I was defeated. I was a failure. This was a painful time in our lives where we encountered friends who ignorant to our plight would delightfully relate how they had conceived on the first try. So had we. We had simply failed in the pregnancy.
The universe works in a strange way. I had volunteered myself to science, notably a study of siblings of women with PCOS. In doing so, I subjected myself to a study involving a very powerful ultrasound. The researcher uncovered that I had a uterine polyp and suggested that this may be the cause of my failure to conceive.
Within three months of having the polyp removed, I conceived.
During that pregnancy our nurses and midwives were amazed that my husband attended every appointment, every ultrasound. I was so scared to look and to listen. When I heard the strong heart beat of my child my heart filled with joy. I was so traumatized by the prior experience that I needed my hand held. I was so scared that the baby would not thrive. So it was with my first two pregnancies.
We are now parents to three beautiful children. I fell in love with each of them in turn when they were born.
For my most recent pregnancy, for several appointments I was asked “How many pregnancies have you had?”
My answer: “Four"
The dream of Yohan lives on, if just for me.
I will always remember my first.
Update: 12 years and 3 kids later, I question whether or not its right to meditate on the loss of the one. I have only to close my eyes and I am back in that room experiencing a loss so great that it consumes me. I have never reclaimed that part of my innocent self that was lost. This is a pillar that transformed me from child to adult.
Since the writing of this article, I read regarding miscarriage from an Asian perspective that — the spirit of the being that was to be created lingers around you until it sees the opportune moment to become.
I sometimes wonder if my eldest is the same as my first. Perhaps he is. That is a path to letting go.
~ 25 Sept 2020
There is a happy ending to this story:
about
