Devastating Emotions Around a Miscarriage

A miscarriage is like planning a beautiful vacation to the exact destination you have been wanting and begging to go to, only to be told you can’t go. 

When you first find out you’re pregnant, especially if you have been trying for a baby, it is like fireworks and explosions of light that no one else can see. You have this little secret inside that you are bursting to tell everyone about, but also afraid to tell people ‘too early’. I don’t know what it feels like to find out you are pregnant when you don’t want to be. That must be a very different experience. All four of my pregnancies have been very much wanted, planned for and tried for. I only have one earthside child. 

The initial grief of a miscarriage is one of shock, disbelief and a feeling of failure. It can start with physical symptoms, or with an ultrasound. I have experienced both. Going into an ultrasound so excited to see your tiny little gummy bear and the silence when it is a kidney bean, not a gummy bear. Wanting to hear that heartbeat, and the technician never offering to bring it up for you to hear or see on the screen. The technician’s flat expression as they say, “your OB will go over the results with you.” Trying not to cry. Trying not to break down.

Your body has failed to protect your baby. It’s only job in this period of time and it failed. What makes you a woman, and you failed. Your body holds a dead child and that grief is overwhelming. Your womb is now a tomb for all your dreams and expectations. Then come the decisions and the waiting for labor or surgery so you can be empty again. Flawed and empty.

You imagined your life in 6 or 7 months with this new baby. Bald, blonde hair, or brown curls. In your mind’s eye, they are real. You can feel the weight of them in your arms. Count their little fingers and toes. Maybe you imagine breastfeeding, or making bottles in the middle of the night. In those weeks, or even months, between finding out you are pregnant and finding out your baby is gone, you imagine so much. Maybe dance lessons, or baseball games. Maybe it is a sibling for your child and you imagine the two of them playing together, arguing, and growing up together.

Then it ends. Your future doesn’t hold any of that. You are left with an empty home, or with the precious child, or children, you already have. You clutch them tighter knowing in some part of you that they could be taken from you too. Maybe you beg with God to make it a mistake. To make it not true. Maybe the ultrasound was wrong. Maybe you aren’t as far along. These things happen. Maybe you will get the miracle. But you don’t.

Miscarriages are not talked about enough. So many women go through them, but we are still encouraged to wait till the second trimester before telling people we are pregnant, just in case. This might save other people the discomfort, but what does it tell women? It mostly tells them that miscarriages should be private between them and their husbands, maybe a close friend or two. 

But this leads to isolation because no one else knows what you are going through. On the flip side, if a bunch of people know you are pregnant, then over and over you have to tell people as you run into them that you lost the baby. This can be painful, but also healing. These are the moments other women often will share that they too have gone through miscarriages or infertility. Neither option is easy.

Your body heals, but sometimes out of the corner of your eye you will see a shadow of another child just the age of the one you lost, or hear an infant cry and for a split second…