KRISTEN OGANOWSKI
pREGNANT WOMEN ARE SUBJECT TO a litany of things that they are “supposed” to do, or ways that they are “supposed” to be, some more legitimate and well-intentioned than others: You’re not supposed to drink alcohol.
You’re not supposed to change the cat’s litter box.
You’re not supposed to consume too much caffeine.
You’re not supposed to eat soft cheeses, or rare steak, even if you have nightly dreams about diving headfirst into a dark-pink filet mignon slathered in bleu cheese.
You’re not supposed to feel anything but angelic and undying love toward your fetus, even if your darling unborn baby keeps you up at night with heartburn and wicked kicks to the ribs.
You’re not supposed to work too much, or relax too much, or exercise too much, or eat too much, or stress out too much.
You’re not supposed to be too fat or too thin, too active or too sedentary.
And you’re not supposed to announce your pregnancy “too early.” At least not until after the first trimester (and the greatest risk of miscarriage) is over because, you know, if you do miscarry then you’ll have to tell everyone. And that’s supposed to be awkward and terrible.
Or at least it’s supposed to make you feel awkward and terrible.
In February 2011, ten weeks and one day into a planned and very much wanted pregnancy, that’s exactly what happened to me. I suffered a miscarriage.
In the morning, in the bathroom, I noticed a shock of pink on my tissue.
The spot was small, mucousy, tinged with the color of the heart-shaped candies that people would be passing out to their Valentines throughout the day.
“Bloody show,” the books call it. A sign that labor is about to begin. A message that your body is ready to birth your baby.
Except that I was far from the estimated due date, which stretched out seven months ahead of me.
In that moment, with the shock of pink before me, I knew that I would not be “birthing” or “having” a baby by the day’s end.
I would be losing my baby.
I had already announced my pregnancy to family, friends, neighbors, and to the thousands of strangers who’d read my pregnancy resource blog, Birthing Beautiful Ideas, when I was a mere five weeks pregnant. In addition to that medium-rare, bleu cheese-slathered steak I had eaten, this was yet another Thing That I Wasn’t Supposed to Do. And now I had to make the presumably awkward and terrible announcement that I was no longer pregnant.
“Sorry, folks, there’s nothing to see here. Move along, move along, nothing’s happened.”
Though I knew of no specific guidelines for how to proceed through my loss, most social cues told me this: You render miscarriage invisible. You speak about it in hushed tones. You don’t bring it up, you don’t ask about it.
You move along, as if nothing ever happened.
By noon that day, the certainty of my loss had become apparent.
The menstrual-like cramps. The rhythmic ebb and flow of a uterine contraction. The indubitable, primordial signal to the brain that this is it.
The sensations of labor.
I straddled between territory that was wild and frightening and feelings that were strangely familiar. It was a death, but it felt like birth. The way I rocked on hands and knees, the way that I arched my hips toward the ceiling, struggling to find a position that would relieve the cramp strangling my lower abdomen.
I hearkened back to the words that my midwives had spoken to me just hours before, words that as a professional doula, I’d spoken to others myself. Words I understood, but which I didn’t want associated with me in this way. Not yet.
“When this gets intense later on . . .”
“Ten weeks along . . . so this might feel like a mini-labor . . . not as intense, you won’t feel the same pressure, but intense in its own right.”
“When the baby . . . the tissue . . . right before you pass . . .”
“I can be there to help you through this, any time, day or night . . . just call me.”
They had spoken in the gentle and cryptic code that I knew all too well: that way of communicating to someone (without making the person scared out of their minds) that “this pain is going to get more intense; there is still a rugged path to travail; this thing, you know, might hurt like hell.”
In an odd way, I felt empowered that I could do this physically demanding thing—that I was able to experience it like this.
But I also felt broken. Wilted. Defeated.
And now I had to tell everyone.
The morning after my miscarriage was the first morning in six weeks that I had woken up knowing that I was “not pregnant.”
I felt empty. And uncertain.
Specifically, I felt uncertain about how and whether to share my news. Not just with family and friends but also with my blog, which had this amorphous, largely unknown audience whose reactions to this news I had no way of gauging.
Complicating matters further, I had written weekly accounts of this pregnancy ever since those two pink lines appeared on the pregnancy test. Surely my blog audience would notice if I suddenly stopped with the pregnancy updates—if I simply moved on, as if nothing happened, just like I was “supposed” to do.
At this point, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
Somewhere in the midst of this uncertainty, I decided to live my miscarriage out loud and on my blog. I talked about what we’re not “supposed” to talk about: the way miscarriage looked, the way it felt, the complex emotions that arose from the loss. I did it without shame or embarrassment. I revealed my experience to the world and proclaimed that this, too, was a way to cope with pregnancy loss: that suffering in silence, within the walls of my home, was not the only way to have a miscarriage.
My body, which had surely known of its loss far before I was aware of it, was well into its return to its pre-pregnant state.
My breasts had already begun to deflate, like two balloons slowly hissing out the air left inside them.
The tiny baby bump that had appeared just the week before was also vanishing, crawling in and downward with the descent of my uterus.
My five-year-old son, upon hugging his arms around my waist, even made note of how my belly “wasn’t so big with the baby anymore.”
It had never occurred to me how each time we hugged, his head must have rested right where my tummy was growing. That he might have noticed those first few days of growth and change even more than I did.
I might have thought that such immediate changes would intensify my grief, leaving me with one more image or string of words or intrusive thought to trigger one more round of crying.
But instead, I took these changes as evidence of nature’s grace, of my body’s kindness.
I didn’t want to look or feel pregnant if I wasn’t.
I didn’t want to be reminded that those breasts wouldn’t be nursing in September, that the bump wouldn’t bulge with the pace of the baby once growing inside of me.
I simply felt more comfortable sitting in that place of pregnancy loss. Just resting for a moment in the loss itself. Because I wasn’t yet prepared to peer around that curtain that separated the space between what came before and what was present: to think too long and hard about the fact that I had spent the last few weeks being pregnant and then, suddenly, I was not.
Perhaps it was evidence of my mind’s grace and kindness.
Though I was by no means the first person to do it, I challenged the idea that the “good” pregnant woman keeps quiet when she loses a pregnancy, and that the Good Mother hides the loss from her other children and carries on with work and family obligations as if nothing happened.
I wrote about the peaks and valleys of my moods.
I wrote about my fluctuating ability to be an active and present parent to my two older children as I processed my loss.
I wrote about how I welcomed the opportunity to have someone take my kids for the day so that I could just sit on my couch eating pancakes, watching bad television, and simply grieve.
I even went on to write about the trepidation with which I approached the thought of “trying to get pregnant again.”
I exposed the messiness of what it was like for me to lose a baby.
And in doing so, I discovered a challenge to the belief that a miscarriage announcement is inherently awkward and terrible.
For soon, I discovered not only mountains of compassion and support but also scores of friends, family, and blog readers who’d all had miscarriages.
“Me too.”
“Me too.”
“Five times before. Me too.”
“Just last week. Me too.”
“I’m so sorry. Me too.”
And many of them had suffered their loss in silence. Alone. Living under the burden of what one is “supposed” to do when a pregnancy is lost.
Some thanked me for sharing my story, and my vulnerability, and my imperfection, in the way that I did. Some found it healing. Some found it reassuring. Some found that it made them feel a little less lonely.
And many wished that they, too, had been able to share their own story during their time of loss.
I decided then and there that shrouding pregnancy loss in hushed tones and invisibility is not something any woman should feel she is supposed to do. Instead, by sharing our stories of loss, we are helping light the path out of the forest for others who come behind us.
Strength through sisterhood.
That, I decided, is something we are supposed to do.