Losing James
I walked into the Pregnancy Loss Clinic on Monday, May 8 (the birthday of one of my children), drowning in trepidation. I couldn’t believe that my miscarriage could be successfully managed without a D&C. I was sure there would be something in my medical history that made me ineligible for the medication, or that the process would fail. We were met by a motherly nurse who wrapped me in a big bear hug, and then proceeded to administer the medication. I wrote in my journal that afternoon:
My cramps began within an hour. I took one of the Tylenol 3’s [the nurse] prescribed. I’m snuggled on my bed at home, Andrew is upstairs with the children. I feel a great sense of relief and peace. The waiting and wondering are done. When the cramps get strong, I feel, emotionally, like I am experiencing labor. And I am happy that I can say goodbye to this baby through the natural processes of my body. I am at home, my children are here, and when things get difficult, Andrew will come and hold my hand.
At 11 PM that night, I passed a mixture of blood clots and tissue (“embryo, gestational sac, I don’t know”) and my cramps immediately stopped. My miscarriage was complete.
There were plenty of tears, of course, in the days that followed. I wrote, “It feels rather desolate, again, not to be pregnant and to have no baby in my arms. Lonely.” But I did not experience anything like the acute grief, specific to the particular baby I had lost, that came after losing Loila. The tears dried up within a week or two.
At the end of May, I wrote in my journal:
I have been very calm and happy in the last week and a bit. Sometimes I feel introspective and sad, but I don’t cry. I think in all the anxiety of that pregnancy I never really bonded to my baby. I feel a little guilty about that, and sad - one more thing my two miscarriages robbed me of. It’s hard to think of never having the opportunity to love your child as a blessing.
That bond with my baby was pivotal to how I felt in the aftermath of my miscarriages. The bond between a mother and her child is a powerful thing, and can become very strong, very quickly. It might be an oversimplification to describe it as a switch that was either off or on, but at the same time, it wasn’t something that developed gradually over the nine months of a successful pregnancy. My love for the babies I was blessed to bond with was rich and whole within weeks of their conception.
It was a very real love for a very real individual.
I can divide my four miscarriages into two categories. My second and fourth were deeply traumatic disappointments, but no more. My first and third (Loila and Grace) I experienced as the loss of a child. I do not believe my grief would have been significantly different in degree if I had carried them to term and lost them after they were born. I don’t think many people realize that a mother can hold the same love for an eight-week fetus as she does for her newborn.
One of my children liked the name James, so we named this little one James.
