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Journaling
As I read back over my journal for the winter of 2006, I am impressed at the hours and pages I devoted to pouring out my feelings at that busy time of my life; and realize how valuable those hours and pages were at the time, in helping me to process my feelings, and are now as a record. Especially for me, being blessed with a brain that holds onto memories like a sieve holds water. If I didn’t have my journal, I would have forgotten this particular day in January. . .
Why?
An ongoing issue for me in dealing with my first, and subsequent miscarriages, was the desire to understand why it had happened. I was dumbfounded to hear my doctors say, “We don’t investigate miscarriages until you’ve had three.” Reeling from my first loss, it was hard for me to imagine multiplying that pain by three before anyone would throw me a lifeline…
Burial
We had several choices for what we could do with Loila’s remains: have them cremated, bury them, or allow the hospital to dispose of them (“respectfully,” I was assured.) We left her at the hospital for two months while we grappled with that decision and everything else. I wrote in my journal, “Some days, I think I would like [to bury her]. Sometimes I think it would be too much effort, or too much emotion.”
God
One of the very hard things about my first miscarriage was that it felt like God had withdrawn himself from me. I wrote in my journal about one night when I cried, “but not over the baby. I cried for loneliness and confusion. I cried because I prayed for peace and it did not come. I cried because I could not feel confident that peace would ever come.”
Two More Words
“I’m sorry” implies empathy, and empathy is powerful.
I received a wide variety of responses when I told my friends about my miscarriages. They ran the gamut from “You wouldn’t have wanted a handicapped child,” and “It’s a good thing, actually. Mother Nature takes care of the ones who can’t survive,” through “Oh well, I hope you can be as brave as someone else I know,” to a friend who hugged me and wept and just said, “I love you so much!”
Who Is My Depression?
“I think of it as a little child that needs comforting.”
One of my teen-aged children taught me a valuable lesson about mental illness. We were together in a counselling session. As we often do when discussing all sorts of illnesses, the counsellor had been using metaphors of conflict. We “fight” a cold, we “battle” cancer; and similarly, the counsellor, in an effort to motivate my teen, was asking them to “confront” and “combat” the anxiety that was severely limiting their growth and enjoyment of life.
“I don’t like to think of my anxiety as an enemy,” my teen said.
Between 2005 and 2008, I lost four tiny babies to miscarriage. In an effort to help others who may be experiencing similar losses, I want to share the story of that journey. If you click on the title above, and then follow the “Next in Miscarriage Journey” links at the bottom of each post, you can read through my story sequentially.