This is undoubtedly the beginning of the hardest writing I’ve ever done. 

In a two-and-a-half year time span, from my late thirties into my forties, I went through a series of experiences that devastated me - shook my faith to its foundations - broke and remade me. More than anything else I’ve experienced in my admittedly sheltered life, more than world events from 9-11 to pandemic, more than education, career, marriage, the birth of my first child, the emptying of the nest - this was the landmark event that divided my life into before and after.

I lost four children to miscarriage.

From the first, I knew that one day I needed to share this journey. Somebody had to. Nothing of my prior experience, including the births of six healthy children, had prepared me for the physical and emotional experience of miscarriage. My friends and I exchanged countless stories of pregnancy, labor, and the adventures of caring for six pounds of brand-new, helpless humanity, but no one talked about miscarriage. It was something that “happened”, and the conversations never went further. A search on the subject at my city library identified hundreds of books on pregnancy, but only six on miscarriage. 

I found myself lost in a nightmare with no points of reference: I want to offer one to those coming after me.  I sincerely hope, by writing my story over a series of blog posts, that I can provide some comfort to another woman bewildered by loss and physical trauma, or help a bystander to view with more compassion and sensitivity a friend or family member experiencing miscarriage. 

Let me emphasize: this is my story, and nothing more. I have no formal training on the obstetrics or psychology - sadly (but perhaps necessarily) everything I know about miscarriage and loss, I learned by living it. Most importantly, please understand that every person’s experience of every separate miscarriage is unique. The grief you feel at the unexpected end of a pregnancy can be overwhelming, or it can be almost non-existent. I will be addressing this more as my story unfolds, but in the meantime, if you read my posts and think, “Wow, I didn’t feel like that at all,” it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. Or me. 

And let me assure you, healing was long in coming, but it did happen. There was a time when writing even this prologue to my story would have prostrated me; a time when every day, every hour, every minute, was filtered through a lens of grief. Today, as I write and remember, there is a poignant, almost sweet sadness in my mind and body. That is all. And happiness is no longer a herculean effort: happiness is easy.

You will reach that point, too.

One last note: thanks to the poet Kimberly Johnson for permission to use her beautiful poem, below.

My goal today is just one sentence - one sentence that adequately states what I experienced between October 2005 and June 2008. It's harder than you might think. To this day I'm not sure if the term "miscarriage" refers to the moment the fetal heart stopped beating, the labor - and it was labor - of expelling that fetus from my body, or the entire time - weeks, in my case - between those two events. I didn't know how to choose a verb tense during those harrowing in-between weeks. Was I going to have a miscarriage? Was I having a miscarriage? Had I had a miscarriage?

And now, looking back fifteen years: should I say. . . .

I had four miscarriages.

So inadequate - it strips all humanity from the little souls I lost. When I talk about my healthy, ninth-month labors, I never say, "I had a birth." I had babies. In fact, I gave birth to people who are now taller (some of them) and smarter (all) than I am.

I miscarried four times.

Now I'm doing it alone. No mention at all of the precious entities who, for eight weeks or eleven or nineteen, drained my energy and made me nauseous; who in such a short time grew arms and legs, fingers and toes.

I miscarried four babies.

This is closer. But putting "I" as the subject, and "miscarried" as the verb almost implies intentionality - accountability - control. Guilt wasn't much of an issue for me, but control was. I had no control.

I lost four babies to miscarriage.

I lost four children to miscarriage.

(Next in Miscarriage Journey) I Didn’t Know