Tags
baby loss, community, grief, miscarriage, pregnancy, silence, social mores, speaking out, stigma, support, taboos, talking
Miscarriage is like a secret club – you aren’t supposed to talk about it to anyone who isn’t a member.
There’s a slight problem with that.
If no one talks about their miscarriage, how do you know who you can talk about your miscarriage?
The stigma about talking about miscarriage goes so deep that you aren’t even supposed to tell people that you’re pregnant until the highest risk of miscarriage passes because otherwise you might have to tell them that you had a miscarriage.
And you don’t want to do that… for… some… reason…
Once that dangerous first trimester, which I hate so much, is passed, and your chance of miscarrying goes down drastically, well, then you can risk it.
Here’s the thing – why don’t we want to tell people that we miscarried?
Why should we walk around keeping pregnancy a secret lest we end up having to talk about miscarriage with our neighbours and coworkers?
But the social pressure is strong.
In fact, if you tell a lot of people that you are pregnant before 12 weeks along, people raise their eyebrows. “She’s feeling pretty confident,” they think.
Well, I told a bunch of people. And it wasn’t because I was feeling confident. I knew the risks, and I had my reasons.
First of all, there’s the nature of my work.
I work with xrays and pesticides and vaccines and all kinds of things that are bad news for a developing baby. I could go around making excuses for not helping people with xrays and suddenly pretending to be too busy to help with anesthesia, or I could tell the damn truth.
So I did.
Then there’s the basic rule of “only tell the people who you would also tell if you miscarried.”
Well, hell, that’s a lot of people. After all, I knew that if I miscarried, I would blog about it, so I might as well tell you guys I was pregnant. And since I get, like, 500 hits a day, that’s a lot of people.
And then, of course, I would never hide something as important as a miscarriage from my family, or my friends, so I told all of them, too.
And my daycare ladies, well, they nagged me constantly about giving Owl a sibling, and I knew that if I DID miscarry, I would find that nagging very painful, and I knew that they would never knowingly cause me pain… so I told them I was pregnant, and then I told them when I miscarried.
They won’t tease me about giving Owl a sibling now, and that’s for the best for all of us, I think.
Really, the only people who didn’t know that I was pregnant, or that I had miscarried, were my dog training clients, the clients at my work, and my more distant Facebook friends.
And lately, I’ve been wondering about why I even bothered hiding it from them.
Because now I have to make excuses, and put on a pretence, and I hate it.
I hate getting cheery facebook updates from people who don’t know what I’m going through. I hate having to tell clients that I can’t make their appointment and need to reschedule because I’m going through a “minor surgical procedure”, and do they mind rebooking for next week.
And for what?
Why am I shielding them from my loss? Why is my loss a kind of taboo that one is supposed to consider too private for discussion? Why should I act like everything is fine when it isn’t? Why is their discomfort more important than my grief?
And there’s something else –
If I hadn’t told so many people, then I wouldn’t have received this immense amount of support.
If I hadn’t told the people at my work, I wouldn’t have gotten flowers, and I wouldn’t have been told “take all the time you need!”
In fact, one of my friends got fired for missing so many days after her miscarriage. They didn’t know she miscarried. They just knew she disappeared for a week while still on her first three months probation. So they told her not to come back in.
If I hadn’t blogged about it, my neighbour who reads my blog wouldn’t have known I was pregnant, and we wouldn’t have been able to go knock on the door and hand Owl over so we could go home and cry the day we were told that our baby had died.
If my friends didn’t know, they wouldn’t be texting me offering help, or bringing me baked goods.
And most importantly – if I hadn’t told all these people, none of them would have told me about their miscarriages.
When I went back to work last Friday, three women told me about their miscarriages (and there were only like 8 people there that day).
Even some friends who had never told me about their miscarriages suddenly came out and told me that they had had one, too. If I hadn’t told THEM, they would never have told me, and we would have gone through life neither knowing that the other shared a similar experience.
And I think about two friends of mine, who both miscarried within a short period of time. They both told me, but they didn’t tell each other. And so they both lost a chance to share their grief with a friend, to help each other through a hard time. To this day, they still don’t know that they have this pain in common, and I am bound to secrecy by both of them.
One of these same friends never told her own family. Her grandmother and her mother-in-law both nag her constantly about having children, and can’t understand why she’s touchy about it.
Why cause yourself that kind of pain, and why allow loving family members to unknowingly hurt you again and again? Isn’t that cruel to both yourself and them?
Why do we keep this kind of loss so private?
If someone’s parent dies, they post it on Facebook.
If someone’s cat dies, they post it on Facebook.
But when your baby dies – that’s not something for other people to know?
What are we afraid of?
Is it fear of hearing stupid remarks?
I don’t think so.
Anyone who has lost a pet can tell you that you WILL hear from idiots who have never had a pet saying things like “it was just a cat”, or “just get another one.” And those words are hurtful, because our bonds with our animals are real, and losing a pet can hurt more than losing a relative.
But people still post it on Facebook, even knowing what kind of idiot remarks they might hear.
Is it a feeling of failure?
A lot of women feel guilt after a miscarriage. I thought it too, you can’t help it – your first thought is “what did I do wrong”?
It’s not helped by the fact that assholes have tried to prosecute women for miscarrying.
But the fact is that miscarriage is not the woman’s fault.
The lady at the Early Pregnancy Assessment Centre said something I will never forget:
“We see a lot of women here who are pregnant and don’t want to be. And you wouldn’t believe the crazy stuff they have tried to make themselves not be pregnant… but they still are anyway. Trust me, nothing that happened at your work could have caused this.”
Miscarriage is almost always caused by chromosomal abnormalities, “a mistake of mother nature,” as they called it when I went in for my D&C, or sometimes a structural abnormality with the uterus or cervix or some other medical cause.
It is nothing the woman did wrong.
So why stigmatize it? Why turn it into a silent shame?
Does it sometimes hurt to talk about? Yes. But so does any loss. That’s why people will ask “do you want to talk about it?” when you are grieving. But this is the only one that you’re not supposed to tell people about.
The fact is, I can’t come up with a single reason that really makes miscarriage different from any other loss, except this:
People don’t talk about it.
Because we don’t talk about it, no one knows how to react to it.
Society isn’t set up for it. There are no “sorry for your miscarriage” hallmark cards. There is no accommodation in corporate culture for giving the father-not-to-be time off to grieve and help care for his wife. You can’t get compassionate leave: that only applies to the death of a family member who has already been born, and no one gives you a death certificate after your D&C.
And so we’re trapped in a circle of hurt – we don’t talk about it, so no one knows how much it hurts, so no one gives any accomodation for it, so no one talks about it.
Meanwhile women who work with each other every day may never know that they have both suffered a loss. May never have even spoken of their loss to anyone. May be grieving alone, thinking no one could understand.
Until one day, another woman comes in with the courage to say, “I lost my baby.”
And then the stories come out, and we hug each other, and we cry for our babies… together, as we should be.
I’m going to start using a twitter hashtag: #talkaboutmiscarriage.
Because we need to.
Krysta said:
I had a miscarriage after the three month ultrasound, so I told EVERYONE. I can’t deal with that again. I only tell people I can trust, and who I would need to help out in case of another one. That’s a small list. It’s not worth the massive clusterf*ck it was last time. Crazy religious relatives made everything worse. So yeah, in the event of a need to terminate, I can’t tell anyone I’m related to. I understand why you feel the way you do, but there’s no way I can trust my inlaws and most of my family. It’s none of their business, and I’m keeping it that way until month 4 (my personal “bar” for telling people).
IfByYes said:
How awful for you! This is just what bothers me about the whole thing
I can see how religious wingnuts could complicate things. It infuriates me because the attitudes towards miscarriage shouldn’t cause you more pain, you know?
That’s what bothers me. This attitude that people have that it is the woman’s fault, or that it is something to be ashamed of or embarrassed by.
And because it is so rarely brought into the open, people din’t know how to react. You announce to a stranger “my grandfather died” and they’ll be full of sympathy. Talk to a stranger about your miscarriage and you’re likely to get an intensely awkward pause.
People like that treat miscarriage more like a yeast infection than like the death of a child.
It ain’t right.
mommybydayHi, I'm Natalie. said:
My replacement at work got about 2 weeks of compassionate leave after she miscarried – the culture exists, just not everywhere. I hope it gets better in less compassionate industries.
I think sharing a pregnancy, a miscarriage, an engagement, a separation, any significant life event is an intensely personal choice – there is no shame in any decision a woman or couple makes.
I didn’t tell most people that I was pregnant because I don’t share grief (or joy) with most people – that’s my choice, and it has absolutely nothing to do with feeling shame. At work, I am very professional and share very little of my personal life – that privacy is part of a thoroughly thought-out work persona – it’s not for everyone and it’s not dictated by my workplace culture, but it’s what I’ve chosen for myself. We didn’t tell my in-laws or parents because they would have made the grief of a miscarriage about them – I had no interest in tolerating that. Most of my acquaintances (and many friends that I only see occasionally) found out when I posted on Facebook, after Adele was born. I don’t see anything wrong with my choices.
Do you remember when my friends lost their baby? That was her third pregnancy – they didn’t tell anyone until after genetic testing was complete because of two prior miscarriages. With their current pregnancy, they waited almost 20 weeks to tell even their closes friends, until after genetic testing and the 19-week anatomy ultrasound. I completely respect their decision.
So… I think it’s great when a woman (or man) wants to share, wants any support that may be available. But there is no shame in grieving privately either.
IfByYes said:
Oh I agree. There’s no shame in any way to grieve and no wrong way to do it – that’s not what I am talking about.
I am talking about the REASONS people feel the need to keep it private.
I think that women feel that they will be shamed by others, like poor Krysta above who heard terrible things from her religious relatives.
I think that our society isn’t set up to allow women a non-judgmental way to grieve. I think that the reason women keep it secret is because our society is so full of people who would imply or say outright that it was their fault, or make them feel that they had failed.
And that’s wrong. Morally and factually.
I am glad your replacement was granted compassionate leave. It shows a step in the right direction.
But those steps can only come if we talk about it. If we say “hey, miscarriage is a real loss that should be respected and given the same dignity as other kinds of family deaths.”
And many women who suffer it think that no one will understand, because no one talks about it and so they may not know how many of the people they know have been through it too.
I have watched friends grieve in private, thinking no one would understand, right next to someone who had been through the same thing and understood better than anyone.
This isn’t about how we grieve or whether there is a “right” way. There is no wrong way. I am talking about how the subject of miscarriage is treated by our society and how we can change that.
withenoughcourage said:
Climbing on my little women’s history soapbox, miscarriage HAS traditionally been blamed on women (along with the baby being the wrong gender, the baby being born with any sort of abnormality, or the woman being infertile). And while we are lucky to have moved away from superstitions about witchcraft, infidelity or other personal sins being the cause of miscarriage, there is enough misinformation and superstition surrounding conception and pregnancy (I’m looking at you, Pro-Lifers who would rather women be ignorant about their own bodies than be able to make a choice about their bodies) that I think women are afraid people will blame them, even if they KNOW it isn’t their fault. And quite honestly, the same can be said of sexual assault as well. We women tend to take a lot of blame for pain which was not caused by us, but that we must shoulder all the same.
IfByYes said:
Yes, I wholeheartedly agree. Miscarriage ad attitudes towards it is a women’s issue. Feeling the need to keep silent is like feeling the need to keep silent about rape. So many women get negativity instead of support and that makes them want to keep it to themselves. And while they should have the RIGHT to keep silent about it, they shouldn’t need to or be expected to and that is how it is right now. And that’s wrong.
Krysta said:
Yeah, I personally don’t get the shame aspect, but I’m way more open in The Community and twitter, and I don’t hide it there. That’s for my own sanity. If, something did go wrong, THAT’S who I need in my corner. I’m less secretive with friends, because they were kinder towards me and seem a little more sane. At this point, if someone I know goes through this, I really hope they feel comfortable coming to me. Some people will never get it. And as good as their intentions may be, it comes across badly.
And there is still a hint of blame, I’ve noticed. I got crap for having a (very necessary!) D &C 3 weeks after the likely death. I do not recommend waiting that long. For the prolife extremists, it’s almost a martyr thing? Like, what happened in Ireland, but peope seriously believe that’s acceptable to die needlessly.
I can’t imagine going through what your friend is, with all the nagging and pestering. They’re unknowingly torturing her, and have no clue the damage they’re causing. It makes you wonder how often that happens.
IfByYes said:
I know, eh? I can’t believe people gar you crap about your d&c. It’s crazy. IT’s DEAD, PEOPLE!
Krysta said:
Oh, yeah, that was a shock (only one craxy felt that way. Even my devout Catholic MIL said getting it out is important.) Spoiler: if you wait 3-4 weeks, you get a raging infection and constantly sick to your stomach. Fun times!
TL;DR, some people are dumb. Take professional medical advice. That bullshit? Caused a family fight that is still going on. And I’m not even involved.
Are you recovering well? Feeling decent-ish?
Zoe said:
I miscarried our much wanted third child at 5 weeks and 5 days. I didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant before I miscarried because we had only just found out ourselves. I hadn’t even made it to my first appt yet. Plus I had a gut feeling something wasn’t quite right. As devastated as I was when I lost our baby, I wasn’t surprised. But I did tell a lot of people after the fact (I still do). I sent an email to my husband’s extended family as they often nagged me to have more kids, and I didn’t want to put them in the uncomfortable position of seeing me cry if they nagged me at our next family gathering. Everyone was so supportive, with the exception of my SIL who to this day has not said one word about it. I know she knows because she was included in that email, plus my husband called his brother to tell him. She wasn’t trying for a baby at the time, so I know that wasn’t the issue, but it still hurts that she never reached out to me. And then there’s my own sister, who did reach out when she heard of my loss, yet never told me when she experienced a missed miscarriage a year later (she didn’t even know she was pregnant). I only know because my mum told me. So there was nothing I could do for her because she didn’t know I knew.
When I fell pregnant again, I told my boss and some other colleagues as I was so sick and I had a few extra early OB appointments. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell the world at large for several weeks, as I was so fearful. Luckily, it was a successful pregnancy and my rainbow baby was born a few days after Owl. My sister had another baby too, but she waited even longer to tell anyone. She could hardly believe it herself, even though he was to be her fifth child. I think she was still shell shocked from miscarrying after four successful earlier pregnancies.
I hate the miscarriage club, but yes, the members should feel free to be more vocal about it.
IfByYes said:
I’m sorry for your loss, but I’m happy you got your healthy baby in the end and that you got so much support!
Traxy said:
This is one of the reasons I think it’s very good that you ARE blogging about it. To get it out there in the open. There are those who don’t have the same support systems out there, and I’m sure that being able to follow what you’re going through is very helpful for them. That way, they know that they’re not alone. If it had been me, for instance, I would’ve been very nervous about a D&C and wondering what it’s like, what they do and so on – and having read your account of it beforehand, I would know what it’s about and what happens and would therefore have been able to be more relaxed about having the procedure. So I think it’s an important thing you’re doing in blogging about your miscarriage, as painful a subject it must be. Stay strong! x
Mamma_Simona said:
It’s very, very difficult to find a “positive” when you’ve experienced a loss – irrespective of whether it’s your unborn child or your grandfather.
I attended a Seminar a few years back because I was “stuck” in grief after my grandfather (who raised me instead of my biological dad) died. I had no trouble at all listing everything I felt I “lost” because of his death, but I could not imagine a single “benefit” or “gain” from his passing away.
Dr John Demartini would not let me off the hook or continue with the rest of the group until I managed to “find” something good that came out of his death. (In a nutshell, Dr Demartini’s premise is that the Universe seeks balance, so for every positive there’s a negative and vice-versa. He says that we suffer only when we can’t see the positive arising from the negative).
If nothing else, I hope you realise how your having gone through this harrowing experience, and blogging about it, is helping so many others deal with their own loss. I hope that knowing that some good has come from what you went through (and your sharing of it) brings you some comfort.
Laura said:
There’s that, I suppose.
IfByYes said:
Did you actually manage to find some good in your grandfather’s death?
I don’t know if I need to believe that any “good” came from losing this baby. I think that sometimes bad things happen, and there’s no good reason for it, and that learning to accept that is a hard but necessary lesson. Time heals wounds, and some day, when I hold a different baby in my arms, the pain from this will be less. I believe that things will balance, and enough good will come in the future to balance this bad. But I don’t need to believe that this bad WAS good. Does that make sense?
Laura said:
It totally makes sense. Balance is my essential nature, but that doesn’t mean that I think all bad things carry within them the kernel of a good thing. Life does. That’s something else entirely, and when you think about it, that’s all you need. (One hopes.)
But then, I’m in a different place than you are, emotionally speaking, having suffered a different type of loss. Maybe that makes things different. I don’t know.
IfByYes said:
I think that I can find balance in the things that come after. When I have another child, there will be a balance. One child lost, one gained. I believe that good is balanced by bad, but I don’t think that bad is good, because then by logic good could also be bad, and I think that’s worse. If there is a kernel of good in all badness, then there is a kernel of badness in all good. I think I’d rather that bad things happen, and good things happen, and in the end, stuff usually balances out.
magpiemusing said:
i miscarried my first pregnancy. i told the people who i knew would get it – and some of that was pure ESP. and once you tell people, they tell you about theirs. it starts to seem so … usual.
i hope you’re doing okay.
IfByYes said:
They do don’t they? Yes, I’m getting by…
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Olga Mecking (@TheEuropeanMama) said:
So much is expected of women, to be perfect, to have perfect pregnancies, perfect births, perfect babies, perfect everything, and be perfect themselves. And if something isn’t perfect, they’re not supposed to talk about it. I think society doesn’t want women to feel about miscarriages becasue it’s so random and they don’t want it to happen to them, so they’d rather not think/not hear about this.
mylittlelilypad said:
As someone who has suffered from multiple miscarriages, I just had to comment. I thought this was a beautifully written post. I shared it on facebook with a group of Mom’s that I knew would also enjoy reading. Thank you for this!
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