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A year ago today…Posted by Kristina Sauerwein
A year ago today, my husband and I lost our girl.
She was only 10 weeks old. We never met her but saw her bean-like self wiggling on the ultrasound screen, twice. We loved her in the unconditional, heart-bursting, all-encompassing way of most parents.
We still do.
A few people have asked if we still think about her. If we’re doing better now that we have another baby on the way. If we’ve gotten over the miscarriage.
And my question is: Do you ever get over a pregnancy loss?
For us, the answer is no. We are able to function normally day to day, and we have laughs and good times. Of course, we’re thrilled about having another baby. But does this baby replace the one we lost? No. The worst thing I think about loss, and it didn’t hit me until I was pregnant again, was that I couldn’t enjoy being pregnant again. The innocence of the excitement of early pregnancy was taken away, and I spent every day fearing to go to the bathroom, fearing every little vague pain, expecting the beginning of the end.
Would it be more difficult if we had trouble conceiving another child or if we lost another one? Yes, it would magnify the sadness and grief to a whole other level. But nothing takes away our feelings about the girl we lost.
I have many girlfriends who have suffered pregnancy losses. Some of them feel like I do: There will always be an ache and an emptiness inside of you that will never go away. I have one very-strong friend who had four miscarriages and delivered twin boys at around 20 weeks. The boys lived for only a few hours. Today, she has healthy 2-year-old twin girls. But she misses all of the babies she lost–and, she says, she always will.
Some of my other friends say they don’t think about their miscarriages much. They were sad for a few weeks and then the experience was put behind them.
No matter how we react to a pregnancy loss, we mostly do so privately. For in our culture, it seems like this is one subject we don’t discuss much. When a loved one dies, there are condolences: cards, flowers, meals, ceremonies. When we miscarry, a few folks might acknowledge the painful loss, but for the most part, it doesn’t seem to rise to the same level. In fact, I found that many people never bring it up, as if it never happened, as if the baby you were nurturing inside of you and eagerly awaiting never existed.
The silence is one of the loneliest feelings.
So we go on quietly. Our pain hidden. Stashed away for the sake of propriety.
Which is sad because miscarriage is so common. The American Pregnancy Association estimates that 10 to 25% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. That’s roughly one in five pregnant women. Most likely, if we all asked around, we’d discover that we know lots of women who have miscarried.
And I wonder: How many of us are walking around grieving our babies we never got to hold?
Posted 9/17/08 3:26 PM
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