This is going to be a painful post. Please skip it if you need to. Part of me working through this is writing it out. I know that for quite a few of you, part of working through your own stuff does not include reading a first person account of my physical and mental anguish. Please do what you need to do for you. Take care of yourself my friend.

This post has taken me about a month to write.

RR

If you have gone through something like this, I hope you know that you are not alone. There are so many women who've gone through this and for a variety of reasons we don't really see each other because it's something we don't just openly talk about. It's something I might think about every time I get asked how many kids I have (which is an innocent enough question, certainly one I've asked of other parents before I realized it was a loaded question and potentially quite triggering) but it's not something I openly really talk about with people who aren't close to me.

So I've had some pretty awful nightmares about my miscarriage this past week. One particularly awful night I had two nightmares about the miscarriage and woke up crying with each, then finally got back to sleep and had a dream where I was being chased by and fighting with some kind of monster and it had me and I was fighting to get away and I bit it but really I woke up because I chomped down hard on the side of my tongue. Yea, that sucked.

I don't really know where to begin this story, so I suppose I'll start with my first pregnancy. Mostly it went as expected. I was pretty young, barely 21, when my son was born. He was healthy and strong.

Shortly after he turned 1yr old I was pregnant with my daughter. It was a surprise pregnancy (I was on birth control and nursing my son). The last month of my second pregnancy was awful. I was diagnosed with prodromal labor and told basically there was nothing they could do to help me. The one thing that worked was secobarbital (yes, a barbiturate, which my Dr said was so "perfectly safe" he'd have used it on his own wife if she was in my position) and it didn't stop the contractions, it just knocked me out for a few days. I slept through them. I barely could wake up enough to get to the bathroom, and my baby stopped kicking and that really freaked me out. So I tried just the one dose of that, but decided I'd rather be awake than hurt her. I had contractions between 15 and 3 minutes apart for 28 days. The birth itself was really very quick. Afterwards I had postpartum depression.

My husband had always wanted several kids. The way he saw it our daughter just came a little early, but we'd definitely be having a few more. 

So I had a toddler and a 6 month old when my husband was done with his enlistment in the military. He decided not to re-enlist and we moved back to our home state. I think my daughter was about a year old when I had a tubal ligation (surgical birth control). My husband was not super happy about that.

I was happy that it was one less thing to worry about. I'd been on birth control when I got pregnant the second time. I wanted more assurance. So I went in, had it done. Under anesthesia the Dr cut 2 one cm long incisions - one in my belly button and one just above my pelvic bone. Each had 3 little stitches. I came back 10 days later to have them removed and literally walked out of the clinic bleeding because while removing the stitches the surgeon (same one who'd done the surgery!) had snipped my skin in 2 different places. I was a bit worried about that. Had he been as careful with my organs during the surgery as he had been with the stitch removal? Well, fuck. I hope so. I was pissed. I should have just taken them out myself at home. Ugh.

So...fast forward through the rest of our relationship...we lasted, on and off, for 12 years. 2 years of dating and 10 of marriage. We broke up a few times, living apart, trying to "make it work" and having the whole thing collapse under all the weight of our unhealthy, disfunctional, abusive relationship. By now I was in college part time and starting to feel like I could have a chance to do something productive with my life, fresh starts and all that...

2 years after my divorce I started dating someone. 2 months later we were married. Shortly after that I started to feel... different. A familiar sort of different. Lol. My boobs and stomach felt different. I took a whole handful of pee tests. Sure enough. We were expecting. I was really happy about it. He was really happy too.

I was a bit scared at first about what if it's a tubal pregnancy. The chances of having birth complications like that are greatly increased in the real fucking slim chance that a woman gets pregnant at all after having a surgical sterilization. So I waited. No stabbing pains, no symptoms of something amiss and about to explode in my fallopian tubes. I went on with my regular activities with the happy hope that it would be ok 

Things were good, like really really good until, one day, they just weren't. I started having cramps for a couple days. Spotting off and on too, but that was not alarming considering that I'd had spotting through both of my other pregnancies. Then the cramps got alarmingly painful. I was at work (I worked part time at a local tv station in the control room). The cramps kept getting worse. I left a couple of times to go down the hall to use the restroom. It wasn't just spotting. This was outright bleeding. At 5:45 I ran out of the room again. My co-worker yelled to me "it's almost 6." I said I'd be back. The studio goes live with the news at 6. I needed to be in the control room for that.

In the bathroom it was bad. So much blood. The cramps were awful. Then it happened. Like a clotty splash. I had to get back. I wiped myself off and was shoving toilet paper into my underwear trying not to think about it. I had to look. It was my baby. I had to. It was one of those industrial pressure run toilets that have like an inch of water in the bottom and a cylindrical lever you push down to flush. There was lots of blood, clots and a duck egg sized knot of a body that was silvery whiteish (like a piece of tendon in a chunk of raw roast beef) and so much blood. No, this wasn't happening. Not now. And then I flushed. I went out of the stall, scrubbed my hands off and grabbed a handful of paper towels and bolted for the control room.

It was less than a minute before we went live. My co-worker asked me if I was ok. I shouted no as I rounded the corner back to the control room. After the news brief was over I told him what happened. Someone else came in for the second half of the shift. He must have called somebody to replace me. Or maybe I called? I don't remember specifics. I do remember hugging my friend M and sobbing and her telling me no, this wasn't my fault. I told her I'd lost the baby before I told my husband.

I don't remember saying that it was my fault, but I do remember her hugging me and telling me it wasn't, so even in that first bit of shock and sorrow I think I'd already blamed myself.

The reasons...

So, in the months following the miscarriage I was just sort of floating through the day. I felt lost. I was absent a lot for my classes. Eventually I just stopped going altogether. Things sucked. I tried to pull myself out of it, back into my real world. Nothing helped. I'd watch my son and daughter play and my heart ached. I felt guilty. Why couldn't I just be happy with them? Why did I need another baby?

I'd planned on not having any more kids. What the fuck was wrong with me? Was I just so fucked up that this baby didn't want me? Did I somehow do something to my body and that's why I lost it? I biked. A lot. Like miles every day to get to class and work. Did that do it? Did I kill my baby with exercise?

Maybe it was that one day that I forgot my water bottle. It was about 4 miles to the university from my apartment. I was super thirsty when I got there. Maybe that's when I killed my baby. I dehydrated it to death.

Or maybe it was that night I'd been drunk. Not passed out or anything, just 4 beers and dancing around a pool table. I'd walked 2 blocks home and fell on the stairs. Hit my leg and elbow. Maybe the beers? Or the fall?

Or it must have been that I wasn't eating right. I biked regularly. Sometimes I'd get home from work and be too tired to eat. Or sometimes I skipped breakfast. Not often, but maybe I starved my baby.

What if my body remembered the last pregnancy? The exhaustion, the total mental and physical fatigue, and just said "nope, I'm not doing that again." What if this baby was just too much and I wasn't strong enough to have it.

Maybe my weakness killed it?

Maybe it was the stress of the custody battle. Maybe my body killed my baby because in the stress of thinking I'd lose my kids, I lost this one. Like my body made it happen.

Then the truly bizarre reasons start popping up.

Maybe it was the new laundry soap I bought. 

Maybe my baby could feel the resentment I had towards my ex-husband and decided that it wasn't going to do that. That it wanted a safe place and it knew my life was a shambles and a shit show so it died rather than come be a part of my family?

Maybe the baby knew that my husband and I hadn't named it yet, hadn't even scheduled the ultrasound yet (we'd been talking about names but hadn't chosen one) and so it thought we didn't love it enough to name it so it decided not to come.

Then there was this little gem that truly is the product of magical thinking and grief logic or time travel or clairvoyance on the part of my unborn child. It was the decision that haunted me. I flushed. How how how how how could I do that? This child knew that I was going to flush it away and that's why it chose not to stay. Flushing was proof of my lack of love. It somehow knew I would flush and that's why we lost our baby.

In his grief my husband made a really simple really stupid mistake. Walking home from the bar a few weeks later he tossed a beer bottle he'd snuck out of the bar at closing time and a cop saw it. Husb apologized and leaned over to pick it up the bottle and a bag of marijuana fell out of his breast pocket. So there was that. And of course since weed was illegal there was the whole legal process for that.

And really, that was my fault too. It was my fault he was grieving in the first place. My fault because obviously there was something I did differently with this pregnancy. My first 2 babies had been healthy. My third had died, inside of me. What the fuck did I do wrong?

A month after I lost the baby I was still having clots and cramps off and on and so I went in to the clinic to get myself checked out. It was the singularly shittiest interaction I've ever had with a nurse.