Breaking the Silence Surrounding Miscarriage
On Christmas Eve, while everyone was busy with last-minute gift-wrapping, I was at the drugstore buying a pregnancy test. After confirming my hunch at home, I told my live-in boyfriend of several years, and we immediately embraced. We both have sons from previous marriages (ages 9 and 11), and we loved the idea of expanding our blended family. Having recently turned 40, I was thrilled at the chance to have another child with the man I love.
Over the next few weeks, I experienced morning sickness, achy breasts and more textbook pregnancy symptoms. But there were plenty of highs, too. Late at night, my boyfriend and I would run through the possible reconfigurations of our guest room to accommodate a crib, and how much time we had before our baby would be walking and we’d need a bigger house.
I was about nine weeks pregnant when we had our first sonogram. I’d been feeling fewer symptoms (a potential sign a woman is further along) but at the appointment, I started to feel like something was wrong. Finally, I drummed up the courage to ask the technician what she saw on the fuzzy black-and-white screen. She shook her head and said, “I don’t see a baby.”
STORY: I Had a Miscarriage and Blamed Myself
Your heart isn’t the only thing that sinks upon hearing those words. Everything sinks. My boyfriend and I embraced just as we did when we first learned we were expecting, but this time there was a current of sadness between us. But while it hurt, neither of us was shocked. We’d been here before, in the very same sonogram room, almost two years prior. This was our second miscarriage.
Women are born with a finite number of eggs. Unlike men, who regenerate sperm, we don’t regenerate eggs, and our strongest and healthiest — or as I like to call them, the “most likely to succeed“— are tapped in our 20s, when many of us are busy kicking off careers and making student loan payments. The last thing on many women’s minds is that their most valuable players are ready for game time. But the clock ticks. “As women reach their thirties, there is a sharp decline in the number of fertile eggs, and a steeper decline as they reach 40,” Jane Frederick, M.D., a specialist in reproductive endocrinology and infertility in Orange County, California, tells Yahoo Parenting. As a result, 20 to 35 percent of pregnancies between the ages of 35 and 45 end in miscarriage, according to the American Pregnancy Association.
Yet, despite how common miscarriage is, it’s also the least discussed pregnancy complication. It affects one in five women, though many doctors think it’s closer to one in four because so many of us don’t tell anyone when it happens — and that’s the real shame of miscarriage. The death of a child is one of the saddest, most painful and incomprehensible forms of bereavement to acknowledge. When it happens, no one knows what to say, and so it becomes easier to say nothing. But for most of us who experience one, we lost a baby. To the outside world it may not have existed yet, but it certainly did to us. The silence can leave women feeling lonely, guilty and for some, even shameful. Guilt because our bodies failed during the first step towards motherhood, and shame that perhaps we did something wrong.
STORY: What Happened When My Daughter Asked About My Abortion
Somehow that just seems wrong. Each time it’s happened to me, I’ve wished for the social license to tell more people so they’d understand why I’ve been “under the weather” and had so many doctor appointments. I longed for the support and empathy that comes with finding the right kinship at the right moment. Unfortunately, that’s just not how it goes. Instead, most of us go on with our lives pretending everything is normal. “So many women are experiencing the same thing, but without anyone talking about it, no one knows what to do,” says Frederick.
Chances are, we each know someone who has experienced this unspoken tragedy. Isn’t it time we break the silence?
Please follow @YahooParenting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Have an interesting story to share about your family? E-mail us at YParenting (at) Yahoo.com.
