BY RENZA SCIBILIA
I wrote this post immediately after a recent miscarriage. Now, a couple of weeks down the track, I am less raw, but still very sad.
The reason I wrote this piece was to try to explain how I was feeling to those around me. I was unable to say anything through the grief. But even though I can now talk about it, I still think that these stories are important because we should be able to freely talk about miscarriage and loss – even when the emotion can be quite confronting.
Today, I am doing much better. The miscarriage took place while I was in New York with my family. We’ve since returned home and I’m back at work and I’m slowly but surely coming to terms with what I have lost. I know that I will continue to feel pain for some time – maybe forever – but each day is a little easier. My family and friends have been an endless source of support to me and I thank them.
I am raw and I know that I probably shouldn’t be writing at the moment. I know that I will regret the words and I know that I will look back and remember the sadness, but not the intensity and pain I am feeling now.
I am bleeding and I am crying and I am sore. Forty-eight hours ago I was 13 weeks pregnant. I was at a friend’s 40th birthday party and was enjoying sharing with people the reason for my little round tummy. Because that’s what you do at 13 weeks. You feel safe and start to tell people. You start to buy clothes a little bigger than usual. You spend $500 on a freaking nappy bag. I shouldn’t have felt safe. My body doesn’t do safe; it does broken.
I have a love/hate relationship with my body. I love it because it allows me to do all the things I need it to do. It gets me up in the morning, gets me out and about. It conceived, carried and delivered my baby daughter – my daughter who is eight years old now and more of a miracle than she will ever understand. It allows me to work in a job I love, do a minimum amount of exercise and do fun things with my family.
But I hate it because I’ve never been happy with it – nothing serious, just in that ‘I wish I was 5kg lighter/had smaller thighs/had better upper arms/had bigger boobs’ sort of way that plagues pretty much every woman. And I hate it because it is broken. Thanks to an immune system that is unable to tell the difference between friend or foe, I have Type 1 diabetes. My own body killed off the insulin-producing cells in my pancreas 15 years ago, so now I wear a pump that infuses insulin into me throughout the day. But most of the time I can deal with this – I hate it and it’s a pain in the arse, but generally, I deal with the diabetes stuff and get on with life.
But more than anything, I hate it because it doesn’t do one of the things it is meant to be able to do – it sucks at being pregnant. Four attempts and one baby. Three miscarriages. I know that there are women who have had more – many more, but right now as there is blood leaking from my body and tears pouring down my cheeks I can only be selfish and think of myself. And the baby that until yesterday was part of the dreams and hopes of my family’s future.