I had my first miscarriage in 1999, before the Internet. It was brutal in every way. Physically, I felt destroyed. At 19 weeks my body was preparing to welcome a baby. After she died inside me, after she was removed while I was under anaesthetic – I wince even now all these years later when I type the word ‘remove’ because it’s so brutally different from the way I’d wanted her to come into the world… to give birth to her… to hold her in my arms.
My empty arms.
The first thing I do when someone I know loses a baby is to tell them to go and buy a beautiful stuffed toy, something soft, and hold it, hug it. The maternal need to hold something after giving birth is primal. And so it can be after having that possibility snatched away from you. I was bleeding, just like after giving birth to a live baby. My stomach was swollen. I was hormonal.
And the milk. Nobody told me about the milk. As I stood in the shower, sobbing, the day after I’d had day surgery and said a tearful goodbye to my daughter while holding my stomach on the way into the operating theatre I was shocked to see milk mixing with the water and my tears on the floor. What the actual…
My body was confused. It wanted to hold a baby. It wanted to feed a baby. And I had… nothing. A cavernous empty hole in my heart where all my hopes and dreams for this baby had lived just a few days earlier.
There was nobody who understood. Oh they tried. They tried so hard. My husband. My mother and father. My best friend. They all tried to talk to me, to hug me, to console me. But I was unreachable. My grief was part bubble, part prison. I couldn’t escape from it and neither did I want to, frankly. All I wanted was to talk with and listen to other women who had experienced what I was going through. It was 1999 though, and I had no way to find them.
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Those shared stories are beautiful and heartbreaking. It both helps me and hurts me to know there are so many others who understand.
One thing that occurred to me, is that while I can see it is well-intentioned, if somebody told me to hold a stuffed toy after my miscarriages I probably would have swallowed my tears but wanted to scream at them. It was obviously comforting for you Mia, which I guess just shows that we are all very different. I've found if somebody shares their loss it is best to try not to tell them what to do, or assume you know how they feel, even when you have been through something similar. I guess it is the caring and hearing their feelings that matters.