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TW: miscarriage
My 1st pregnancy ended in #miscarriage. It was almost 14 years ago, but it remains the most awful experience of my life so far.
There& #39;s emotional pain, overwhelming grief, despair, sheer lack of comprehension. There& #39;s terrible, terrible loneliness & emptiness.
1/ https://twitter.com/zoewhittall/status/1248995429322240002">https://twitter.com/zoewhitta...
My 1st pregnancy ended in #miscarriage. It was almost 14 years ago, but it remains the most awful experience of my life so far.
There& #39;s emotional pain, overwhelming grief, despair, sheer lack of comprehension. There& #39;s terrible, terrible loneliness & emptiness.
1/ https://twitter.com/zoewhittall/status/1248995429322240002">https://twitter.com/zoewhitta...
Emotionally, I felt hollowed out, as though the whole of myself had been forcibly excavated from the shell that was my skin, all as a punishment for a wrongdoing I hadn& #39;t committed.
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(It didn& #39;t help that my then-doctor& #39;s 1st words to me implied that the miscarriage was my fault.)
Every movement hurt. I& #39;ll get to the physical pain in a minute, but that& #39;s not what I mean here. What I mean is that every time I moved my body in any way, it felt like plunging
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Every movement hurt. I& #39;ll get to the physical pain in a minute, but that& #39;s not what I mean here. What I mean is that every time I moved my body in any way, it felt like plunging
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even deeper into grief. The world around me was lightlessness tinged with red. Every time I moved my body in any way, all light dimmed even further. It was like being swallowed whole down the lightless gullet of a creature too hideous to contemplate.
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Physically, the pain was excruciating. Worse than the worst menstrual cramps I& #39;d ever had. It felt like someone was stabbing a knife into one side of my abdomen, dragging the blade through my guts to the middle, twisting the blade a round, and dragging to the other side.
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It went on for a week.
I couldn& #39;t get out of bed. If I was hollowed out emotionally, then my body was hollowing itself out physically. There was an excavation going on & my body was doing it to itself. So much blood and tissue. I stayed in my bed and did nothing, saw no one.
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I couldn& #39;t get out of bed. If I was hollowed out emotionally, then my body was hollowing itself out physically. There was an excavation going on & my body was doing it to itself. So much blood and tissue. I stayed in my bed and did nothing, saw no one.
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I wasn& #39;t suicidal. But my entire world was nothing but pain, and no kind words from friends or family made a dent in it. I didn& #39;t want to die, but I certainly had no interest in living. I lay in my bed and stared at the wall as I rode the waves of pain.
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I didn& #39;t know how to ask for help. I didn& #39;t know what I needed, other than for all the pain to stop. I didn& #39;t know what to do with well-meant advice to get back to my normal activities to take my mind off things. "Maybe you& #39;ll feel better if you connect with your normal life."
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I don& #39;t remember getting angry, but I also hadn& #39;t yet grown into the truth that me being angry was an okay thing. (That& #39;s another thread and shall be told another time.) I felt as though everyone around me was an alien speaking an alien language and living an alien culture
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that I couldn& #39;t hope to participate in. I did participate in it. Long story short, three weeks post-miscarriage I sang solos in a series of performances with a visiting choir. Now I think "did I really? how??" But I did. It felt like someone else was up there singing. Not me.
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That whole summer and fall, a zombie automaton went through the motions of my life. It was another year before I started feeling anything like myself again. And it wasn& #39;t until 8 years & some therapy later that I realized: the miscarriage & it& #39;s aftermath sent me into a
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spiral of depression -- on top of previous, undiagnosed depression -- that I only now am really in recovery from.
I& #39;m not crying as I type this, but it took a decade before I could talk about that time in my life without weeping.
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I& #39;m not crying as I type this, but it took a decade before I could talk about that time in my life without weeping.
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And I still count. That baby would& #39;ve been 13 years old in February. I still grieve the life that child would have lived.
I so very well understand my 98yo Grandma, who still mourns the baby she lost in 1944.
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I so very well understand my 98yo Grandma, who still mourns the baby she lost in 1944.
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