A Miscarriage Story
By Minna Dubin
First came the breasts. They were humongous. They felt like they’d been filled with air. As if, overnight while I was sleeping, the boob genie had grabbed a bicycle pump, and the little man threw his weight up and down, up and down, until the needle hit “Porno Impossible”—both big and perky. If they hadn’t been so sore, I’d have wondered if perhaps my 11:11 wishes had been crossed with someone else’s, and some flat-chested 16-year-old girl out there was waking up pregnant, while I got fantastic breasts that would make every senior boy wish he was taking me to the prom.
Next came the smells: the sudden aversion to mushrooms and onions and all white meat. The nausea was just paces behind that. With all those textbook pregnancy symptoms, I didn’t understand when the doctor doing the ultrasound told me she was sorry. It’s not like I didn’t know about miscarriage; I just hadn’t considered it. What about the onions, I wanted to scream. What about the boobs!? How could I feel this crappy and not get a baby at the end of it?
*
“Everybody has miscarriages!”
“My sister had two before her boys.”
“My cousin’s friend had one and then was fine.”
“A lot of first pregnancies miscarry, so at least you got this one over with.”
Everyone knows someone who’s had one, or knows someone who knows someone who had a bunch. It’s not their fault; people don’t know what to say. So, they tell a miscarriage story.
“After the twelfth one, she ended up getting pregnant twice in her forties.”
I nod and smile, and try not to think of myself in the papery, hospital gown on the table in that big, cold, silver room. I try not to imagine what has only been described as “suction” and compared to a “vacuum.” When I wake, my breasts are still large and tender, but I know I am empty. I go home, go to bed, and fall to pieces. The practical me tells the dark me that even though I am tired and will be bleeding for days, weeks, I will not stay shrouded in that bed forever. The sadness comes in waves. My partner is not as sad as me, but I need him to cry to see the pain on someone else’s face. He does me a solid, and we weep together, gripping each other on the bed that held our joy.
The next night I realize I am officially no longer a pregnant person. This sort of occasion calls for beer! It’s been two months and the hoppy, amber coolness hits my tongue like a salve. I gulp it down. There will be no polite sipping tonight. Soon enough I begin to focus on other things again. Work regains importance. Family obligations reclaim their hold. Life returns. I am remarkably okay and falter only occasionally, like when I hang out with a pregnant friend who’s due any day. I stay engaged, peppy, even with the birthing talk. But by the time she’s on her knees struggling through early labor pains, the muscles behind my eyes are pulsing and I excuse myself, claiming exhaustion, which is true.
With time and busyness, there is improvement and I stop thinking about my loss, and the suction, and how my body betrayed me. Desire returns for the first time in months. Since its absence sex has become a new animal — scary and exciting, full of relief and hope and sadness. It opens up a new world of recovery I thought I’d already reached.
In the meantime, I find myself compulsively telling everyone my own miscarriage story — part of my healing process, and also aiding some sort of feminist agenda to get the word out that miscarriages are common, which, of course, everyone who’s ever had a miscarriage knows, and everyone who hasn’t doesn’t. The news won’t make their possible future miscarriage any less awful.
*
A couple months after the miscarriage, I find out my friend Tally, who started trying around the same time as me, is pregnant. Without thinking, an invitation for her and her partner to come to dinner at my house tumbles out of my mouth. A reflex response — I am a good friend — that’s what good friends do — celebrate each other’s successes. But the day of the dinner, I am not feeling so good. I don’t want to celebrate my friend being a good woman having a good pregnancy and a good baby. An army of choppy, air-gulping tears marches just below the surface of my face. The thought of sitting across from this happy, pregnant couple sounds like a punishment I do not deserve.
I ring for reinforcements, and call my best friend from back home. Mel and her partner have been trying for two years. A succession of miscarriages, old cans on twine, rattle behind her everywhere she goes. I can hear her vigorously nodding in empathy on the other end of the phone.
She tells me, “It just sucks.”
“It does,” I sniff, knowing we’ve hit the plain and shitty truth of it. “What do I do about this dinner tonight though?” I moan.
“Oh, you should definitely drink at dinner.”
We both laugh. I hang up, feeling fortified by Mel’s empathy and humor. When my partner arrives home from work and cheerily suggests we all drink sparkling cider to celebrate Tally’s pregnancy, I grip the champagne bottle and hiss, “I’m not fucking pregnant. You can have sparkling cider.” My reserves are strong though, and I get through the dinner without getting too drunk or crying or spouting out a poorly disguised, bitter comment.
My partner and I have stopped trying to conceive … though we aren’t trying not to conceive. Still, I am stunned when I realize my period is late a couple months later. My stomach is a mix of knots and butterflies as I lie on the doctor’s table for the first ultrasound to confirm if this one is for real or not. I am squeezing my partner’s hand so tight, and when we see the heart beating and the doctor’s smile, I burst into sobs.
Weeks later, my partner cannot make the second ultrasound, so I beg my friend Sigal to come with me. When I beckon her into the ultrasound room, she looks surprised.
I barely control myself from hysterically screeching as I say, “If that baby’s dead, I need you in there, holding my hand, not in the waiting room!”
“Right,” she nods and dutifully follows me in.
Wet goo on the wand. Cold sliding across my skin. I grip Sigal’s hand, waiting for a sign of life on the monitor. The peanut shape of the fetus appears. We both gasp as it throws its arms above its head and brings them back down. We laugh, all wet eyes and sweaty hands.
*
I know at some point I have to tell Mel. My single miscarriage feels very small compared to what has become Mel’s journey of childlessness. She’s spent tens of thousands of dollars. She’s done the whole shebang — testing, daily hormone shots in the butt, multiple IUIs, countless rounds of IVF. It has been years. Mel is on an island of grief and anger. I call, but most of the time she doesn’t want visitors.
Most miscarriages happen in the first trimester. So, I wait to call her. Then there is the genetic testing. No need to get her upset just to find out the baby has some terrible disease that will kill it before it’s two years old. I wait some more. Each milestone passes without a hitch: the heartbeat, the first trimester, the genetic testing. When I run out of excuses, at 14 weeks pregnant, I pick up the phone.
“How far are you?” Mel asks shakily.
“I’m in the fourth month.”
“Can I hang up now?” she asks, her voice about to break.
I whisper, “Yes.”
*
As my belly grows round and sure in the second trimester, I feel my baby move inside me. After a miscarriage, new pregnancies are full of hope and the constant potential for loss. Each kick to the gut brings a flood:
Boom!
[surprise]
Was that..? Was it…?
Boom!
[exhale] [relief]
Hi, Baby! I feel you!
[tentative tentative tentative joy]
I’m your mama! I feel your strong legs!
[unbridled elation]
In the third trimester, the baby’s movements become visible from the outside. The baby pushes its elbow out (at least, I think that’s its elbow); I push gently, sending the elbow back into the abyss of my womb. Next, a knee. Then, a foot. We play this for months, a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. I laugh till I am crying, then back to laughing. The border between laughing and crying dissolves.
*
Mel hovers on the edges of my happiness. I want to call her, tell her about my game, but I cannot reach her.
“I hate myself. I am such an evil person right now,” Mel writes in an email, explaining why she cannot be in contact with me. Tears fall, but I know the grief-disguised-as-bitterness she’s talking about. I remember the dinner I put on for Tally, how shook I felt just to be in the same room with her good news. I understand that Mel’s sorrow is too great to come near my joy. Still, it hurts to only be connected by the delicate threads of heartbreak. I hope things will be different once the baby is born and my body is no longer a visual cruelty.
*
Ollie is two when Mel says she’d like to meet him. The get-together is brief. I notice the effort in her laughter. I don’t want it to be hard for her to love him. I reach for my butterball boy, hold him protectively against my heart.
Over the years, Mel and I have become “friends” again, but our new friendship has grown over the heartbreak, and heartbreak is the kind of wonky material that never lays quite right again. I love her, even as I miss her. At night I dream that Mel and I run into each other and she’s pregnant. We embrace and cry in the supermarket, on the street, at a house party. In other dreams she’s not pregnant, and walks quickly away from me.
These days, when someone tells me they lost a pregnancy, I say, “I’m so sorry. I lost one once, too.” I’m waiting for the day Mel gets her baby. Then, I’ll be able to tell Mel’s miscarriage story, and how she eventually made her way to motherhood, and maybe, maybe, even back to me.
Minna Dubin (she/her) writes about motherhood and identity. Her literary nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, Hobart, Longridge Review, The Forward, MUTHA Magazine, Parents, and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. Minna’s chapbook Position: Mom (The Fine Print) placed in contests for Tolsun Books, Gazing Grain, and the Disquiet Literary Prize. She is the recipient of an artist enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Minna is working on a book about “mom rage” in 10-minute increments when she’s not texting in the bathroom, hiding from her children. You can follow her on Instagram @momlists.