What Having a Miscarriage is Like

I write this now because today was the original due date, and that’s the sort of thing you remember.

I wasn’t far along when I miscarried — less than three months, but close enough to the three-month mark that I’d already begun to buy little gifts to announce it to grandparents and great-grandparents in another couple of weeks.

We were cooking dinner when I started to get cramps. I wanted to believe it was no big deal, but I hadn’t had any since before the positive pregnancy test.

Ever since we had started trying, I had been tracking all of my symptoms and everything about my body in an app. I had become hyper-aware of it all, and once I’d found out I was pregnant, I had enjoyed the symptoms because of what they meant. My body, my breasts particularly, had begun to change immediately, and although I wasn’t nearly far enough along for a bump, I could already see that my body looked different.

But one symptom I hadn’t had was nausea. None. I knew that not everyone got morning sickness, but I also knew that when I had become pregnant at twenty-one, it was my first symptom. But ten weeks along and it hadn’t shown up, and I had been secretly worrying for about a week that something was wrong.

When you’re newly pregnant, it’s hard not to tell people. Your life suddenly feels so different. The common practice is not to tell people until after the three-month mark when the chances of miscarriage go down, but I had decided I’d rather have a support system if things go wrong.

So although I hadn’t told the people who would be most heartbroken if something went wrong, I had told the friends I saw regularly. I had also told my dad the morning I found out I was pregnant because I knew that whatever happened, he could handle it.

He was the first one I texted for advice that night when, after cramping, I started spotting. But he was in a different time zone and wouldn’t wake up to the message for a couple of hours.

In my anxiety, I couldn’t sit down. I just stood there scrolling through pages online. Do these things mean miscarriage? The answer, I gathered, was no, not necessarily, but I still had a bad feeling.

And then it got worse. I wasn’t just spotting; I was bleeding.

I didn’t know if there was something I was supposed to do. What if it wasn’t just a miscarriage and something else was wrong? My mom had an ectopic pregnancy when she was my age and those can be life-threatening.

But I hadn’t yet had my first appointment with a midwife — we had an onboarding with the practice scheduled for the next weekend. I wasn’t officially a patient yet, so I didn’t have any emergency numbers.

I called the maternity ward of the nearby hospital, and they didn’t understand why I had bothered calling. They couldn’t give me medical advice over the phone. (My question had been, should I go to an emergency room or something?) If I was miscarrying, they said, then there was nothing that could be done.

By the time I went to sleep that night, I was pretty certain the pregnancy was over, and when I woke up in the middle of the night, I was sure. The chances that I had bled that much and not lost it were slim to none.

I went to work that next morning. It was a Sunday, but at that time, I was teaching swimming lessons seven days a week. Some of my most traumatic moments have been followed up by working with kids, and it isn’t always a bad thing to have little ones to put on a brave face for, even when it simultaneously makes it hurt more.

I got in for an appointment two days later, and the midwife, who was wonderful, confirmed the miscarriage. She advised that we give ourselves time to deal with the loss before trying again.

I didn’t want to acknowledge it as loss or trauma; I just wanted to fix it. And as immature as I knew it was, I felt like I wouldn’t be okay again until I was pregnant again.

It was strange to tell my friends that I had miscarried. But maybe mostly because I couldn’t help but be casual about it. I didn’t want to make too big a deal of it, and I felt myself reassuring them that I was okay. And I was, sort of. In times of trauma, I am always simultaneously okay and not okay.

On the worst days of my life, while a part of me felt like I was dying (or wanted to), I was no less aware of feelings of love or less capable of productive thoughts. I think it’s the part of me that will always try to survive.

The most difficult thing to deal with was all the changes as my body reset itself to not being pregnant. I had gotten so used to noting each change and considering it to be a good thing. Now, every change was bad; every change meant that I wasn’t having a baby.

I did the sensible thing and got back on birth control. And within six weeks, we were in the midst of a pandemic. The world changed, and so did my partner’s and my financial outlook.

Today, it’s not looking a whole lot better.

Just about every day, my partner picks up one of our pets and holds and talks to them like they’re a baby. It’s very sweet, and it makes me want to have a baby with him.

But now is not the time. I know and hate that it’s not. I also know that when that time does come, assuming that it does, I will be very scared that this will all happen again. While part of me continues to dismiss the experience as not a big deal — I’m really okay! — another part of me is still traumatized.