19 November 2016

A Different Type of Devastation

The toughest thing for me was not that the pregnancy didn't proceed the way we would have liked. For me, it was the incredible loneliness that was associated with it and the ensuing events.

Physically, I was not alone. I have a wonderful husband by my side who was also dealing with his own grief. And, since we had made the choice to tell so many people, we had a lot of support.

But emotionally, I felt stranded. Everyone was treating me like I should be devastated. Tiptoeing around, both wanting to bring it up and not wanting to bring it up at the same time. All of this was out of love for me & J, this I knew. But I wasn't devastated, not by this. Devastated was what I felt when my dad passed away, like the rug had gotten pulled out from under me and beneath it, the floor was missing. With this, though...I was sad, yes, but intellectually I knew this was the way my body was supposed to work. And I was very sad for J.

And the hormones do nothing to help this sense of sadness, the sense of feeling like an oddball, nor do they help make sense of much. (postpartum depression, I learned, can happen even when the pregnancy doesn't proceed)

I spent a few nights googling "not devastated by miscarriage," or "non-viable pregnancy but feel ok." And I found very little. I found pages and pages of women who wrote they could barely function -- was there something wrong with me?

J told me to get off the internet. And it was true -- all it was doing was making me feel worse that I didn't feel that bad. I was shaming myself to feel something I didn't. Which is dumb. And it was just exacerbating that feeling of loneliness.

But here I am writing on the internet, and you are reading on the internet, so let me say this. The truth is, there is no right way to feel. We all have different reactions, and none of them are wrong. For me, I know that if this pregnancy had been right, it would have remained viable. Instead of feeling devastated, I choose to see this as my amazing body doing what it was supposed to do. So I was not devastated by my miscarriage*. Instead, I was confident that next time it would be different. Or, if it wasn't, my body would again to its job. I chose appreciation and awe.

*yes, I hate the word miscarriage...but this is to help other women who may be searching for that particular phrase, like I had


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