“Some people know I’ve had a miscarriage — my family and a few friends — but mostly no one has a clue. I wasn’t far enough along to show. No one can tell from the outside how devastated I feel on the inside. So when someone asks me, ‘How are you?’ I say, ‘Fine,’ but actually I feel like I’m falling apart.”
— Jane, miscarried at 11 weeks
When you have a miscarriage, not only do you lose your pregnancy and baby, you also lose your hopes and dreams of the future. Your body isn’t working the way you always expected it would; you lose control of feeling healthy and ‘normal.’ And it feels so unfair that everyone else can have babies — you want to shout, “what’s wrong with me?”
No matter how far along you were, when a pregnancy fails, you lose a part of your reproductive story. You have experienced a reproductive trauma and this loss needs to be grieved.
A miscarriage is such a statistically common event (at least one in five pregnancies end in a miscarriage) that it is often overlooked or minimized, but it was your baby that didn’t survive, and the pain you feel is real. Your self-esteem may plummet and you may feel alone in your grief. By sharing your story and hearing the story of others, you will learn that you are not alone.
Excerpt from: J. Jaffe, M. Diamond and D. Diamond, Unsung Lullabies, Understanding and Coping with Infertility, St Martin’s Press, 2005. Copyright © 2004-2005 by the Center for Reproductive Psychology. All rights reserved.
Visit us at www.acfs2000.com or download for free the chapter on the Emotional Aspect of Infertility from Dr. Nemiro’s new book – Overcoming Infertility.
