I had a miscarriage on January 19, 2004. I was twelve weeks pregnant. It started at home with light spotting and a feeling of something being off. As the day went on, the bleeding got worse and by the afternoon, I called my husband to meet me at the doctor. I was frantic. By mid-afternoon, I was in the cramped parking lot at my obstetrician’s office, my two year old son in tow. I parked as a woman in the car next to mine fiddled with her phone. I couldn’t open my son’s door; she was too close. She saw but ignored me. Finally, I started to cry. And then I screamed at her.
“Lady! I’m having a miscarriage right now! Can you pull out so I can get to the doctor?”
She was horrified, mumbled something, looked sick, avoided my eyes and quickly drove away.
My husband met me in the office. He had the firm look of denial on his face. I was sweating, terrified, and bleeding. He took our two-year-old and I went to the rest room while the front office got the on-call doctor up to speed.
And that’s where it really happened. I was alone, with paper towels in the rest room at my doctor’s office. And, it was horrific. I cried, tears racking my body as I lost more and more blood. I was shaking, disbelieving, on auto-pilot, cleaning, crying, and shooing away knocks on the bathroom door. I was suspended in time, but I’m sure it was at LEAST twenty minutes, maybe more. I remember sweating, and crying, and cleaning and crying, and cleaning. I was so concerned with not leaving a mess. And the lights; the bathroom lights were so bright, fluorescent bright lights shrieking at me as I lost my baby.
Finally, I went to an exam room and we all looked at a blank, still ultrasound screen. There were no little blips of a heartbeat. There was nothing. Just grey fuzz. I cried. I was a shell. My husband was stoic, holding our son—why did he bring him in room? I guess because he was only two, where would he go? The on-call doctor retrieved my doctor. She grabbed me in a hug and cried with me.
I was numb. I was exhausted. I was lost. Finally, there was nothing more to say or do. We stayed a few minutes, I got as cleaned up as I could, and we went home. I slept. I cried. We cried. I spent the weekend resting, feeling everything, feeling nothing. We told our family.
Our baby was gone.
And then, I talked about it. It was a death to me. To us. And my friends, my real friends did what friends do: they sent flowers, they brought meals, they cried with me, they hugged me and made soothing noises. I also found that I wasn’t alone. Of course I wasn’t. Miscarriages are common. They just aren’t readily talked about.
What surprised me, what filled my heart, was the response to my vulnerability. People, not just friends, but acquaintances, the woman I sat next to at spin class, the aerobics teacher at the gym, they all scooped me into a giant hug and held me until I no longer needed holding. They told me their stories. And my pain became their pain. Together we healed.
And, it made some people uncomfortable. And that was just too bad.
It’s hard to be authentic. We risk rejection. We rationalize hiding our true selves. On one level, it makes sense. And yet, it makes no sense. If we don’t share our true selves, then who do we share? Many people, even those we consider friends, won’t respond to honesty and depth. But then we’ve learned something. We have further defined that relationship. So many friendships bloom when fed with truth and openness. And, we grow closer, we grow stronger. We see that we are not alone. We speak our soul, and we are heard.
We all share life experiences and grow from honesty and openness. What isolates us is silence.