One would hope that something that happens so frequently would be discussed. But overwhelmingly, it’s not—until, as I learned, you join the miscarriage club yourself.
For an LA storytelling show in 2009, I wrote and performed an essay called “The Cinderella Instinct,” a piece detailing that cut-and-run gut feeling nearly every woman in her 20s cultivates from continuously escaping predatory men. Easing the audience in with the softball line, “Every man is a potential rapist,” I launched into stories detailing the many times I’d quite literally run away from an uncomfortable situation with a possible predator—from hopping out of a convertible at a rolling stop in Hollywood to sprinting from a shirtless Frenchman through a deserted, deeply unsavory part of Nice.
At the essay’s conclusion, I reflected on how, while I’d escaped potential assault throughout my life so far, 1 in 6 women do not—including some of my best friends, and my sister, whose story I shared with her permission. Perhaps my “luck” was partly because my stories had involved strangers, whereas assault has always been more likely to occur from someone you know, as it had with my loved ones. “So who that I know is the real potential rapist?” I’d written in the original essay. “Is it you?”
Granted, they made me cut that final line in my performance, deeming it a bit too much truth telling for a comedy night. Because of this, it wasn’t until some handful of years later, with the advent of #metoo, that I thought we might finally be ready to address the question—and that things might start to shift.
Reader, we did not cleanse the world of rape culture. But, at least, we began to talk about it, and to me, that felt like progress.
A decade on, I’d survived the end of my twenties, and spent most of my thirties setting the stage for a deeply healthy marriage (pro-tip: couple’s therapy while dating!). Then, I fell face first into yet another hidden gem of womanhood—a very different pile of bullshit our culture has encouraged women to shovel through in silence.
I had a miscarriage.
While there’s been a slow thaw towards openly talking about miscarriage thanks to social media, the word itself still contains an air of old-timey superstition and precious shame in most everyday contexts, something I would quickly learn in the aftermath of my own. Even now, chatting with friends or neighbors, I’ve found the word “miscarriage” invokes an involuntary wince, in both myself and others, because it’s just not something we talk about in a casual way.
Meanwhile, in a medical setting, doctors will bluntly inform you of how wildly common miscarriage is, ending 1 in 4 pregnancies, mostly in the first trimester and often before you’ve even realized you’re pregnant. One would hope that something that happens that frequently would be—I don’t know—discussed? But overwhelmingly, it’s not—until, as I learned, you join the miscarriage club yourself.
I’m not going to get into the public political discourse on pregnancy here—that would require several books, not an article. But with the trend of states legislating a stranglehold on women’s reproductive rights, it feels more important than ever to have open, candid, and clear conversations about the reality of pregnancy—including potential miscarriage. And that means sharing our stories, no matter how uncomfortable, so that we have a realistic, informed, and nuanced view on the many things becoming pregnant can entail.
So, here’s mine.
I’ve never felt the clicking of my biological clock, but after blissfully devoting my 30s to self-producing edgy physical theater with my co-performer-turned-husband, I realized if we wanted to procreate, we’d better get a move on. So, we survived a global pandemic, got married, and had a year’s worth of unprotected sex—until one day, just like I learned, I peed on a stick and found out I was pregnant. Like magic!
As an information-seeking, newly pregnant woman of advanced maternal age, I’d already worked hard to mentally prepare myself for possible miscarriage. I knew the 1-in-4 statistic, how spontaneous miscarriages are very normal, and that they’re often chromosomal and don’t mean anything negative about a couple’s ability to have children. Still, in the early days of my pregnancy, my mind raced, mapping out the ticking 40-week time bomb of our life. To me, my pregnancy was real the minute that pee stick said so; and I took any advice I could find, whether from doctor friends or the internet, avoiding deli meat and sushi, abstaining from alcohol and Advil, and quitting my nighttime melatonin. At the same time, I tried to hold the simultaneous truth that this pregnancy could be nothing—that I could be one of the unlucky ones—trying to temper my own anticipation until enough time had passed to make it “real.”
To make matters worse, I’d found out I was pregnant a few weeks before my husband and I were scheduled to shoot pick-ups in Los Angeles for the film adaptation of one of our aforementioned edgy plays. I was dismayed to learn the doctor wouldn’t see me until I was 8 weeks pregnant—right when we were out of town—because of the prevalence of miscarriage in the first trimester. As she explained, it wouldn’t make sense for them to see me until the pregnancy was really viable, so they scheduled my check-up for when I would return to New York, at the top of week 11.
Lacking a doctor’s guidance, I felt like I needed a master’s in philosophy and a zen Buddhist practice just to navigate the mindfuckery of early pregnancy. This potential baby was both alive and not at the same time. It was Schrödinger’s Cat, but in my womb. During this time, I also had several experiences where I’d cautiously divulge to a trusted friend that I was in my first trimester—always sharing that I knew I was “not supposed to tell anyone.” But nearly every time I offered that caveat, people would actually shush me—as if uttering the word “miscarriage” while pregnant would invite it in. They insisted that if I believed things were okay, they would be; and as time continued to pass, I grew more confident that they were right, that I could trust my pregnancy was real. My cautious internal caveat of “I could miscarry” began to lose its footing. In my mind, Schrödinger’s baby was alive.
Back in New York, my husband and I excitedly went to our doctor’s appointment. The vibe was immediately optimistic and pleasant: We’d just made it to week 11, and after having a discussion about all the nightmare things we’d have to monitor for the next 30-odd weeks, things felt pretty real. Then, we got around to the ultrasound. At first, the doctor couldn’t really “find” the pregnancy visually. Which… seemed bad. Then, once she did, she noted that it looked closer to 7 weeks, not 11.
The vibe shifted.
The doctor asked about the timing—could we have mistaken the date of conception? In response, I showed her my overachieving honor student psychopathic period tracking data, and her expression changed. Suddenly, the life-changing timeline that had taken shape over the past weeks started to crumble. The following week’s nuchal translucency, done at week 12, was changed to a “dating sonogram.” Later, in my patient notes, I saw it was actually to check viability: No heartbeat had been detected.
While I was too blindsided to think clearly, my husband luckily had the presence of mind to ask what all of this actually meant. Finally, the doctor explained how the sonogram was to confirm if this was an “abnormal pregnancy.” If it was, we’d discuss next steps of how to “remove” it, and we’d be able to “try again” basically right away.
Since this was a Friday appointment, we would have to wait an agonizing weekend before getting official answers at Monday’s sonogram. During two endless days of a new, unwelcome brand of uncertainty, I sat in my paradigm’s reversal, going from 95% sure I was pregnant to 95% sure I was not. In this purgatory, I tried to catch up to a new reality while still occupying the old truths I’d come to accept. Like a prayer or superstitious tick, I kept avoiding lox, soft cheese, and alcohol when we went out to eat, but I also cried for hours in anticipatory mourning.
That Monday, the doctor confirmed I had, in fact, miscarried a couple of weeks prior. Turns out there’s a thing called a “missed abortion,” where you miscarry but it doesn’t actually leave your body, and you still feel totally fine. I’d always thought miscarriages were marked by cramping and bleeding and a big event—but no, mine was just straight chilling in my body for weeks, something I found horribly disturbing, but is medically normal. (Yet another thing no one talks about, and something I only learned of after it had happened to me.)
Going through the psychological whiplash of accepting that I was no longer pregnant felt even harder given all those hushed conversations that had preceded it. I felt like this pain was something no one wanted to hear about, or talk about—that I wasn’t allowed to talk about it. But then, something surprising started happening. The minute I would get over the fear of divulging my story—and the fear of making other people feel uncomfortable, sad, or awkward by being truthful about what I’d been through—all of these other stories began emerging around me. Women I’d known for years began privately sharing their own experiences with me—how they’d miscarried both before and after carrying successful pregnancies, how they’d had to endure D&Cs during IVF, how they had held the image of their future child in their heart and had struggled to let it go. Once I learned just how many women around me had carried the same pain, the powerful loneliness around my miscarriage fell away. And while feeling grateful for the empathy and support these shared stories gave me, I also felt sorrow that I’d never heard them before—that these women only now felt like it was safe or acceptable to share them with me because I’d gone through it, too.
It was also through hearing about other women’s experiences that I learned, in at least one respect, I’d been very lucky. One small silver lining of my story was the team of spectacular women doctors who saw me through my miscarriage as quickly and empathetically as possible—something a doctor friend informed me is “very unusual for OBs.” They worked to get me seen within the week of my sonogram, and upon noting my distress, the doctor doing my D&C worked to fit me in at the hospital the next day so I could go under anesthesia. When I thanked her for all her efforts—knowing how glacially slow the medical world usually works—she simply said, “1 in 4 of us have been there, we know how important it is to get past this as quickly as possible so you can heal.” That same empathy was echoed by virtually every woman who saw me through my care, from both of my doctors to the receptionists booking my appointments to the nurses in the hospital. (Weill Cornell… Thank you.)
Still, it took me nearly a year to feel well enough to write about any of it. This is partly because I had to grapple with my own internalized conceptions of what a miscarriage “means,” even while knowing intellectually that it does not “mean” anything. I was raised on a German workhorse ethic, believing anything I put my mind to I can make happen, so a “failed” pregnancy did not fit into my sense of self. Plus, navigating the term “infertility”—which suddenly gets slapped on you medically after miscarriage—has been far from easy, especially in a culture that seems obsessed with women’s reproductive viability, and how many years past the age of thirty they dare to age.
But as I’ve worked to come to grips with these many things that lie beyond my control, I hope that sharing my story can help start some necessary conversations. That maybe my sharing will help someone feel a little less alone in the same way so many women helped me feel a little less alone, too.
I won’t sugarcoat it: Miscarriage sucks. It’s sad. And no one likes talking about sad shit. But based on my own experience, I think we need to talk about it. Because when we don’t—when we carry it alone, when we shush the possibility of its existence—we give it unnecessary weight. So many others are carrying this, have carried it—and it shouldn’t feel so heavy. But to make that possible, we need to catch up culturally to the reality of miscarriage medically: It’s normal. Often, it’s your body resetting from a pregnancy that was not ready to cook. Whatever the root reason, it’s not a failure. It’s just another one of those things that happens.
When we stigmatize miscarriage by refusing to talk about it or treating it as a tragedy, we’re setting women up to feel isolated and broken, to feel like they’ve failed. I’ve found that, by talking about my own miscarriage openly, without hesitation, I’ve helped redefine what it means to me personally: It’s not a failure, and no one is to blame. It’s just another one of many steps along the road, a moment of sadness I’ve endured and moved beyond. It can feel tragic, but it is not a tragedy. It is normal. You’re normal. And if you need to feel sad, just know: There is a whole world of women out there sharing the weight of this with you, whether you realize it or not.
~
Author’s Note: I’ve referred to people who can get pregnant in this essay as “women,” as it is a deeply personal story, written from my perspective as a woman. However, with so much rampant transphobia in culture and politics right now, I want to make clear that people beyond the traditional gender binary can get pregnant, and can also experience miscarriage—and I emphatically believe they should be included in this conversation.
