I keep searching blogs to find someone talking about miscarriage. It’s hard to find. It’s only on medical sites or on online communities where you can read about what to expect and how long recovery is said to last, but nothing on what the mom experiences.
My need for external validation is exemplified when I find myself searching with desperation to name what it is I am feeling. To read for myself that other women survive and come out on the other side of this awful, hole producing ache.
So far, I’ve been comforted by C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed,
“And poor C. quotes to me, ‘Do not mourn like those that have no hope.’ It astonishes me, the way we are invited to apply to ourselves words so obviously addressed to our betters. What St. Paul says can comfort only those who love God better than the dead, and the dead better than themselves. If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to ‘glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.”
In one sense, my experience with miscarriage can be accurately depicted in the grief stages. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. And yet I’ve had to experience the shock of what it feels like acknowledging what was so far from me when I was surviving in denial. I’ve had to feel the shame that comes alongside anger and the feeling of powerlessness that is present in bargaining. I’ve had to walk with them. Wrestle in them. Experience the actual weight of the stages.
I’ve stayed to myself for some weeks, withdrawing from most contact that isn’t predictable or reverent. For the most part it’s been relatively quiet. However, my life has never felt so loud. Never have I tried to silence with such failure something so intrusively deafening.
