The Aftermath

I’d just lost a baby. And it had dropped me into a hell of despair so deep that it hurt just to breathe. My one lifeline, the one thing keeping me going after discovering my husband’s selfish affair, had vanished. All hope gone, in the blink of an eye.

Miscarriage is death. It brings with it all the agonizing grief that comes with losing a loved one. But miscarriage is also a taboo topic. It’s the very reason that we hide our pregnancies during those first dicey months, fretfully waiting for the danger to subside before making any announcements.

When bad news comes, Moms-to-be that lose a pregnancy tend to mourn in secret.

There are no funerals. No memorials. You don’t get sympathy cards or flowers from friends. Instead, routines go on, and you suck it up.

In fact, the only tradition our society does have regarding miscarriage is that you’re not supposed to talk about it. We expect grieving Mothers to buck up and pretend that the little life lost never existed in the first place.

So, here I am, with another heavy cross to bear and another secret to burden my soul. Could I have confided in my friends about all these horrible things that seem to keep happening to me? Sure. But honestly, for me, life is so short and my time with my girls being little is so brief, I just can’t bear to dampen any moment with sorrow. To wallow in the sadness, dwell on the negative and exist in the despair. I didn’t have it in me to tell and re-tell my story because frankly, that is exhausting. I tried to just charge on and be brave, for my girls.

Years later, I still think about that sad day. Would it have been easier to just exhale the truth. Would it have been easier to expose my husband for the cheater that he was? To let everyone know how the Hussy tormented my thoughts, and caused my family to come crashing down? If I could have let people say, “I’m so sorry.” If I hadn’t had to pretend that everything was ok, even as I was in the grips of soul-swallowing grief… would that have made things easier? I really just don’t know.

The one thing that I do know though… Is that the only thing worse than losing the things that meant the world to me is pretending that I lost nothing at all.

If only that is where my story ended…