Knowing what I know now I will act differently in any subsequent pregnancies. I will not hide the fact that I’m pregnant like a dirty secret for the first trimester. There is no reason to hide it. They say that it is so that we don’t have to tell everyone if we have a miscarriage. I found that I wanted to tell EVERYONE when it happened. And I did. I started texting people who I had never told I was pregnant in the first place to tell them my grief.
It got me thinking that there is no reason to hide it. Miscarriages are happening all the time to people all around us. 1 in 4 women suffer a miscarriage in their lives. I am one of those 4, but with the amount of people we know, the likelyhood is that many of the people around me have suffered through it as well. I know about a few but as I share my story more and more women are coming to me and telling me their stories.
Most women suffer in silence. They may talk to a few family members and their partner, but they don’t have anyone else to talk to about it. There are forums and Facebook groups that are terribly helpful, but sometimes you just need to be able to vent to someone who knows exactly what you are talking about. I’m lucky that I have a couple of family members who have experienced similar situations and they are willing to let me talk to them and ask them questions. It’s part of the grieving process.
Not everyone is as lucky. I hope that the movements that have been coming up in the last few years (from what I can tell) to get people to be open about their losses keeps progressing.
Of course I’m not saying that you should share it if you don’t want to or are uncomfortable doing so. It is definitely YOUR decision to make. My point is that it is YOUR decision and not just the communities decision that says it’s taboo to do so.
I haven’t experienced this, but I know that there are people who will tell women who announce their pregnancies early on that they are jinxing it. That they will have bad luck. Simply a bunch of negativity. It simply isn’t true.
We shared the news of the pregnancy with our parents, my siblings and nieces and nephew pretty early on. Then the Friday before we found out the baby had stopped growing we told his siblings and grandma. Doing this did NOT cause the miscarriage.
As I mentioned, the miscarriage was destined to happen as soon as sperm met egg. There was something wrong with one or the other or the combination of both. But there was absolutely NOTHING we could have done to know or to cause or to prevent the miscarriage from happening.
