Miscarriage.

2025

The original version of this piece started with, “I guess I should state up front: this piece isn’t written for you. It is written for me.” But how true is that really when I am putting it out there for anyone and everyone to read? But it was for me when I first wrote it. It was, as trite as it sounds, some outlet for me after a heartbreaking event. Now I think I can say that it is for us, for me and for you, if you want or need it too. I will offer a content warning here. The below discusses what it was like for me to have a miscarriage. Do not keep reading if that is something you cannot read today, or any day.

When I had my miscarriage I was seven weeks pregnant. I had cramps and light bleeding a few days before, but we got it checked and we saw the baby’s heartbeat forming; the little flicker of white appearing on and off screen. But that morning I felt the blood leak out of me again. A funny thing to me is the blood coming before the cramps. That’s not how it is with my period. The cramps started, they got worse, the bleeding continued non-stop. It got heavier. By now I would move the description away from “leaked” and into “flowed”. I was setting up for an event at work and wasn’t able to leave until another team member arrived. When they did, I grabbed my stuff, I called my boss and told her, and went home, sobbing on the subway. At home my cramps got worse and worse. Every time I moved even a little bit I felt more blood literally cascade out of me. I called the doctor’s office and said I needed to come in the following morning and they booked me an appointment. I felt calmer. I still felt a seed of hope that this wasn’t what I knew it was.

Then I sneezed and it came out. 

I do hope that if you have gotten this far, that the sentence above elicits even a small smile from you. Sneezing your miscarriage out is such a completely silly, ridiculous concept.

It rolled out into my cupped hand and I understood what I was seeing. My breath caught, a phrase I have never really understood until now. I carried it to the kitchen and tipped it into an empty takeout container, the clear, round kind we all have a million of collected in our cupboards if we live in New York. The smaller of the two middle sized ones, in case anyone was wondering. It really is the most useful of those types of containers: it adapts itself for such a wide array of storage needs with this situation being no different. I washed my hands of the blood, and while I knew there was no mistaking the small bean shaped collection of white and light pink tissue I saw, I took the extra step of google image searching “what does a miscarriage look like.” You know, just in case passing something that was the same shape as the image on the ultrasound screen could possibly be a normal part of being pregnant.

In the days that followed, there were only a few people I felt comfortable talking to. There were not many people that I felt really “got it.” Which is fair and unfair to others at the same time—I know people wanted to help but it felt as if there were not enough words to go around for all the people I had to tell. There was a deficit of ways for people to say they were thinking of me and sorry I was going through this. There was a deficit of ways in which I felt I could respond. 

I will admit to you here that before having my own miscarriage, I assumed people were sad, but that they ultimately moved on quickly because the baby was not yet a physical reality in your body. Not yet causing morning sickness, not yet showing, or not yet past the “safe zone.” I was so wrong. Those few weeks were incredible, euphoric, fucking-life-affirming. To lose that—to be losing that all day with nothing I could do but be a witness to the process—was a heartbreak I had never felt before. My first thought when I saw the white tissue was “This is bad because I can’t fix this.” Because I could not. There was nothing I could do to prevent, pause, change, or prolong the outcome of something that had started happening long before the physical signs made sure I was aware of it. 

After it happened I crouched on the floor and howled and howled. For days I dreamed of people from my long ago past dying. I woke up crying every day for five days. And again ten days after that. The puffing around my eyes did not go away for over a week.  

But what I didn’t account for was the fear. The fear when I first started writing this, that I was already feeling about the next time an embryo transfer worked for us. How are people meant to live with the fear it will happen again each time we are pregnant? H O W. It felt like it would not even be a daily fear, but an hourly one, a minute by minute feeling. I held fear that this longed-for thing wouldn’t happen for us: fear about what this might mean about mine and Michael’s bodies not being able to make another body together. But just as bad is the fear that even with one miscarriage I had already moved closer to accepting that potential reality

When I did get pregnant again, seven months and one chemical pregnancy later, the fears did, of course, linger. They manifested in ways that meant it felt like other people were more outwardly joyous and excited about my pregnancy than I was. I knew I was protecting myself, but I wasn’t prepared for how I might protect-myself-out of feeling the excitement. 

We have a baby now, and he is the sweetest thing I’ve ever known. We are lucky, we tell each other that almost every day. I hope you don’t have to go through what I did to get here. But I hope that if it does, that you remember reading this and know you are not alone if you don’t want to be.