The Loneliest Road

I actually had to laugh when I saw this card because it captures how perfectly I have been feeling over the past year and a half.

After my PMP, I was thrown into 9 months of medical limbo. During that time, a number of my friends gave birth to babies, and it seemed like an even bigger number were getting pregnant.

There is nothing that makes you feel like more of a failure than watching so many people succeed where you could not. It's a wretched situation and one that I would not wish on my worst enemy.

To add insult to injury, a woman at work had her due date the day after what would have been mine, and so I got to spend the next 7 months watching her get bigger and bigger and trying not to measure her milestones against those that I would never have.

Having a miscarriage is probably one of the loneliest roads one can travel which seems strange to me because for something so common, it is so rarely discussed. It is such a taboo subject that no one ever speaks about because it makes everyone feel uncomfortable. Nothing kills a conversation faster than talking about your dead baby. People are scared to bring up your loss because they are afraid that it will remind you about what happened. What they don’t realise is that not a day that goes by when I don’t think about what happened.

A miscarriage is a life altering experience and the truth is you’re never the same after having one. A piece of you dies along with your baby. Society recognizes the grief of losing a parent, a grandparent, a brother, sister or friend, but it doesn’t look upon losing an unborn child in the same way. It’s a loss that most people aren’t able to understand and so many women are left to grieve silently.

Recovering from a miscarriage in the physical sense is a lot easier than recovering emotionally. Those scars run deep and are reopened regularly. My miscarriages destroyed my confidence in my own body which I used to think was pretty dependable until it failed me horribly over and over and over again. There is no joy in the thought of trying once more to get pregnant - only fear. Fear of losing another baby, fear of the physical and emotional pain, and the fear that the next time might kill me. And yet I will try again. I have to. There really is no other choice if I want to be a mother.

Hello, Rock, meet Hard Place.