I’m sorry about your loss. And loss it is. A huge loss.
There is a huge difference between losing a baby that is wanted and getting rid of one that is not wanted. Huge.
People who have not gone through a miscarriage probably have a harder time understanding this, and you may have an even harder time understanding what I went through, but we’ll see. When we want to have children, we begin to create them in our minds long before they come into the world. Sometimes long before conception as well.
In our minds, those children are real. We imagine giving birth. We imagine creating a nursery for them. The books we buy. The clothes. The bottles. We imagine changing diapers and breastfeeding and reading and bouncing them on our laps and looking in their eyes and cooing and seeing them smile. Even hard-hearted jerks like me, who don’t like kids until they are like 7 years old, imagine these things.
Slowly, through seeing these things, they become real—at least in our hearts and minds. We actually live with them before they exist, and, in my case, before they have ever been conceived. [Crying break] My wife and I wanted kids for years and we couldn’t have them. The day I found out I was infertile…. well, I felt like an alien. I couldn’t do the one major thing that just about every other human being could do.
I sat on the side of my bed for hours, staring at the wall, wondering how I fit in. I had no idea. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know why I was reacting that way. But all my life I had believed I would be a father, and now I believed I would never be a father. All my life, I had believed in my children. Children of my mind. And now….
Now…. they were all dead. Gone. Never existed. Dead.
They were as real to me as any live baby. And so, I needed to grieve.
It’s crazy grieving over something that never existed, right? Well, we do it anyway. Yet people tell us we’re grieving over nothing and they just don’t get it. They can’t imagine.
You were closer. You could feel that life in your stomach. Maybe you could even feel it kick, although maybe the miscarriage happened before that. We subsequently went on to do various artificial procedures and at one point, my wife had three heart beats on the ultrasound. A week later, there were two. A week after that—one. Scary. We got our daughter from that group, and having one child instead of twins or triplets seems to make the others losses that aren’t so bad. You are desperate for any child so thinking you should have had three seems ungrateful. We were grateful for one.
Your child was real, and you had, whether you are aware of it or not, a whole story going on. You lost that story and most of us, when we lose something that important, need to grieve. It wasn’t the cells that you grieve, it was the child of your mind, which is an awful lot like a child that is physical, because while there is a physical child, the child you relate to is the child who you envision in your mind. We all do that. We relate to our perception of the other person, not to that mass of cells. We relate to our idea of their personality.
You don’t need to explain any of this to anyone except to people who can understand. If the people in your grieving group are all religious… well, I can see how that would be a problem. I tend to translate the language of religious people into something that makes sense to me, but of course I am most comfortable with people who share my view. Maybe there are other grieving groups who are religious. Maybe an online group. Maybe you have to teach your friends to understand it the way I do. Or the way you do.
I am so sorry for your loss. More so now that when I started this comment since thinking about it brought back a lot of old feelings. It sucks. It will not really begin to go away until a lot of time has passed or until you have a new conception growing that can rekindle your hopes and dreams. I hope that happens soon for you and that it goes easily. If you have trouble, I urge you to join a fertility group. For two reasons: one, it is comforting to talk about this shit and two, because people in fertility groups have a much higher chance of having children. I think they stick to it longer. Support makes a difference. We were the second to last two to have kids and in the end, they were biological children. The miracle of modern science. I think this experience will make you more grateful for your child than you might otherwise be. It is easier to appreciate them, and I think that makes you a more understanding and empathetic parent. When you have trouble, you know how fragile life can be. It’s not something to take for granted. You understand where your love comes from and of course, like every parent, it is probably the most powerful thing you ever felt.
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