How I Healed After My Miscarriage

Some lives are long, and some are very, very short, but they all make their mark.

That’s the sentence that came to me from somewhere that felt very much outside myself in the days after we lost the little sprout that we believed would be our second baby.

I’m a fairly private person, so I’ve struggled with how to discuss this here. But I talk so much about finding bliss and equanimity and peace even through the hard days, and there were no days I’ve had that were as hard as those.

So I’ve decided to open up a bit, and share how I found my footing and began to heal after this loss.

Note: If you don’t think you can handle hearing the details of a miscarriage, this isn’t the post for you. I have decided to do something scary, and that is to write honestly, which is something I am tired of being afraid to do. That’s a topic for another post, but suffice it to say, this will be a post that does not hide from life’s more uncomfortable realities.

First of all, miscarriage is something very few people talk about, but it is very common. I think it’s so difficult to discuss because it most often happens well before you begin to look or even feel pregnant. We had only told our families, and so in a sense, unless we said to everyone, “Hey, we had a miscarriage,” it was invisible to almost everyone, making our pain private and lonely. (I actually wrote to my closest friend in the days afterward, telling her, I said, so that she could be witness to this event in my life. I’m so glad I did, as I could not let this little life go without my closest friends helping me to acknowledge it.)

1. Reach out to friendly ears. Don’t go it alone.

When we found out we were pregnant again, we were stunned and happy. We were hoping to have a second child, but we were surprised at how quickly it happened, since our son took us some time to conceive.

I knew I was pregnant for a week (but I was 6 weeks along), and I wish I could say that I spent every moment being grateful and thankful for this new life. Instead, I found myself thinking about how I would fit a new child into our home, how it would affect my relationship with my son, even—gulp—what it would do to my body, as I felt I had finally gotten it “back,” whatever that means. In other words, I wasted more time than I care to admit in useless worry and what-ifs.

Once I saw the spotting, the fading line on the pregnancy tests that I took once I realized this pregnancy was unlikely to continue, and finally, the bleeding that told me that I’d never see this particular baby’s face in this particular lifetime, I was filled with regret, with remorse, for every second I spent not being grateful for this new life.

2. Won’t do that again.

Because it was an early loss, I trusted my body to do what it needed to do. No doctors. Just some ibuprofen for pain, and normal life. After all, I have a beautiful and energetic son to take care of, and a toddler, thank god, doesn’t stop for anything. Life went on as normally as possible, until…

Until I discovered my lost baby’s embryo. That’s what happens, isn’t it? One day an embryo was in my uterus on its way to being my second child, and for reasons I will never, ever know, that path ended, and it couldn’t stay inside my uterus any longer. And there, in the wavelike folds of toilet paper, I was forced to say goodbye to more than just an idea of a baby.