Finding myself really depressed as my due date would have been in two weeks. I just went to a drama study abroad in London to finish my masters degree this summer because I wanted a change and to be distracted. We watched and discussed 12 plays and surprisingly several had themes of miscarriage, child loss, and/or infertility. It was a very emotional 5 weeks. Of the plays the hardest was Yerma with Billie Piper at the young Vic theatre. It is a gut wrenching modern adaptation of Lorca's play about a successful woman who cannot conceive later in life with a very tragic end. She is 34 when the play begins and she finally decides to try to have a baby, just like me. And the production of Macbeth at the globe highlighted the fact that the couple's actions were driven by their crippling recent loss of a baby/pregnancy and their ongoing inability to have children. There was a small boy running around the stage that the couple interacted with -- the bitter sweet dream of their child that wasn't alive--that would never be. I heard this version is heavily influenced by the most recent movie with Michael fassbender. Even three penny opera alluded to miscarriage more than once. And the incredibly beautiful young Chekhov production of the seagull at the national, Nina's last monologue about losing her infant, left me walking the 45 minutes home through the London streets sobbing hysterically in front of crowds of strangers. I cried all night. Then in class the next morning my professor said it was good that the baby had died because it would have ruined her life further. I had to leave. Plays are so much more emotionally visceral and being already raw it was a sort of torture to witness the loss in these examples especially. Now that I have experienced this I see that miscarriage, infertility, and child loss are prevalent themes in TV, drama, literature, and movies. It is everywhere. And you don't notice it until it happens to you. I am glad that it is discussed-- has been discussed for hundreds of years-- because this horror is a huge part of life and has been as long as humans have existed. Even though it all made me incredibly sad, I'm thankful for the catharsis and the dialogue it opened up with my classmates who were all so much younger than me but really supportive.