if you have a miscarriage

When you have a miscarriage, you might wonder who you should tell about it. I miscarry when I am at six weeks (or eight weeks? I’m not sure, because I never got to my first OB appointment), and I meet up for a playdate with a friend and his two daughters. When he asks how things are going, I want to say, “I miscarried last night,” but then I think, Actually, I’m still miscarrying now, aren’t I? It’s all still coming out of my body, and I’m wearing this pad, I can feel clots drop onto it, so the correct verb tense trips me up, and also, would talking about it even be therapeutic, or would it just be a bummer? So I don’t end up saying anything.

I miscarry when I am not far along at all, when only a couple people know, and it almost feels like it doesn’t count. A real miscarriage, in my mind, is a tragedy reserved for women who are further along. A real miscarriage would be if this were the third or fourth time. A real miscarriage would be if I didn’t already have two healthy children. And it’s true that I don’t have to break the news to dozens of people. It’s sad, but it could be tragic.

I wonder about hardship sometimes, and how much it is okay to dwell on my own. There will always be much more tragic circumstances in the world – war, starvation – but I also know that telling someone that someone else’s pain is worse than their pain isn’t always a helpful truth to bring up. One year at school, I was talking about Jim Crow during the 1930s in America, since we were reading Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. I explained lynching, and the inability of many Black people to find justice since the police and the politicians were all white. One of my students, a Jewish girl, said, “It was still worse for Jews in the Holocaust.” I was dumbfounded by this statement and did not know how to respond except by, perhaps, shaking her until she fell out of her desk. Thankfully, though, another student raised their hand and said, “That’s not a helpful thing to say. If you have a broken arm, and some guy with a broken leg comes over and says, ‘Hey, my pain is worse than yours,’ that doesn’t take away the pain in your arm. They’re both legitimate pains.” In this moment, I nearly wept, because I was blown away by this middle schooler’s wisdom, their judiciousness, and their power to address the other girl’s comment far better than I would have been able to. I still think about this student’s words, that pain is pain. All that is to say that when I miscarry, I think, This could be so much worse, but I also allow myself to think, This is sad.

I want to tell people I miscarried because it is what happened to me, and leaving it out seems dishonest somehow, but it also doesn’t seem like something that people talk about casually. I have a friend who told me she miscarried only after we were deep in a conversation about fertility. Most people I know of who’ve miscarried I only learn about after reading Facebook posts.

When I was a kid, and maybe even a teenager, I didn’t know that miscarriage really existed, probably because I never heard of anyone having one. When I go back to school this week and the kids ask how my summer was, I’m not going to say, “We went to the beach a lot, ate some watermelon, and also I had a miscarriage.” It’s not something you share with students, but also wouldn’t it be good if they knew? That this happens to people, and it’s sad, but I’m okay? Because couldn’t this happen to them one day, or someone they love?

After I had a miscarriage, I told my mom, one of my sisters, and two friends I’d had dinner with who’d guessed I was pregnant since I wasn’t drinking. A couple weeks passed, and then it seemed as if the chapter was closed. I stopped bleeding. My body returned to its normal state – no heartburn, no nausea, no back pain. The nurse told me to wait for a normal period, and then we could try again. But then, last week, on my way to an open mic, I think of a joke about my miscarriage, and then, in front of thirty comedians, many of whom I do not know, I try the joke out. And then, as I drive home, I think that it’s better this way, to have disclosed this sad thing that is not a tragedy but is still sad. And then I think, it can’t be that sad anymore, because I have made it funny, and isn’t that often how people heal?