I wish more people talked about pregnancy loss

So I’ll start by talking about mine

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In spring of 2019, I was 8 weeks pregnant when I started spotting. My husband Tony and I were in the middle of a pretty epic trip to Italy, and we weren’t sure if we should go to the hospital. We had just logged about a million steps in Florence, seeing Michelangelo’s David in the Uffizi Gallery (in person, it took my breath away) and feasting on bisteca alla fiorentina and Chianti (for Tony; I had a few sips.) We called my OB in New York who said to go to the hospital, but my primary doc said it could wait.

After a lot of texting our moms and worrying, we decided to wait until a few days later, when we were back in the UK, where Tony is from.

We managed to book an ultrasound scan right away, and the news was reassuring. We listened to the pitter patter of the baby’s heartbeat, my hand in Tony’s hand. We cried tears of joy and relief.

“Everything looks great,” the doctor said.

“What about the spotting?” I asked.

“It happens,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry.”

I was able to take her advice—after all, we had those little black and white pictures of the proto baby blob. Everything was measuring on track, she told us. She gave us a big smile on our way out and said “congratulations.” It was glorious, sun-drenched springtime, and we were with family in England.

That was Thursday afternoon. Saturday afternoon, we headed to a friends’ wedding in the stunning British countryside. I wore a black jumpsuit and the same dangly earrings I wore to my own wedding the year before.

I made it until the end of the night, after the beautiful ceremony and dinner and dancing, and then I started to bleed. It was a sensation I’ve never felt, my body violently expelling great globs of red-black blood. I couldn’t stop shivering.

We made it the ER in a sort of blur. I left a puddle of blood in the taxi, and blood dripped off my jumpsuit in the waiting room. The doctors were kind; they didn’t make me wait. They gave me a robe to wear home: I threw the jumpsuit in the bin with the biological waste. I couldn’t stop crying.

The English ER didn’t have an ultrasound tech in the middle of the night on Saturday, so we had to wait until Tuesday, when we flew home to New York, for the doctor to confirm what we already understood: I was no longer pregnant.

The New York doctor told me that miscarriages were so ubiquitous that most women who have two or three kids have lost at least one pregnancy. She was compassionate; she told us we would almost certainly be able to have a baby. It didn’t take away from our pain, but it was good to hear.

I knew pregnancy loss (or miscarriage, but isn’t that term kind of awful?) was common. But I didn’t realize how common. Loss occurs in about one in five of detected pregnancies.

I think I had that silly but widespread confidence that the bad stuff somehow wouldn’t happen to me.

I wasn’t prepared for how deeply our own loss hurt.

I wasn’t just grieving for the mass of cells that had formed and then unformed in my uterus. I was grieving for that wild, warm excitement that flooded me when I got that first PREGNANT read on the stick I peed on, for my husband’s excitement, and my parents’, and his parents’, for their crinkly eyed smiles when we shared the news. For what was going to be. For our sparkly hope and those first seeds of plans we were planting for life with a baby.

In many ways, our story had a happy ending. We got a fluffy, exuberant puppy named Ace to love on and to take out to pee what felt like a million times in the middle of the night, until one day, something clicked in his puppy brain and he learned. Only a few months later, we got pregnant again. Our daughter Simone just turned one.

But pregnant with Simone, sometimes an acid fear would burrow itself deep into my rib cage.

Come December, when the baby who wasn’t would have been one, I felt bereft. When I think about her now—in my imagination she is a girl—I still feel tender and sad.

For me, one of the hardest parts of my miscarriage was the loneliness of the experience.

I have the best little family, and Tony and I weathered the whole thing together, but it still felt lonely in our small bubble.

So few people discuss their pregnancy loss; it feels almost taboo. After all, the custom is to share pregnancy news after the first trimester, when risk of loss plummets. That means when we learn that we are no longer pregnant—that the growth has stopped or something mysterious went wrong (it is almost always mysterious)—we are left to endure alone.

I am by nature a sharer (oversharer?), but we had only told our parents and each other, and it felt weird to break the news of my pregnancy by telling the story of its premature end. I almost obsessively sought out stories of other women’s pregnancy loss. (Shoutout to Beyoncé, Michelle Obama and Chrissy Teigen, for opening up about their experiences.)

When I recovered from my eating disorder, being in community with others was immensely healing. In the last few weeks, a few friends of friends have called, asking if they could talk to me about their pregnancy losses. On the phone, I listened to their stories and I cried with them. I shared my own story. It doesn’t get better, per se. It is a part of me now, this heartache. It has made me the person I am, and the parent I am.

With Simone, I told some close friends as soon as that stick said PREGNANT. I wanted them to be there for me if anything went wrong.

If miscarriage is so common, why do so few of us talk about it?

If you have experienced pregnancy loss, you are not alone. It is not your fault.

One more time: You are not alone. It is not your fault.