My Miscarriages Are the Reason I'm Announcing My Pregnancy Early

In case you missed my big announcement on Friday, I'm pregnant with baby #6!

I won't go into details (you're welcome,) but because my body and my cycle are super-weird I'm not sure how far along I am. My guess is 9 weeks, but I hope to know more after an ultrasound on Thursday.

In the past, Phillip and I have always waited to announce our pregnancies until much later. After all, goes the standard wisdom, the risk of miscarriage is highest during the first 12 weeks, and you wouldn't want to announce a pregnancy and then lose it, would you?

I don't even know where I first heard the advice to keep quiet until the second trimester "just in case," but all I know is that I took it.

And then "just in case" happened, three times.

Because we'd so zealously guarded the secret that we were pregnant, when we had those early miscarriages between 6 and 10 weeks, no one knew. Just Phillip and I. Not even our own children knew. 

Why I'd ever believed that keeping the 12-week rule would safeguard me, I really don't know.

I still endured the grueling physical process of miscarriage and struggled with the messy emotions of grief, sadness, frustration, and anger. I just did it alone.

In the days and weeks afterward, friends at church smiled and chatted with me in the hallways like they always did. Why wouldn't they? The other parents at my kids' schools were cordial as ever. Life went on just like always. 

Not a single soul so much as acknowledged that we'd just lost a baby, because no one knew there'd been a baby to lose.

We did, eventually, tell a handful of people — namely our parents and the people who watched our older kids while I went to miscarriage-related doctor's appointments.

But sharing the news afterward, saying "I was pregnant but now I'm not," wasn't helpful.

It was passed, gone, something that had already happened. Whoever I was talking to learned of my pregnancy and my miscarriage in the same breath. No one was shocked or disappointed at the loss; it was just presented to them as a fact.

For the most part, I'd kept my pregnancy a secret and I felt so awkward about opening up after the fact, I kept my miscarriages a secret, too.

I wish I'd told someone, at least my family and close friends, as soon as I spotted two pink lines on my pregnancy test. I wished a friend could've asked me in those dark days after a loss, "How's the pregnancy going?" so that I could share what happened with someone.

Instead, I swallowed my feelings when I knew I was going to be interacting with someone that day so I could keep acting normal.

Waiting to announce our pregnancy hadn't made things better when "just in case" happened. It actually had made them worse.

It took me years to come to terms with my miscarriages, and I think the silence was part of the problem.

It was only after I "came clean" with my children who were old enough to understand, and started talking about it here on my blog, that I began to feel like I was finally processing my emotions instead of just shoving them down to wherever you shove feelings you're avoiding.

Following the 12-week rule had been, for me at least, damaging. In fact, I'm not sure it's doing anyone any favors.

If it weren't so common to keep quiet about a pregnancy until after the risk of losing it has passed, maybe my first miscarriage in particular wouldn't have been such an exquisitely painful introduction to how statistically common pregnancy loss is.

At the time, I literally knew no one who'd had a miscarriage — none that they'd ever talked about, anyway. 

I'm encouraged by the openness I've been seeing on the Internet about pregnancy loss lately. I hope the stigma is disappearing. It's okay that some women prefer to keep their miscarriages private — but it's a problem when they feel like they have to.

I hope that going forward, more women who lose a pregnancy in the first trimester know they're not alone.

I hope that they already know friends and family members who've been there before, so they don't have to be the first ones to speak up in order to get some support.

So I'm sharing the news of our pregnancy early, not in spite of the risk of miscarriage before 12 weeks, but because of it. 

The only times the 12-week rule worked for us was when the pregnancies were healthy ones. For the sake of those pregnancies that weren't, I wish we would've told people sooner.

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What to Say (and What Not to) When Someone Has a Miscarriage

When a friend tells you she's had a miscarriage, do you know how to respond?

As many as 1 in 5 pregnancies ends in miscarriage, so odds are you'll be in this position someday if you haven't been already.

Women who've lost a baby need to develop a hide made out of Kevlar to deal with some of the things people say. Nobody purposely tries to be an insensitive creep, but sometimes less-than-helpful words just get blurted out.

Don't Say: "What a bummer."

When I called my OB's office after my third miscarriage, the receptionist said in a very sympathetic voice, "Ohhh, that stinks!" There are hardly words to describe the devastating experience of losing a pregnancy, and it hurts even worse when people trivialize it. It's a bummer when your ice cream falls out of the cone; it's not what you say when someone's baby dies.

Let me repeat: If you only take one thing away from this article, I want it to be that dismissing your friend's grief is the singularly most hurtful thing you could do. She is a grieving parent. If what you say wouldn't be appropriate to say to the bereaved parent of an older child, it's also inappropriate to say right now.

Try Instead: "I'm so sorry."

Your friend lost a real baby and she's grieving. You can't change the situation, but you can treat it with the respect it deserves. Let your words, your tone of voice, and your facial expression show it. After my miscarriages, it was a huge relief just to talk to anyone who understood even a little how deeply it affected me (and would for the rest of my life.)

Don't Say: "Are you going to try to get pregnant again?"

This is literally the most inappropriate time to be asking that question. It's like asking a new widow at the funeral if she's going to remarry, and I hope you would never do that. It's too early for a woman having a miscarriage to be thinking that far ahead; and even if she is, it's none of your business.

Try Instead: "Can I bring you dinner tonight?"

If you want to ask questions about the future, find out when you can bring over a meal this week. Miscarriage isn't just an emotional trauma, it's physical, too. Trust me, she isn't going to feel like cooking for a while. If she has other children, could you take them for an afternoon or drive them to soccer practice today while you're at it?

Don't Say: "Maybe it wasn't meant to be."

Even if she's a religious person who also believes that God has a bigger plan, she's hurting right now. A sincere "I'll pray for you" would be okay, but proclaiming that her loss was God's will makes you sound like sort of a jerk.

Try Instead: "How are you feeling?"

Really, the only thing you can do is listen, so give your friend a chance to talk. Depending on your relationship and what's going on with her at the moment, she might not want to. But if she does, try rephrasing what she says, asking questions, and avoid making any judgments or conclusions.

Don't say: "At least..."

At least what? At least anything. Not "at least you know you can get pregnant," not "at least you were only 7 weeks," and not "at least you have children already." She's allowed to say that stuff if she wants to, but you keep your mouth shut.

Try Instead: Give a hug.

If you want to comfort a friend who's lost her baby, give her a hug. She doesn't need you to point out the silver lining, she just needs to process her feelings and knowing that you care will make it easier.

The #1 Thing to Remember

The double whammy after a miscarriage is that people avoid bringing it up. They don't know what to say, so they simply stay away or avoid talking about it.

But please know that your job isn't to fix the situation, cheer her up, or to say the "right" things. The truth is that losing a pregnancy just feels wrong to a woman who used to be pregnant and isn't anymore, so there is no "right" thing to say, anyway.

What a friend going through a miscarriage needs from you is your support and your empathy. That will look different for everyone depending on your relationship, but if you can do nothing but say you're sorry and mean it, that's enough.

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Joining the Miscarriage Club

This week a friend rang my doorbell with a box of maternity clothes I'd lent her and burst into tears.

Somehow she got out the words that she wouldn't be needing them anymore. She'd lost her baby.

I'm not a crier, but I cried with her that day. My own miscarriages had been years ago, but those emotions came rushing back with a ferocity that surprised even me.

I guess you never forget.

My first miscarriage blindsided me in 2007, after the perfectly normal births of my first two children. We hadn't yet announced the pregnancy; we'd decided to wait until 12 weeks "just in case."

And even though I'd felt deep in my gut that something wasn't quite right with this pregnancy, I still hadn't given any real thought to the fact that "just in case" might actually happen.

It never dawned on me until I started bleeding that getting pregnant didn't automatically make you the mother of a healthy baby in nine months.

I made a frantic call to my doctor's office. Surely they'd tell me what to do, how to stop this. I was told to stay hydrated and put my feet up. In other words, there was nothing anyone could do.

Honestly, I was shocked. I'd always believed that Phillip and I were in charge of our family planning, but here I was, losing a baby. This was completely in God's hands, and completely out of mine.

Nobody talks about pregnancy loss. I didn't know it would be so hard on me physically, or that it would be such a long process. At its height the cramping was as painful and intense as labor, and I was sore and exhausted for days. The bleeding goes on for a week or more.

I walked through the next several weeks in a fog, feeling alone. Every woman, I think, goes through it alone no matter how much support she has.

No one else has experienced the raw physical and emotional connection with this pregnancy, or felt the equal devastation when it's lost. No one else is in the bathroom with you for those terrible minutes and hours and days, watching clots of blood and tissue pass.

After a while, life has to start again. Someone has to go back to work. Kids still need to be bathed and fed. Somebody has to go grocery shopping. You begin interacting with people again.

Maybe you hadn't announced the pregnancy yet, in which case you feel like a big fat liar, walking around pretending that the worst thing imaginable didn't just happen to you.

Or maybe you'd already told everyone, and now you face the task of re-opening the wound again and again every time someone asks about the pregnancy.

Telling another person about your miscarriage for the first time is awful. I don't know what it is about simply forming the words and saying them out loud, but somehow it makes everything crash down on you again. It gets better but never goes away.

Before I had my first miscarriage, I didn't know anyone who'd experienced a pregnancy loss. After I began talking about it, people who'd had one or two or more came out of the woodwork. I found myself a member of a very large club that nobody ever wants to be in.

Knowing what I know now, here's what I would say to someone experiencing a miscarriage: Find other women who belong to this club. If you can't find them in person then find them online.

Talking to them will help, I promise. Sharing your story with someone who's been there before will help.

My second piece of advice would be to prepare for the insensitive comments. Truthfully, there's no way to prepare for them. But know that they happen.

Anything that follows the words "at least" is the worst possible thing to say to a grieving person, but someone will say it to you anyway.

Some well-meaning soul will point out that you were 'only' X number of weeks along, as if that will make you feel better.

And some people won't even count it as a real loss. They'll say things to you they wouldn't dream of saying to a bereaved parent of a baby who was one year old, or even one day old. They'll say "aww, that stinks," and then they'll ask if/when you're going to try to get pregnant again. They'll imply that if you just have another baby you won't be sad anymore.

Many people won't understand that you're not just disappointed because some theoretical baby will not appear to you in the future as you expected. You already had a baby, it was so close it was a part of you, and now it's gone. People will not understand that.

It takes a long time to heal emotionally from a miscarriage. People expect it to be easier than other losses. Even I expected myself to "get over it" faster. I'd be fine and then some reminder — putting away a box of baby things, or maybe even nothing at all — would trigger a breakdown.

Years later, those emotions still bubble up from time to time. I think I never fully dealt with them all. My miscarriages happened before anyone other than Phillip knew I was even pregnant, so not many people know about my miscarriages. Sometimes it feels like I'm the keeper of some horrible secret.

That, and the lack of closure, is what kills me. There's no memorial service, no decent burial. No mother feels good about the final resting place of her miscarried child. It feels wrong not to have any momentos, aside from maybe an ultrasound picture if you were able to get one, of this little person who affected your life.

I read somewhere the suggestion of planting a tree or bush in memory of your baby. I think I might do that someday. I have a hard time thinking about my miscarriages with anything other than sadness, but maybe seeing three thriving bushes in my yard would make me happier when I think about those little souls.

My heart goes out to my friend, and to all the other women in our terrible club. I hope that however we do it, we can heal and find peace.

That someday, we might be able to think about those angel babies and smile.

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