I have played with the idea of writing a blog for a few years now. Every once in a while I would get excited about the idea of sharing my thoughts online but I never came to materialize it. My last-year resolution was about self-expression. More specifically I set myself the goals of finally publishing my dissertation and starting a blog. The publication of my dissertation is going to be part of 2014 and so I figured I should at least have my first post out before this year end.

I would never have guessed that my first post would be about undergoing a miscarriage. I learned that I was going to lose my pregnancy at a regular checkup in which my husband and I expected to hear a heartbeat for the first time. The pain I felt upon this news was as intense and penetrating as was the miraculous feeling of containing life within me. While my husband was saddened by the loss, he did not share the extent of my heartache. Like me, he experienced the loss of a long-awaited pregnancy and a future we began to imagine. But I, first and foremost, lost a child; a very particular child whose spirit occupied my body and heart and whom I already loved. Deeply. I was devastated.

It was not easy for me to conceive. I am reproductively challenged in more ways than one. Prior to the glorious morning in which the two lines appeared on a stick were several months of processing the upsetting news about my fertility problems. Delaying childbearing until my late thirties and genetic misfortune combined into a grim prognosis that was painful to accept. I am often told that I look much younger than I am; closer to late twenties than late thirties. I certainly feel younger. I have been known to lead my life in a manner that attempts to defy time (on that in other posts). My reproduction system was not in match with the rest of my body and spirit. How was I to make sense of the unappealing diagnosis of “premature ovarian aging,” a term undoubtedly conceived by men?

The news about my reproductive challenges was also accompanied by numerous medical appointments and overwhelming information that are part of the wondrous world of fertility treatments. I found myself struggling with feelings of inadequacy, which penetrated all aspects of my life. My husband and I also went through a roller-coaster of feelings, intensified by the fact that I was the reason we have waited this long. The looming possibility of having to use an egg donor and never learning what the combination of my Sephardi origin and my husband’s Ashkenazi genes could create was painful to entertain. All this was happening at a very challenging and demanding time professionally. The day I was supposed to begin taking hormones for my first fertility treatment I got completely overwhelmed and broke down crying. My husband and I decided to treatments by one month. “One more month is not going to change anything,” my husband reassured me as I was feeling guilty for some inexplicable reason.

I didn’t say anything to anyone, but I had a feeling… My close friends often joke that I’m some kind of a witch as I my wishes often come true. I thought it would be typical of me (of my body) to escape an unpleasant situation and slip into a desirable one in the last minute. It would also make for a lovely story. Secretly, I even thought of a “pregnancy name” for my future child. If I got pregnant naturally, I decided, I would call him/her Hanukah (I’m Jewish) as he/she would be this miracle that happened to me against all odds.

My friends and family felt my pain and were sympathetic to my loss but there was also some urgency to accept the loss and focus on the future. “Things happen for a reason;” “You’ll get pregnant again.” Yet I was completely overwhelmed by the searing pain of losing my child; my first child. During the brief period in which I knew I was pregnant I could not find the words to describe how I felt. I kept using the word “miraculous” as a way to capture the out-of-the-realm-of-ordinary-experience nature of this feeling. I am similarly at a loss for words now as I am trying to describe this loss. This failure of language to convey meaning made it difficult to share my pain with others. The attempt to translate my feelings into words left me feeling alone and misunderstood. In contrast, whenever I got to talk to a woman who went through a miscarriage herself I immediately felt supported. We did not need words to explain why the loss of a seven-week embryo of whom I have known for two weeks can be so heartbreaking; how one falls in love so quickly and so deeply. Similarly, I found solace in websites about miscarriages that were thoughtful to acknowledge the meaning of this loss. Words like “devastating” were surprisingly validating and comforting. I was tremendously grateful to the women who shared their experience in different forums; women who understood. They called these babies “angel babies” and considered them to be an eternal part of their family, regardless of how many more children they already had or went on to have. I began to have the sense that a miscarriage is a topic we are not supposed to talk about too openly. It is something we women are supposed to bear; share with one another; quietly.  It is the powerful experience of feeling comforted by these women who I will never meet that created the impetuous to finally give birth to this blog.

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What makes a loss so painful? Is it longing for what was? Is it pain over that which will never happen? Are we grieving the lost person or the parts of us that only come to be with this person; the mother I would have been and never will be for this particular child? People sometimes say that if we cherish what was most important to us in a person or a situation then we have not lost at all. I disagree. Something remains, but something precious is forever lost. I will never again experience the particular visceral and sweet sensation of carrying this specific child. The ability to enjoy my early pregnancy and love my growing child fearlessly, without protecting myself (despite the known risk for an early miscarriage) may also be lost. But something has endured. This child gave me the gift of experiencing myself as someone who can conceive life naturally and for a while carrying it; someone who can love deeply and unconditionally. And his/her spirit continues to inhabit me – not as vividly as before and that I continue to grieve – but present nonetheless. My angel baby, Hanukah.