elasticmatchbox

[elasticmatchbox]

if this isn’t love

i am injecting sesame oil into my butt and that is just a really weird thing.

Little one, I pray some day you know how hard I worked to bring you here. 

[elasticmatchbox]

i was pregnant

I was pregnant, and now I’m not. 

We have this narrative of miscarriages. Pain, blood, shock, grief. Silence. 

We don’t talk about it. We don’t share our experiences. We aren’t given space to mourn. We pull each other aside to divulge our own histories, our own pain. We whisper quietly after the topic has come up casually. We send a meaningful text or email, after the fact, to express our condolences and solidarity. We don’t tell people about our pregnancies because the risk of a miscarriage is so high, and then we don’t talk about the miscarriage because no one knew about the pregnancy. We suffer silently, we grieve alone. 

My first positive pregnancy test was a Tuesday morning. We’d tested over the weekend and watched the HCG levels from my trigger shot go down to zero. After that, any line that showed up the next few days was a positive result. Tuesday morning we woke up at 5:45 to test. I’d get up, pee on a stick, put it down, and Elisabeth would start the timer. We’d wait our three minutes, then she’d pick up the test from the bathroom and carry it to the light in the kitchen. We’d hold hands and suspend our breath, and look on the count of three. And sure enough, Tuesday morning, a faint blue line appeared. 

Wednesday morning, faint blue line. 

Thursday morning, faint blue line. 

The box says we’re pregnant. Forums, conventional wisdom, everyone says a line is a line and a line means pregnant. It wasn’t getting darker, but we read account after account of lines staying faint until weeks into the pregnancy. 

Thursday we went to the hospital for a blood draw. This was our big day, our beta test. Today was the day we confirm the results we’ve gotten at home. They took my blood and I went to work. All day I checked my phone between sessions, watching for a missed call. At 3pm, I got a voicemail. I called Elisabeth from my office and we listened together, breath suspended. “Congratulations, Katherine. You are pregnant.” She immediately burst into tears and I gasped, unable to feel the floor beneath me. We listened to it over and over, letting it sink in. This is it. We’re pregnant. 

We got instructions for a follow-up test, two days later. We ordered What to Expect When You’re Expecting, on rush delivery. Elisabeth picked me up at work, bouquet of flowers in hand. We ordered a pizza to celebrate. I referred to myself as “we” and repeated “I’m pregnant” under my breath. Elisabeth kissed my belly over and over. We giggled, we cried. We drowned ourselves and each other in gratitude. We’d finally made it. 

IVF had been grueling. My body responded well to the drugs, which produced great results but made every inch of me, inside and out, hypersensitive to the world. I cried constantly. My breasts grew a full cup size over the course of a week. My belly puffed out as my ovaries swelled. Ultrasounds became even more excruciating than usual. Being injected with so many hormones made me feel tiny and desperate to be held. It also made the physical act of holding me too painful to bear. But at the end of it all, we had seven frozen embryos and a perfect, healthy embryo burrowing into my body and making a home. It was worth every second. 

Saturday morning we took another pregnancy test. Faint line. Still positive. Still pregnant. We walked to the hospital. We talked about ways to tell my parents, baby names, maternity leave plans. I continued to murmur “I’m pregnant” to myself and touch my belly whenever I was alone. We finished the second blood test and came home to What to Expect at our door. We dove in and skimmed through, marking the chapters we wanted to read first. We made a healthy lunch and Elisabeth wrapped me up in blankets, wanting “us” to stay warm. 

And the phone rang. 

“We’re so sorry, Katherine. Your levels have dropped. It looks like a biochemical pregnancy. Come back on Monday for more bloodwork. I’m so sorry.” 

If my heart could twist itself into a knot and drop out of my chest, it did in that moment. We collapsed into each other. My sobs overtook the room and my heart crumbled. I cried for hours. 

And for three excruciating days, nothing happened. No cramps, no bleeding. No outward signs of a miscarriage. Just the knowledge that the little thing inside of me, which had grown to the size of a sesame seed, was no longer viable, and we were waiting for it to go. It could be days, or weeks. My sesame seed was dying inside me and all I could do was wait for it to be over. 

Monday’s blood test confirmed that I was no longer pregnant. Tuesday the pain started, and I had one of the worst periods I’ve ever had in my life. The pain was unreal. With endometriosis, cramps start in my uterus, and then extend to my lower back. The pain goes up to my stomach and throbs every time I eat or drink. The endo is growing on my sciatic nerve, so I get burning nerve pain for days that makes laying down and sitting unbearable. And during all of this, in the pain and the blood and the shock and the grief, my little sesame seed left my body and I was no longer pregnant. 

I was five weeks pregnant, and I hadn’t told anybody. A few friends knew where I was in the process, and knew if I wasn’t bubbling over with happiness, that something had gone wrong. I confided in a few close friends at work that I was having a miscarriage, but the rest of the world knew nothing. 

I was five weeks pregnant, and then I wasn’t. And while my little sesame seed never got the chance to become a baby, it was a relationship, and it was a loss. The whole idea is that you keep your pregnancy a secret until the risk for miscarriage is over, but it leaves the grief of miscarriage, when it happens, disenfranchised, with no place to simply be. I went to work like everything was fine. I made small talk with clients, with strangers, as my body purged itself of a pregnancy that was no longer viable. The heaviness of that loss hasn’t left me, and I am still in mourning over what could have been. 

Today we would have started telling people. Today would be the end of my first trimester, when it would be safe to share our news with the world. Today I could announce that after four failed IUI cycles, surgery, and IVF, we were finally pregnant. And instead, I’ve had two more mind-alteringly painful periods and am back on hormones for yet another try. Our What to Expect book is tucked away in a corner of our home where I can’t find it, because I couldn’t bear to look at it until it was finally time. The little stocking we had saved to announce to our parents that our family was growing has been put away for another year. The picture of our embryo, the one that could have been, is buried deep in Elisabeth’s pile of papers so I won’t accidentally stumble on it and ruin my own day. Today I took my estrogen pills, my baby aspirin, changed my estrogen patch, and waited one more day for our next little miracle to make a home in my body. 

I don’t want to be silent anymore about how hard this process is. My heart has broken over and over again, as my dream for a family gets pushed away by another month. My life, my career, my dreams are on hold as I do everything I can in a process where I have almost no control. I don’t want to carry this secret anymore. I don’t want my infertility and miscarriage to be shameful and guarded and things that don’t get talked about. I don’t want to hold this by myself. Miscarriage is an excruciating and totally disenfranchising process of grief, and I don’t want to perpetuate silence around it any longer. 

I was pregnant, and now I’m not, and I’m really fucking sad and I’m still grieving and I’m not sure I’m ready for another try but I’m pushing through the doubt and I’m scared and excited and nervous and it’s constantly on my mind and I am equal parts so upset with my body and trying to encourage my body to do this thing it’s supposed to do naturally and it leaves me in a constant state of uncertainty about what happens next and I don’t want to be quiet about that any more. I had a miscarriage and I lost my pregnancy and I am grieving. 

Pain, blood, shock, grief. No more silence.