By Kayla Mroch

Nothing turns you further inward than pregnancy. Every twitch, gas bubble, muscle spasm – it all sends you into body scan mode, assessing each irregular yet completely regular feeling for a life-threatening emergency, yours or the baby’s. You criticize everything you put into your body, you evaluate the air quality of every room, every place, the contagion level of every person you come into contact with. But even then, no matter how careful you are, how healthy you are, how protective you are — the worst can still happen.

I had a miscarriage in my senior year of college. I was sleeping with an ex-boyfriend pretty frequently and after spending Halloween weekend partying, I found myself pregnant. I didn’t want the pregnancy. I was terrified. It was going to derail my entire life. I spent the first week white-knuckling the abortion option before I realized that I could never go through with that. I am and always will be pro-choice but that choice just wasn’t for me. I was already rearranging my life to fit the needs of a pregnancy; how could I ever have gotten rid of something I was already accepting as a part of my life?

So I kept it and nicknamed the budding baby Pip.

I told my ex about the slip up, apologized, told him I didn’t want anything from him. He said he’d stick around so I invited him to the first ultrasound.

We never heard the heartbeat. My body had betrayed me, tricked me in the cruelest sense. I was ten weeks along, thinking I had nearly finished the first trimester, practically untouched by morning sickness. But instead of what should have been my baby’s heartbeat there was only silence. My baby had been floating dead in the water inside of me for the last two weeks. I didn’t know what to say. The doctor held my hand and gave me pills to take to expel the fetus. It was the week before Christmas.

Losing a pregnancy is excruciating in the sense that you will almost never know what happened. It’s also excruciating physically. It can take weeks to fully lose a pregnancy. Weeks of actively miscarrying. I bled for nearly two months. Two months where I went to work and school and the grocery store. I spoke to people while my body tore my pregnancy apart.

How do you tell people that? When they ask how you are, how do you say, “I’m actively losing my child in front of you, right where I stand.”

I waited tables while I bled. I asked men how they wanted their steaks cooked and watched happy families with their two-point-five kids fight over appetizers. I changed kegs and cleaned taps and emptied the trash. I cried in my car every night on the drive home.

Few people checked in on me. Even my ex, the one who dealt with me after the fallout, who held me when I got drunk and sat on the bathroom floor with me as I puked my guts up in his apartment and told me that we were forever connected by this, never asked me how I was. A month later and we never spoke again. I don’t know if I can ever forgive him for that.

It’s just passed the one-year mark since I lost Pip. The loss doesn’t hurt any less. I still think about it every day. I probably will for the rest of my life. But I’m learning that that’s ok. I’m far from alone in this. Nearly one-third of pregnancies end in miscarriage and most women, like me, never even know why. Usually a miscarriage is the body rejecting an unviable embryo but I don’t think that’s what happened with me. I think my baby knew I wasn’t quite ready yet, that I still had some growing to do. Whatever the truth is, I loved my baby, then, now, and forever, and I can’t wait to meet them someday.

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