Unwanted Advice, Assumptions and Grief: Surviving an Early Loss Miscarriage

By Helen C

I had a miscarriage last year.

To myself and others, I tried to diminish my loss. To my ethically polyamorous partner in his neoliberal nesting set-up, I knew the bunch of cells that had been forming inside me wasn’t on par with the confusion it would cause his sentient children. To friends, I knew it wasn’t the time; I didn’t have support.

It was an early loss. I was out doing the day job of taming everybody else’s brain weasels (I’m a therapist). I doctored my language around my loss, terrified to appear less pro-choice, of triggering my sisters who’d made difficult decisions or offending those who’d been empowered in accessing a stigmatised form of healthcare. I felt as though it was my duty to take on the complexities of issues that weren’t comparable, like I was responsible for making everything ok. In my professional life, I’d call that a maladaptive coping mechanism.

There’s a paradox in trying to make everything ok. People around me told me that I’d be a great mum one day. Why didn’t I take the practical steps to try again, away from my current dating situation? I gritted my teeth through unsolicited advice from strangers about sensible partners if I wanted a family in the future. There was also advice from the same strangers about finances: it would have been very difficult; it’s for the best that I was waiting for more support.

The angry feminist emerging after I drowned my sorrows felt furious. I was being rushed into a permanent, ‘sensible decision’ by the patriarchy. The brooding therapist, cocooned in blankets with a heavy heart and gin breath, knew that it was well intended. We want to solve problems, to give hope. We want people to know there’s a future. Except my future felt uncertain, and those clichés pelted me like bullets.

I had chosen my baby’s name. I had bloated and was craving bagels and ready salted crisps. I was under no illusion; I’d done late-night google calculator maths, prepared for two years with no disposable income or time. I’d known it would be chaos that was beyond any preparation, and there’d be no lamenting when I was covered in vomit and drowning in ear-piercing wails at 3 am.

People making assumptions about how ready I was based on my leisure time as a very liberated single and childless woman entrenched a fear that I wasn’t good enough to be a mother. That somebody who wants to be a parent must have always acted and made choices in line with one day being a parent is ludicrous. (I fully wasn’t expecting to be adorning the kink scene and storming around on picket lines weeks after giving birth, yet every person felt the need to remind me that my life would change.)

Having perceived relief in my partner’s eyes when we’d discussed outcomes, and despite his support through comments that this wouldn’t be my only chance, I was convinced this pregnancy was viewed as an inconvenience. I’d known I’d wanted to be a mum and had the privileges necessary (even alone) to consider single parenthood (my fantastic community of feminist aunties). Not everyone thought this was a good idea, though. There was something deeply disconcerting about echoed perceptions that only a cis het nuclear family was an acceptable way to parent – something I’m still unpacking.

Suffering this loss, I can see that many don’t allow the space for grief and instead offer an immediate sticking plaster. A miscarriage, socially, is considered a physical ailment that is an obstacle to the purpose of bearing kids (the patriarchy’s only purpose for you) rather than a loss, which contributes to this lack of grieving space. As does capitalism: in my day job, I regularly see traumas pigeonholed into a six-session solution focus. We want you pulling up your bootstraps, masking your triggers and getting on with stuff. Be your old productive self; look to the future. Except my old self feels inexplicably changed, and I have no idea what I want moving forward.

Feeling ignited again – after grief or during – by seeing joy in a future is a beautiful thing. You do find it again, but you find it authentically. Processing such grief looks different to everybody, and all those emotions, even the disturbing and difficult ones, are valid. Everyone is ready to move on at different stages. We meet different circumstances that our grief becomes deliquesce around, sometimes compacting, shifting or sitting.

That hope doesn’t come from the societal approach to miscarriages, treating them as a blip on the journey to motherhood and the internalised misogyny that surrounds unconventional families. We don’t need to tiptoe around our own discomfort around a loss that is still hugely stigmatised and misunderstood. When surviving patriarchy, there is an unspoken need, an internalised responsibility, to have all the answers instead of listening. We are all unlearning that to some degree.

I don’t know what I want for the future. I don’t know if I want children. Before my loss, I’d talked myself out of it because of the state of the world. Again, I don’t know if that’s repression or something I’d love or preservation in the face of uncertainty. I don’t know if I’ll commit to one partner or several outside of the constraints of neoliberalism or stick with the community I’ve built. If I choose to ‘try again’, my child will be raised by the village we forge.

I do know that I lost a baby. There was and is no way to make that ok. And admitting that is so important.