By Colin Bennett of Holy Sh*t I’m a Dad

I’m just going to come right out with it: we had a miscarriage.

I say it like that because it’s the one word that’s really difficult for people to say surrounding pregnancy. Even our doctors came up with about 45 different ways to tell us what happened.

About 18 months before our son was born, we got pregnant for the first time. We followed all the rules – no more drinking, no smoking around the pregnant lady, and do not tell anyone you’re pregnant until you’re a few months in.

That last one is the dumbest fucking rule in the world. The logic behind it, so far as I can gather, is to make sure you aren’t going to lose the pregnancy. The practice behind it, for us anyway, is that we went through the next few weeks virtually alone.

I was terrified the first time we were pregnant. We were living in Bay View in a cramped hallway of a downstairs duplex. I was producing a morning radio show, a job which would basically maroon my wife for 12 hours a day with the baby. I wanted a child, but more than anything I wanted to tell everyone how goddamn scared I was.

My wife was going through something completely different. She was scared, too. I’m sure she shared a number of my fears, but her anxiety was also visceral. She could feel something was off. We never once used the ‘M’ word together, not right away.

The only thing scarier than being pregnant is the prospect of losing a pregnancy. And deep in her gut, my wife knew it was happening. But we talked about it only in superficial terms. Even at St. Luke’s, when I was lying on the ER table and my wife was fidgeting in the seat, we never spoke it out aloud. You’re not supposed to do that kind of thing.

No matter what happens, we told each other euphemistically, we’ll be okay. We almost believed it, too.

There were two ER visits and a handful of ultrasounds – the majority of them being the internal variety. It was weeks of slogging through appointments and paperwork and ultrasound results we couldn’t be happy about. During the last one, we couldn’t see the little white dot.

“Is there anything there? I don’t see anything there. There’s nothing there, is there?”

Despite my wife’s questions and the empty screen staring at us, the ultrasound tech kept her word and didn’t say a thing.

“It’s very common, these things,” our doctor says as if my wife’s uterus is an old printer that keeps flashing a PAPER JAM alert. It took him about 20 minutes to say the word ‘miscarriage’.

And that was that. Two weeks ago, prospective parents. Today, nothing. We weren’t even sure we were prepared for it, and then it was gone and we had no choice but to deal with the empty space it left behind.

I’d be lying if I said part of me wasn’t relieved. Relieved that we’d have more time to get ready for a baby. Relieved that it happened at six weeks. Relieved that at least we have some kind of resolution.

And I’d be further lying if I told you that not a day goes by that I don’t punish myself for feeling that, even in the slightest.

After the miscarriage, we just sort of carried on. We convinced ourselves, with varying degrees of success, that this was for the best. We went back to our old lives, and barely spoke a word of it to anybody. You aren’t supposed to talk about things like that.

It didn’t take my wife long to say ‘fuck that’ and come right out with it. The pain and emptiness eating her from the inside had to come out. The loneliness and ache that lived in that apartment needed a new place to go.

So out it went – into the world. My wife spoke the phrase “I had a miscarriage.” And she told people how our doctor told us that around one in four to five pregnancies end in miscarriage. And how she didn’t understand why no one talked about it. And how she was going to work to support other women who were in her place. Women eaten from the inside by loss and misery. Women who are told that pain needed to stay on the inside, lest we ruin someone else’s good time.

In those days, she was strong and brave and beautiful in a way I’d never seen before. She took this thing – this awful fucking thing – and turned it into the engine she needed to move beyond pain. Whatever happened next, she really would be okay. She could move forward.

And that’s exactly what happened. The next January, we’d find out we were pregnant again. We told everybody about it all the time. We shared every appointment, every ultrasound picture, every ounce he grew and every kick he made. And that September we welcomed our beautiful baby boy into the world. Our little rainbow after the rain.

I still think about the first pregnancy, but not as a baby we lost. I think about it as the strength we gained, the confidence we grew, and the bond we forged as we readied ourselves for parenting.  It still hurts, of course. Every day I think about how bad it hurts. But no matter what happened, and what happens next, I know we’ll be okay.

This post was originally published on Holy Sh*t I’m A Dad.

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About the Author

Colin Bennett is a 30 year-old freelance writer and stay-at-home dad. He also dabbles in poetry, fiction, and podcast hosting. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with a wife who’s out of his league and a one year-old boy. He writes a blog about fatherhood – Holy Sh*t I’m A Dad – you can read at hsiad.wordpress.com