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How many of you have heard these phrases?
- It probably would have been deformed.
- Thank goodness you were only in your first trimester.
- It’s not like it was a real baby.
- Just get pregnant again and you’ll feel better.
- It was just a miscarriage.
When friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers learn of your loss, they are going to feel the need to say something. They feel awkward and unsure. They definitely don’t want to make you cry.
So they try to come up with something to make you feel better. Somehow, they really do believe that downplaying the loss (only first trimester, not a real baby, just a miscarriage) will help you downplay it too. Or, that they can show you a “bright” side (deformed, nature’s way, not the right time.) Or give you advice (get pregnant again, don’t dwell on it, you’re only making yourself depressed.)
I’m not happy with these people. I wish I could be your personal guardian, walking around with duct tape and sealing their mouths. But usually they aren’t really trying to upset you. They want to say something. They don’t know that “I’m so sorry for the loss of your baby. Please let me know if I can do anything,” is plenty.
Ignore them when you can. Just nod and walk away. And when you’re feeling up for it–tell them. And explain to them what to say next time, before they repeat these things to someone else.
This is a touchy subject, but one I can address more easily in general rather than with someone specific in an email or post. Hopefully some of you out there googling miscarriage and emotional recovery will hit upon this.
Those wonderful female hormones that govern our cycle and turn us into emotional swingers right before a period, in early pregnancy, and in post partum have an extra special role right after a miscarriage–they often get completely out of whack and make our lives hell.
Often when someone writes me in the first two weeks after a loss, upset and angry, wanting to leave her husband, afraid she’s not doing well with the children, and sure that every one of her friends is trying to make her feel worse, I know her body has made life less easy to cope with.
We already are saddled with a lot after a loss: grief, frustration, fear, despair. It’s a terrible kick in the gut that in addition, our confused reproductive system often sends out so many mixed hormone signals that we can’t manage our emotions. In this state, a casual “How are you doing?” becomes a cold-hearted slam. A husband asking, “What’s for dinner?” is grounds for divorce. Can’t they see life is horrible, our baby lost, nothing will ever be the same, and can’t he make his own freaking dinner just once?
What is happening is partly the people around us–most don’t really know what to do or say to a greiving mother–and part of it our inability to process outside stimulus. These hormones literally become a jumbled filter and so much of what we would ordinarily handle perfectly well–a mess on the floor, an abrupt end to a phone call, a comment about our appearance–will become huge issues.
It’s not really our fault. And hopefully everyone will give us the space and understanding we need. We will get better, not because we’ve forgotten the baby or the sadness of our loss, but because our bodies have filtered out these conflicting hormones and now we can think more clearly and organize our feelings into those that bear getting upset over and those we can wave away.
If you’re here, and everything seems upside down and everyone in your life is upsetting you, just take a deep breath, get as much time to yourself as possible, and when the going gets rough, break some small piece of inconsequential dinnerware. You’ll get better. I promise.
I feel very frustrated each time I see news coverage of the abduction of an infant. The media’s portrayal of the woman who takes the baby creates an unsympathetic and inaccurate view to the public of women who have suffered a miscarriage.
Infant abduction is a very polarizing crime–the babies are so helpless, hard to identify, and innocent. The public–as it should–feels no concern whatsoever about anything but returning the baby to its mother.
In this extreme of villany, police and the media stereotype and generalize the assailant at will.
In this case, ABC News aired the following list of attributes of an infant abductor:
- A woman of childbearing age.
- Overweight.
- Often lives in the community where abduction took place.
- Frequently says she lost a baby.
There are so many things that are wrong with this, I can barely contain my rage enough to type.
First, in their own broadcast, ABC reports there have been 13 abductions from hospitals since 2000. This is frightfully little data to use in a profile and even though it is gleaned from hospital abductions, the public will use it when they think of any abduction, even though the profile may not fit.
Even more than the ridiculous addition of “overweight,” I am distressed by the movement from “woman who has lost a baby,” which was the profile descriptor in the Missouri abduction last year, to “says she lost a baby.” Now we’ve shifted from a woman suffering from a post-partum and grief induced psychosis to a woman who will use a loss as an excuse for her criminal behavior. The very wording of this element of the profile suggests both that she has lied about it (when very likely she has NOT lied about it) and that she believes it is a justification for what she has done.
Both of these negative suggestions affect the community of women who have miscarried. The first undermines the power of our grief. To assume straight off that women are lying about a very real condition that affects our behavior is to minimize the anguish we endure before an already insensitive public. The second insinuates that we feel we are “owed” something due to our loss, and that we can go steal a baby with some warped sense of vindication.
I do not believe these profiles are useful in locating an infant abductor, and they certainly do harm. Women who have lost babies in the town where an abduction has taken place wonder when the knock will come on their door, and feel the negative association with their loss and the suggested lack of rationality and control.
What needs to happen instead is a solid list of information that has actually led to the recovery of babies:
- Noticing the sudden appearance of a baby and asking about it. (While this seems obvious, recognizing this scenario is what has led to ALL the recovered abductions. The women can’t help but show off their newborn but have mangled explanations for its arrival.)
- Actual descriptions of assailants rather than profiles (In every case, they had people who could detail the appearance of the abductor–somebody saw her. In this last one, they had video. I fail to understand the justification of calling them all ”overweight” when we can see what this one ACTUALLY is.)
- Projections about where the assailant might have gone based on how long it’s been and what highways/destinations seem most likely.
- Reminders that the family and friends of the abductor are almost always the ones who can realize what has happened and help return the stolen infant.
Women in our miscarriage community and the general public have a common goal: to assist, when we can, in helping locate the infant. We women who have already endured a loss do not, however, have to stand by and be villified and maligned in the process.
