what we talk about when we talk about talking about it

A refrain: No one talks about miscarriage. I can’t help but hear a slight chiding to it – like it’s our fault, somehow, that there would be less shame or pain or maybe even surprise if those of us who went through it just got over ourselves and talked about it. Before I experienced it myself, I think I thought this. 

I have turned out to be one of those people who didn’t talk about it. Who still wouldn’t in most circumstances, besides this weird little newsletter. Who hasn’t posted about it on social media, or told many people besides my closest circle. That surprised me. It’s made me wonder why.

Maybe people don’t talk about miscarriage because most people don’t want to hear about it. Not really. 

To start, most people don’t know anything about pregnancy. Literally, not the most basic thing. You’re allowed the narrowest possible range of feelings about it – joy to sheer joy. You download a pregnancy app and everything is pastel, cute-sy, fruit-themed. You’d think it was a theme park ride, not a profoundly altering, dangerous, and uncertain physical experience.

There’s a joke in The Office where a creepy character says "I love maternity wards. It's the perfect blend of love and horror. Things can go so wrong or so right." Ha! Ha. Ha. I think about that line a lot, almost gratefully. Sometimes it seems like that creep was the only damn person telling the truth.

Another reason — sometimes it seems like just describing what happened could be traumatizing to the wrong listener (or the right one, at the wrong time). For every night that I scrolled through pregnancy forums desperate to read someone’s story that sounded like mine, for someone to name the details of what I was experiencing, there would be another night where just the off-hand mention of a pregnancy sent me down a dark hole. I have erased so many paragraphs of this fledgling newsletter because I’m scared of doing that to someone else. I know that the world is full of triggers, that honest stories deserve to live somewhere even when they’re upsetting, but maybe that’s another reason – whatever that somewhere is, I’m not sure I’ve found it yet.

Or maybe people don’t talk about miscarriage because it’s depressing as shit – even (especially) the things I wished desperately that someone had warned me about. No one told me that for weeks after a miscarriage your body still can’t tell what it is, hormonally – pregnant, not pregnant, or some other thing that you’ve never been before. You can have what is essentially post-partum depression. One day I just found myself on the floor, a faint, desperate thought breaking through the fog – maybe I shouldn’t be alone. I couldn’t lift my phone to call my husband. I lay it on the floor next to my cheek and clicked his name. 

Or maybe it’s this. In her essay about a total eclipse, Annie Dillard writes: If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. 

Maybe that’s one of the reasons. Grief made me feel like our whole world had disappeared. No baby, no significance. What was the point of finding the words?

I still don’t want to talk about it, to be honest, despite having made a whole newsletter about it. But I’ve come to believe, slowly, that at least one reason people don’t talk about miscarriage is shame. And I’m interested in talking about it enough so that at least it’s not a secret, not something hidden in the dark. Talking about it enough to let it into the light, just a little.