Like the 1 in 4 women who have been pregnant, I have had a miscarriage. And, like many of those women, I really didn't know what to do with the experience as it was happening or after it had happened. There were a lot of things I thought I had to do during my miscarriage but, as it turns out, I was (mostly) ridiculously wrong about all of them.
My miscarriage, like most, occurred early on, at about 6 weeks in gestational age. My son was 18 months old and, while my husband and I had wanted another child, the pregnancy was unplanned and very much unexpected. My feelings about being pregnant, while mostly positive, were complicated. So, when I began to miscarry days after I had found out I was pregnant, my feelings about the miscarriage were even more complicated. Because everything happened early on, I did not have to have a D&C procedure to empty my uterus. At the time, a part of me wished for some sort of appointment to make everything seem "official." Finding out I was going to have a baby only to find out that, no, I wasn't, in the span of a few days was hard to wrap my head around, so something "concrete" to give me a definitive and steadfast "end" to something I had just realized was potentially beginning would have, for me (I thought), been helpful. A part of me felt that even believing I had been pregnant and had a miscarriage in the first place was crazy; that maybe what I was feeling wasn't real.
Now that I have the ability to look back, I can see that second guessing my feelings and emotions, was the primary belief motivating a lot of my feelings and behaviors during and after my miscarriage. I wasn't sure how to feel or if what I was feeling was real, so I held myself to a predetermined standard and thought I "had to feel" a specific way. Of course, that isn't true, and a woman going through or recovering form a miscarriage can feel anyway she wants, and react anyway that she wants. So, if you're like me and the 1 in 4 women who will experience a miscarriage, please know that your feelings are valid and, please, now that you don't have to do the following things, if you don't want to.
Hate My Body
It felt completely natural, even called for, to hate my body after my miscarriage. I mean, it had failed me, right? Still, hating my body for what I perceived it had done, made me hate other aspects of it to: its size, its shape, its clumsiness, its weakness. Any insecurity I'd ever felt about myself in the 30 years I have been alive, came bubbling to the surface in the matter of minutes.
Deny Myself Comfort
It wasn't until a dear, sweet friend sent me a bunch of chocolate bars that I realized that many of the things I'd expected of myself and denied myself were unreasonable. I expected myself to know how to feel, to feel the "right" way (which I had perceived, basically, to be the opposite of whatever I was feeling at any given time) and I expected to do all of this without being even the slightest bit gentle on myself or indulgent of my feelings. In short, I had constructed a scenario I could never, ever win.
But those three fancy chocolate bars were an external signifier to me: what I felt mattered. Someone else saw my experience and recognized it as something that warranted compassion. When I couldn't trust my own perceptions, having someone else react to my reality with objects of comfort, enabled me to see that what I was feeling mattered, and because my feelings mattered, I mattered, and I deserved to help myself feel better.