Bubble

I suppose I’m not entirely sure where to start - but the beginning, as always, seems best.

My husband and I met in January of 2007 - my junior year of college, his senior. I had just come back from study abroad in London, and he had moved in earlier that year with a few of my close friends. I returned to campus in winter of 2007 to meet my friend Matt’s new roommates - and tell him I had a crush on one of them. He guessed the wrong one, we laughed.

5.5 years and 4 cities later, Noah and I were married.

We moved, married, and honeymooned in the two months between med school and residency (for him), immediately prior to business school (for me). We spent the next two years barely seeing each other - him steeped in rotations, me in classes, club meetings, and parties masquerading as “networking events.” I took a job at a biotech firm immediately following grad school, he slogged through the hardest parts of an unrelenting, barely paying residency.

One of the hallmarks of residency in the US is just that - universities and hospitals get virtually unpaid highly skilled labor in exchange, at least at my husband’s program, for the lovely benefit of fully covered health insurance. So we did what most early career, early marriage couples would have done if faced with free insurance on a finite timeline - we rushed to realize higher medical costs in that window. We rushed to have babies.

I think - no, I’m sure - I told myself we were as ready as we were going to be. We were married, we’d been together for more than 8 years, we were healthy - my mom was 27 when she had my sister. I was 29 and we had one year left on our free insurance - clock was ticking.

We got pregnant fairly quickly. I regretted it almost immediately. I felt particularly robbed of 10 months - that non-birthing partners like my husband proceeded unchanged through the better part of a year while I had to change my behavior, what I ate, drank, etc. I carried that resentment with me for a while - I wasn’t really “showing,” so I wasn’t really sharing, especially at work. I’d say I spent the better part of my first trimester kind of trying to ignore my pregnancy, and only started letting myself imagine what came next once I passed 13 weeks.

But I did pass 13 weeks - and then 14, 15, so on - so I started coming around to the idea. I started thinking about names, about the things we’d do. Scheduling baby showers and buying baby clothes. And I told work that I was pregnant. I had been particularly nervous about that, because I was in a post-MBA rotational program where each year I competed for the top spot and most competitive positions. I knew that they “couldn’t” let my medical status impact my placement, but I knew it would. Still, at around 18 weeks, I told my boss that I was pregnant. He was kind, if dismissive.

At 19 weeks and 4 days I stood up from my desk and immediately felt a gush of water. I called my best friend from college who had already had one kid, laughing - “did you ever pee yourself? Just totally randomly?” We laughed. “I didn’t even think I had to pee! Didn’t even try to pee! I just stood up!” More laughing, but this time just mine. “You should call your doctor,” she said. I promised I would - after my next meeting. I tied a sweater around my waist and walked up the hill.

Nearly an hour later, I dialed. The nurse said she thought it sounded OK. I exhaled. She called me back a couple of minutes later and told me the doctor wanted me to come in.

I drove the 45 minutes from Thousand Oaks to Westwood. I parked my car underground. I think my husband met me there. Honestly, I don’t really remember a lot from this point. I remember the stirrups, I remember the gown. I remember them confirming my water had broken, and my pregnancy was no longer considered viable. I remember them explaining that the baby was fine, now - but that without the amniotic sack growing, there would be no room for baby’s vital organs to grow and expand. I remember them telling me my options. I remember being asked if I wanted to know the gender of the baby. I pictured a girl. I said no.  I remember being asked if I wanted to save the fetus for a burial. I pictured a shoe box. I said no.

I don’t remember the D&C. I remember going home, and I remember feeling empty. I remember my best friend being conveniently home from New York. I remember crying in her lap.

I remember going back to work the next week because I felt I couldn’t do anything else. I remember drinking - a lot. I remembered hating other friends’ babies. I remember hearing my sister ask my dad if I was “acting less crazy” yet. I remember a lot of women that I worked with telling me they, too, had miscarried. I remember my grandma, my mom, my hairdresser, the same. I remembered feeling like I was suddenly part of this super secret horrible club no one wanted to be a part of. I remember feeling angry. I remember feeling responsible.

I remember the one thing someone said to me that resonated: The thing about words is that they don’t really say what you need them to say, sometimes. Because “it’s gonna be okay” doesn’t cut it, and “I’m sorry” is nice but not so helpful, and “everything happens for a reason” is bullshit, and “this too shall pass” is rough because it might be true but it doesn’t make you feel any better…And maybe the point isn’t to feel better right now. Maybe that’s not what this time is for. I don’t know what it’s for. I don’t have answers - just lots of questions - and lots of words that don’t quite mean enough.

I started therapy at some point later that year, when I couldn’t shake the feeling that my reticence had led to my miscarriage, and have continued off and on since then. In the 7 years since, Noah and I have had two healthy, beautiful, brilliant children - Levi (5) and Sophie (2).

Noah and I started couples therapy last summer, at a time when our relationship, our life stage, had grown particularly challenging. 10 years of marriage, two toddlers, shitty jobs, heavier financial burdens - a nice hearty season of life. And one of the things we eventually discussed was the miscarriage - I hadn’t gone into it thinking I wanted to discuss it, but there we were. And I admitted to feeling like I went through a lot of this alone. Like I was the only one burdened by what happened - I was the one extremely distraught over it, feeling responsible for it, working through the processing of it. Hell, I was the only one who it physically happened to. My husband, at least seemingly, had soldiered on.

There was a lot of healing in that conversation - healing I didn’t know I was waiting for or needed. And I’ve continued to heal through hearing other women’s stories.  Through breaking down that super secret club and sharing the challenges, and the blessings, of the path to parenthood. Because it is beautiful - but it’s also scary and hard and traumatizing and heartbreaking and limiting and life changing.  And none of us should have to deal with it alone.

~Emma Sugerman