The Thursday before Passover was a big day. My mom and stepfather, who live in Maine, were coming to town that night, and my mom and I planned to spend Friday cooking in preparation for a seder I was hosting. But first, I hoped to share some big news.
I was nine weeks pregnant, and Thursday morning I had a prenatal appointment scheduled to make sure everything was going smoothly and confirm the due date. That night, I planned to tell my family that my husband and I were expecting our second child.
My husband, Aaron, and I dropped off our 2-year-old son Nate at preschool and headed to the San Francisco Kaiser Medical Center. We squeezed into the small exam room crammed with an ultrasound machine and birth announcements of happy babies, and my upbeat nurse practitioner told us she would get us lots of photos for the grandparents. But soon after starting the ultrasound, she became serious. There was no heartbeat, and the embryo was much smaller than it should be at this stage of gestation. I had lost the pregnancy.
She began sympathetically to explain that this wasn’t my fault, and Aaron’s eyes filled with tears. I didn’t feel much of a reaction at all, and began to chatter wildly about how maybe stopping at just one child was for the best.
The sadness came later. So much of pregnancy is about anticipation — in the weeks after I found out I was expecting, Aaron and I had mused excitedly about what the gender would be, what the baby’s personality would be like, how Nate would do as a big brother. We made plans for the coming year — I would have the baby in November; we would travel to New England to visit family over winter break.
After losing the pregnancy, our conversations changed. Instead of sharing giddy hopes, I talked about my anxiety about getting pregnant and facing this uncertainty again. And I had to wait. I had chosen to have a medical procedure called a D&C to bring the pregnancy to a close instead of waiting to miscarry naturally, which can take weeks. Looking at our calendars, it seemed to make sense to schedule the procedure for the following Thursday, leaving an entire week in the interim. The loss loomed heavily over me during that time. I was still experiencing pregnancy symptoms; I just wanted to get it over with and move on.
I found different coping mechanisms to get me through the week. When I got home from the doctor, I immediately had a lunch of tuna sashimi, brie cheese and beer — all traditionally discouraged during pregnancy. I helped myself to plenty of wine during the Passover seders. Aaron and I went on a one-night getaway to Calistoga while Nate stayed with his grandparents — we had planned the trip months ago, but the mood had of course changed. My mom extended her visit to help us through the week, stocking our fridge and cooking us dinner. She later came with me to the D&C and helped keep Nate out of my hair while I recuperated.
Miscarriage is very common — up to a quarter of pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to the American Pregnancy Association. Many women I know have experienced one, and I’ve received sweet support from friends and family during this time.
I was due to have a fall baby. The loss may have hit me hardest when I calculated that even if I conceived again at the first opportunity, the earliest I would deliver would be next March — a spring baby. I had lost a whole season.
When I was preparing for childbirth during my first pregnancy, Aaron and I went to a class led by a midwife who specialized in meditation. She talked about how so much of our lives are dictated by “industrial time” — your alarm clock tells you when to get up in the morning, your employer tells you when you can go home. But babies, she argued, operate on “horticultural time” — like garden crops, they ripen according to their internal clocks, and their arrival can’t be scheduled or predicted.
After the D&C, I came home and slept the rest of the day. I woke up the next morning feeling well rested and ready to move forward. Maybe my next child is simply operating on horticultural time; he or she will come when the time is ripe.
Drew Himmelstein is a writer at J. Reach her at [email protected].