Miscarriages aren’t something that get talked about very frequently, are they? At the time I wrote this, we just passed our 2-year-anniversary of our miscarriage. I’ve done a lot of writing in the past about grief and miscarriage, but I thought I’d sit down and share a few open and transparent thoughts in this space.
I know why historically it’s been hard to talk about miscarriages.
All of the verbiage of miscarriage is awkward.
- “We lost our baby.” Technically speaking, “we” didn’t “lose” anything. We knew right where our baby was, and my husband didn’t really have much to do with the “losing” of our child.
- “Miscarriage.” The prefix “mis” means “wrong, wrongly, incorrectly.” When you look at the word this way, it places immeasurable guilt on a woman, who already may or may not feel guilt to begin with. I didn’t do anything incorrect or wrong. My child just failed to develop. But the very word has guilt embedded into it.
- Gender issues/naming issues. When we miscarried at 10 weeks, our child(ren) (a story for another time) didn’t have a known gender. So naming our child felt dishonest, since we already had a “boy name” and a “girl name” picked out. We still, to this day, refer to our miscarriage as “our other baby.”
- “Our baby died.” This is just out-and-out too hard to say. And in our culture, sadly, when those words are spoken, it’s assumed that your alive and breathing postnatal infant died.
- Then there’s the tricky bit about how to count your children, if you have other children in the home. Our miscarriage was our third child, but we went on to have another baby fairly quickly afterwards. Currently we have three alive children in the home—that’s what most people will ask about, in general conversation. But in our hearts, we still believe that baby was a part of our family, and it hurts to ignore their brief time with us. Also using ordinal numbers for age identification purposes is tricky. i.e. “That’s my eldest child, and then over there’s my second….”
- “Rainbow baby.” Some people find comfort in this term for a baby born after a miscarriage. The term is supposed to mean that you’ve got a rainbow after a stormy season in your life. But I’ve never felt comfortable using that term about our little girl. Our miscarriage was a miracle, not just a storm. There was a baby living in my womb; that in itself is miraculous. To identify my youngest child as a “bright spot after stormy weather” is cute, but it misses the point. Both my miscarried baby and my youngest baby were/are bright spots. It just so happens that one of the bright spots left our weather system, if you want to keep up the weather analogy. Again, it’s just not a term that I feel comfortable identifying my youngest as, although I know many use it and find comfort.
I have seen a growing trend of people feeling more comfortable about talking about miscarriages, and I am so very grateful for this trend. If you have experienced a miscarriage, I am so sorry. We never really forget, do we? And if a friend of yours or a sister has miscarried, please just give us grace as we grapple with what words we choose to use. The vocabulary can be pretty messy; grief is messy. Sometimes we just need you here with us in the mess, listening to whatever words we choose to use.
(For those of you who have experienced miscarriage or stillbirth, Rochester MN Moms Blog has a special place on our site to honor the memory of our little ones. For those of you who are struggling with grief and need someone to listen, or if you have any questions about grief or child loss, we also have an anonymous “Ask The Counselor” service on Rochester MN Moms Blog.)
