Jazz Solo: Navigating the Muddy Waters of Miscarriage
I carried you around with me for six weeks, but a lot longer than that, too. Even those first two weeks they count before conception, and long before, as a matter of faith. I didn’t know then that the first two weeks of pregnancy are technically imaginary, but find joy in that, like the twinkle in the eye counts, that actual conception is an idea. And it is. A wild, harebrained, incredible idea.
The notion of creating life is such a big thing to try and hold all at once. You can’t. You are blindfolded, feeling the shape of something. You might peer into a fraction of it at a time, a sonograph like a telescope showing a blurred piece of its vastness, but to conceive of it completely with only a human peabrain and a heart, big and full as it may be, feels impossible.
Things I didn’t think to learn the first time around: how a blastocyst burrows into a uterine wall like a little fox, how a microscopic sperm cell can live for up to five days, how the placenta begins as a roving blood and nutrient vampire, how luteinizing hormone predicts ovulation on little blue strips dipped into a tiny cup in which you’ve peed. The science. The elusive recipe of it all, that we chase and chase.
I originally met you the first time I went under hypnosis, while I trained to be a hypnotherapist. I saw you there, waiting, floating, and begged you to be patient and not give up on me. That was four years ago but it seems like longer. A psychic later told me you’d been with me since I was seven. That made sense to me — like maybe you had always been, in a way, the imaginary friend I felt. Maybe you and your sister both were there as twinkles all along.
I love to tell the story of finding my baby book in the basement as a teenager and inside it a loose yellow lined piece of paper with baby name ideas for me. All but one written by my mom, which my dad had entered in his own handwriting, a very confident slanted cursive: Twinkle.
An alternate timeline with me as Twinkle.
Now that I got the chance to carry you for some time — not long enough, by so far — you have become more than an idea. You are real to me. It was such a joy to know you were there, as tiny as you were — to look up just how tiny every day: an appleseed, a peppercorn, a drop of sweat, a pencil eraser, the opening of a straw. And the last one I looked up: tall as a match.
On Friday, four days into the awful drawn out saga that is miscarriage, I felt you holding on. My hormone levels went up, which surprised the midwife, but not enough that she could confirm one way or the other. Give me a percent, I asked her, and she said five. I carried you and that five around with me all weekend. To two fall festivals and the county fair. Leaf piles and fried dough. I carried you through a haunted farmhouse, a field of bull thistle, around and around in a carousel, hoping you were there.
The blessing of fall when you are already feeling melancholy: a series.
The match went out on Saturday night, I think. Or started to really flicker. Like it was fighting some wind. As soon as Lynn — our honorary third nana and dear friend, who sat on the floor and told me of her own loss that began in a movie theater almost 30 years ago, her eyes pink with tiny pools that held fast without dropping — left that night, your sister in bed, and the house quiet, my cramps set in, more earnest than before. Different. In the bathroom, a glob of red sitting in the cradle of my underwear. I knew this wasn’t good. I looked at it closely. It wasn’t. Yet, it was tiny. Not distinguishable, but not nothing. As long as a match is what I told the midwife, but only as thick as two matches. I placed it carefully in a tupperware. Two hours later I remembered to put it in the fridge.
Someone told me that no matter what, loss like this is an isolating experience. And it was, I found. No matter who is around you and what they are saying, this is happening to you alone. It was not that my fiancé was not grieving, but that he was doing so in a smaller, separate way. He was aware of this and named it, saying because it wasn’t happening in his body, it hadn’t become quite real yet. I had to acknowledge that he’d also not felt this spirit like I had, like a little light orb, and therefore hadn’t also had to feel it dim slowly over days like a flashlight on low battery, one you beg to keep working while you walk through the dark of it.
I embraced this in the end. Sitting on my couch on a Saturday night, alone, staring into a YouTube soundscape of an ever-opening butterfly and speaking out loud, forcing the words out at first and then letting them spill, ever opening, telling the spirit it was okay to let go and that it would be okay, that we’d try again and so should they, please, and thank you; all things I needed to say to myself, too.
When you lose a pregnancy, no one tells the algorithm. No one tells it to stop the heavy rotation of pregnancy pillows and adorable maternity sweater dresses for fall. You have to physically press your thumb to the bottom right. No one tells the Google calendar to cancel the reminders of the ultrasound you scheduled in excitement at a much different time. You have to physically Delete Event. Delete the apps you downloaded to tell you the baby’s size every morning. But part of it never deletes.
Instead, it transmutes, gets baked in somehow in a way that can’t be undone. Now that it’s been a year and I’ve experienced two losses, I have to say, while pregnancy loss can feel like an isolating experience, it shouldn’t have to be. There were so many feelings surrounding mine — stubborn hope and sadness, yes, but the one that was the hardest was shame. I felt shame in my own body, like it had failed me, that I had maybe personally done something wrong. That I was too old, that I hadn’t been exercising enough. It was the shame that made me want to isolate the most. But for anyone who goes through this, what I most want to say is, you have done nothing wrong, and you don’t have to tough it out alone. If you can muster the voice to speak about it, you’ll probably be glad that you did.
I’m grateful now that I had that weekend of hope, when I asked friends to light candles and send thoughts that might give the spirit a chance. I’ll never forget the friend who asked on a cold Monday night, “Would you welcome an apple crisp I baked for you?” and then showed up at my door and sat at the kitchen table with me; her genuine smile of care that makes her dimples show. The friends who checked in daily. The understanding voice of my midwife. My mother who came for the second blood draw and then to Washington Baths where I cried in a hot pool, who sat in a beam of light on the daybed and ate rye bread with sweet butter with me. I was lucky.
While I came to understand why miscarriage is a thing talked about in hushed voices, I was also kind of dismayed at that. With the National Library of Medicine estimating it may occur in a quarter of pregnancies, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recognizing its mental toll on most who go through it, it’s not something anyone should feel obligated to place in the shadows. It’s a human experience, and a profound one at that. Like birth, and pregnancy, and sex itself, miscarriage is ancient and primal and real.
After all was said and done, the best way I could describe the feeling was like it had added a layer to my being. It placed me among a long line of people going back thousands of years who have been through it, who had bled and grieved and found some way to keep going, as I had. It gave me the future ability to be the bearer of apple crisp.
In the NIH’s recommendations for providers working with patients experiencing miscarriage, one is to avoid using medical terms and instead use phrases such as “your child” or the name of the lost baby. So I will take that advice:
Jasper. My sweet jazz solo.
Not long enough, but always.
Cover photo by Lynn Danielson on Unsplash
About the Author
Emily Wittenhagen is a writer living in Maine, fascinated by the natural and the supernatural. She practices nutrition, herbal medicine, and hypnotherapy. She is currently pursuing a course in miscarriage doula work and focusing a portion of her business, Breeze Holistic, toward offering support to people going through this experience. She embraces herself as queer and lives with her sweetheart and their daughter who asks compelling questions like, do butterflies sit in chairs to eat lunch? Most recently, she has been published in Anodyne Magazine and the Champagne Room, and is honored to be included in the MUTHA community.
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