I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement

by Jessica Zucker

Your ache, relief, despair, or indifference is uniquely yours. It is yours to navigate in any way you choose, through whatever feelings arise—be they sadness, anger, hopefulness, neutrality, helplessness, fear, or a mix of them all.

grief doesn’t adhere to a timeline, and that healing from any traumatic experience is a cyclical event with no beginning or definitive end.

We’ve become accustomed to living parallel to one another, oblivious of the pain we’re all trying to overcome.

Another one of trauma’s unforeseeable effects: briefly succumbing to overwhelmingly intense emotions, promptly followed by full-body exhaustion and a disengagement so severe you can practically disassociate. Taken over by bodily sensitivity and what feels like an emotional storm, you realize that trauma is a depleting game of mind-body pinball.

“Don’t share your good news until you are in the clear. This way, if your good news becomes bad news, then you won’t have to share your bad news.” Stop and think about this—really think. By suggesting that women stay mum during these preliminary weeks and in the event of an early miscarriage, we essentially remove from the conversation—and in so doing, stigmatize—any woman who doesn’t experience multiple trimesters of pregnancy. It implies that you probably won’t want to or shouldn’t share news of a miscarriage, so you shouldn’t say anything until the risk of that happening is lower.