The Grief of Pregnancy Loss • Part 1 (Episode 46)

In this episode, Janis shares the complicated painful grief of all types of pregnancy loss. Sharing her own experience and years of working with other women, she offers encouragement that can be helpful as you process the loss and the very normal responses of questioning yourself, others, and God in the midst of inexplicable loss.

The podcast is produced by ⁠Clayton Creative⁠ in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The content should not be considered or used for counseling but for educational purposes only.

This podcast should not be considered or used for counseling but for educational purposes only.

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Transcript:

Welcome to Life & Love Nuggets, where licensed therapists Brent and Janice Sharp share how you can thrive in your life, your love, and your relationships. Hi, welcome to Life & Love Nuggets, normally with Brent and Janice Sharp, but today you just get me. October is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, and we didn't want that to go by without recognizing it due to some of our own experience and the experience of some people that are very close to us. Now it is in October, this won't air until November, so please forgive me for that, but we did feel like it was an important topic that we needed to cover. I'd also like to add along with that, infertility and failed adoptions, those are the same type of grief and the same type of loss. One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. This isn't one in four women, this is one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. This doesn't include stillborn, failed adoptions, and other losses of infants. So we're not going to go into each of these separately, so forgive me if I'm not hitting exactly the issue that you are dealing with, but I do feel like it's an important topic because it's about grief. And all of us grieve, all of us have either experienced this or we know someone that's experienced this, and we don't know how to relate to them at times, we don't know what to do that we can really help. Each grief is different, every person is different, and so we're going to grieve differently.

But the important thing to remember is if you've experienced this or you know someone who has, this is a death, it is a loss, and it's something that has to be recognized. Even if it's a very early miscarriage or a miscarriage of an unexpected pregnancy. Sometimes people go, well, I wasn't really planning on one, so why am I grieving?

It's still a loss. So we do grieve. One of the hardest things about this is a lot of people don't get it. They don't understand the loss that you're going through. We hear things like, oh, don't worry, you'll have another baby, or it's not like it was somebody you knew, or it's just a bunch of cells at this point anyway. Very well-meaning people make some really stupid comments and things that can be very, very hurtful. Fortunately, I think we're getting more aware of this and Facebook has been helpful in helping people find others who are grieving and having some support groups through that that have been really, really helpful. But there's still going to be people in your life that don't get it, and they will make some of those insensitive comments. When a woman finds out she's pregnant or when she even suspects she's pregnant or if there's a possibility that an adoption is going to go through, we already jump and have that child in our lives. We think about in pregnancy, we think about, gosh, when will I wear maternity clothes?

Or we'll have a baby by Christmas. We think about, they'll be two years younger than this child, or they'll be in kindergarten at this time, they'll graduate from high school at this time, oh, they'll be a little bit older than their cousin or a little bit younger than this cousin. So all of those things are in our mind as soon as we find out that we're pregnant or we have a possible adoption. In our mind, the future has already been set. For you as a mom that's had miscarriage, this child has become a part of your life already. So though others don't get it, that's a child to you that is in your life. When you're going through infertility, each late period is a grief. Each month when your period is late, you get your hopes up that, okay, this is the time that it's going to happen. And then the sadness and the grief every time, when I'm not pregnant this month again, it's real and it needs to be recognized.

You know, all of us are going to grieve at some point in our lives. When Brent and I did a, what are we doing now, a podcast on grief, we talked about there's a lot of different kinds of grief. So everybody's going to grieve at some time and we have to recognize this and work through it. You know, all grief is different. I've found over the years that a woman will grieve differently than her husband in a pregnancy loss. It seems like it's easier for the husbands to get through it. It's not always the case. Sometimes they just don't express their emotions, but because it's so personal to a woman, she's generally going to grieve longer and in a different way than her husband. And it's accepting that there's nothing wrong with her.

There's nothing wrong with him. But just dealing with this in a different way. For us, our first marriage, excuse me, our first miscarriage wasn't as hard as the other ones.

We were in grad school. You guys have heard this story. We were in grad school. We were working full time. We were rebuilding a house with another couple. And I started feeling really yucky, not to be personal, but I just had spotting instead of my normal period. And I thought, wow, this stress is really getting to me. But because I had a friend that had just gone through a time where she discovered she had a very large tumor, I thought I probably ought to get into the doctor and check this out. So I went to the doctor on a Friday afternoon. Hardest things generally happen on a Friday afternoon. And I went in to see him.

And of course, realize this is back in the old days. I think it was 1979, no, it was later than that, 1982, 81 or 82, it doesn't matter. Anyway, I went in and I said, I'm just not feeling good. And he examined me and he goes, well, I don't know how to tell you this, but you're almost three months pregnant. I was shocked.

We hadn't even thought about it. Britt and I were so busy in our lives at that point. We were like, yeah, we'll have a baby someday. But you know, we're not really ready to now, even though our friends generally had several years before.

So I went home and we were so excited. It was like, well, we weren't planning on it, but why not now? I mean, there's no reason we shouldn't have a baby. We're just about to graduate from grad school. The house is about to sell that we're working on.

Our life should get easier. So we had a weekend very excited about our new baby. My doctor had said he was going to go ahead and have a blood test to make sure. So Monday morning, I got the call and he said, the blood test shows that you are in the process of miscarrying.

So we were sad. It was hard.

I did eventually miscarry, but it wasn't quite as hard as some of my later miscarriages, because this was unexpected. And we were young and we were healthy. And it was like, OK, this convinced us to have a baby. So let's go ahead and have one.

So we did. We had Preston not very long afterwards. And so I kind of put all of that in the past. Then after Preston was born, we waited a little while and we wanted to have another child. In fact, in my mind, I wanted to have five.

I got close. I ended up with four. But for some reason, we had difficulty getting pregnant. And then when we did, we miscarried. And then it took us a whole year before we could get pregnant again. And we miscarried again. I know my story is nothing like some of your stories. I have many friends who have gone through so much more than this. But the grief was still real. And I hope in sharing some of my experience, it will help you guys in dealing with your own grief. But what makes pregnancy law so hard?

Why is this so difficult? Because people will ask you this, like, why are you making a big deal about this? Why is this so difficult? For many of us, it's the first bad thing that has happened.

Oftentimes we're young. I know I was fairly young at the time. And it was like, OK, you know what? I can bounce back from this. But one of the problems was when I had further miscarriages, it was like, there's something wrong here. And I hadn't really had anything bad happen in my life. I hadn't lost any grandparents. I hadn't had any siblings have issues. So there's kind of this feeling of, gosh, that fence around my life, that idealism that I had, that everything's going to be OK, is gone. And we can often feel like, if that can happen, who knows what else can happen? And so we begin to be a little more fearful, or we just view the world and God in a different way.

And not everyone. But I often find when it's your first loss, it does change your perspective on life and God and what could possibly happen. For other people, they've just had a lot of bad things in their life. It's been like one thing after another after another. And they get pregnant. And it's like, yes, this went right. And then they miscarry. It's a deep, deep loss. Because this was the thing that was supposed to be better.

This was supposed to work OK. And it didn't.

And it's painful. Or maybe you're older. And it feels like, oh my gosh, each time I miscarry or I don't get pregnant, that's one more month that I'm getting older. And it lessens my chance more and more and more. And so there's a sense of loss that's there. Oftentimes when we have miscarriage, it's unexplained.

There aren't any answers for it. We don't know what's happened or why it's happened. I know for me, I was told many times that I had bad luck. There's no reason why you shouldn't have another baby. You're healthy.

You've had one baby already. You're fine.

But it still happened. So not having that answer and not having things in my control was very, very difficult. Sometimes the answers that we get, they're not enough. We want to hear something different than that. Why can't I have a baby when it seems like 13-year-olds can, 15-year-olds can, but I can't have a baby? In our last miscarriage, I was really angry at the doctors.

That's part of grief. But it was like, don't tell me it's bad luck. I need more answers than that. I need something else that can explain what's going on. So they did do a chromosome analysis of my last one and found out that it was twin girls that didn't divide right. They could never have existed. It would be impossible for them to live because they were so undivided, for lack of a different word, that there's no way it could exist. But I still grieved because I grieved the healthy baby that I thought I was going to have.

And that's what many of us grieve. It's what I anticipate is going to happen, which happens with our friends. They get pregnant and they have babies and the babies are fine. But we grieve the ideal of what could have been often instead of what already was. That doesn't mean that's bad to grieve that, but it isn't. We are grieving the potential of a baby rather than the one that we actually had. One of the things that I questioned when I found out that it was chromosomal, which was supposed to give me some kind of relief, is so what's to keep that from happening again? But if it happens again and again, which it did a couple of times, but there is again that sense that my safety's gone.

So it could happen to me over and over again. In fact, when I actually got pregnant with my daughter, Caitlin, I had a really hard time accepting that she was going to be okay. It took me a while before I could go, okay, this actually is a healthy, normal baby. And it took me even until after her delivery to say, I can relax because she's okay. And I remember getting her in the night after she was born, they brought her to me, and I remember looking at her and realizing for the first time, I'm going to cry a lot in this, that I got to keep her. And the joy of having a baby that I got to keep was just unbelievable. But it's normal to have that hesitancy in another pregnancy. Because once you've lost a baby, you just are so afraid it's possibly going to happen again. And that is multiplied exponentially when you have a stillborn or an early infant loss. So recognize that it's okay to have that ambivalence or that feeling of I'm not going to get close to the next baby until I know for sure what's happening.

That's part of the grief, and that's part of the loss. We look for places to place blame. We ask ourselves, what did I do wrong?

Maybe I shouldn't have been running. Maybe I shouldn't have had that candy bar that I had the other day.

Or maybe it's the stress of my life. And people around you are oftentimes ready to say some of the same things, because they feel bad for you. It's not that they're trying to be insensitive people, they feel bad for you. And so they'll ask you things like, what do you think happened?

What can you do to prevent this? Maybe I was told by several people, maybe it's because you've been in grad school and you've been working full time, and it's just been too hard for you and your body just can't handle it. So I went to my doctor and I was like, okay, is the stress of my life and the things that I'm doing, is this causing this?

And he said, absolutely not. Again, it's bad luck. But he said, if it was from running, or if it was from being too stressed, we would never have any pregnant teenage cheerleaders. Because they're stressed that they find out they're pregnant, and they're very, very active. Or people in third world countries would not have babies. So you don't cause the miscarriage, but there still is that sense of blame.

What did I do wrong? How could I do this differently? And so I found myself, especially after the last miscarriage, searching and searching my heart. God, is there something in me that's wrong? Is there something that I'm not doing right? I mean, I checked for sin in my life. I went through everything because I was just so desperate to find out. And then me being who I am, when I searched my heart and went, no, I can't find anything, I immediately went, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and turned to Brent. And it was like, hmm, maybe there's something in his life.

Maybe there's something that he's doing wrong. It's funny now, but it wasn't at the time.

So I'm questioning him. Is there anything that's going on that I don't know about?

Obviously there was not. But we do that. We want to know, what have we done wrong that could stop this? This is when people come into our lives that say things like, I'm sure if you went to my chiropractor or if you drank this certain kind of nutrient or if you did acupuncture or you did this, then I'm sure it wouldn't happen anymore. They're very well-meaning people, again. But most of the time, that's not the answer for what's going on. Most of the time, there's just something that either we don't know about or there's something that's terribly out of our control. And I say terribly because that's the worst possible thing. We hate not being in control.

We hate not having answers. But this is generally what happens when we're dealing with pregnancy loss of some kind. There's no clear answer. For most of us, having difficulties getting pregnant or sustaining a pregnancy or losing a baby, it feels like we're a failure.

It's like, I can't even do this. This is like part of being a woman. And I can't do this. It makes us feel like there's something fundamentally wrong with us, something intrinsically wrong with us. When again, there's not. This is part of life. And one in four pregnancies do end in miscarriage. But we still carry that sense of, I'm flawed or I'm broken. We had this especially because we had a crisis pregnancy center at the time at our church that we were involved with. And so we were seeing girls that were 13 and 14 and 15 that were pregnant and carrying babies to full term. And it was like, oh gosh, if these girls can do it and they don't even want one and it's causing crisis in their lives, what's wrong with me that I can't just have a baby?

My friends are having babies and some of them were having babies on their perfect timing. �커arring Both of us are probably two years apart and it would work for them. It didn't work for us and it doesn't work for most of us, but it's hard because it's out of our control and other people it seems like that it's in their control.

That makes it difficult. You know, the grievinging is also hard because we have some unfamiliar emotions and reactions that come up. We act in ways, we think things. Emotions that can bring up some of the deepest things in us that were maybe wounds from earlier in our life, but we struggle with the pain of that and then on top of it, we often have the pain of bringing up some things in the past and we don't know who we are.

We don't know what am I going through? What is happening in the midst of my grief? I know one book that I read many years ago said a lot of women will dye their hair when they've gone through a miscarriage. It's like at least I have control over this or I need something different because I'm not going to have the baby. I need something different. One of the weird things that I did is I found myself shopping for really feminine clothes, like lacy feminine clothes that aren't normally me and I think it was because somewhere deep in my brain, I wanted to remind myself that I'm feminine. Just because I can't have a baby doesn't mean I'm not a very feminine person. So we're going to react in all kinds of different ways and as I've talked about in grief in our other podcast, you know, as long as it's not illegal, immoral, it's not going to hurt you, it's not going to hurt somebody else, and it's not going to bankrupt you, if you need to do it, do what you need to do. We generally instinctively know what we need to do to heal. It's whether we allow ourselves to do that or not. So again, as long as it's not harmful, if you want to go sit on a swing and swing for a long time or you want to paint the bedroom purple or do whatever you want to do, as long as it's not going to cause a problem or harm, you need to do what will help you in the midst of your grief.

Miscarriage and pregnancy loss seems so random and so unfair. We have a lot of feelings of, why me? Why not that person over there?

Why not that person over there? And it's really hard when you see a pregnant woman in public that's smoking or drinking alcohol. You want to just stop up there and go, what are you doing? How could you take this so lightly? It's that pain of, why doesn't she miscarry and I do? Again, there's no answers, but we feel that way. I remember having friends who were so upset. I remember one in particular that was so upset over an unplanned pregnancy and would go to the altar and cry because she was having another baby.

Now, I have empathy for her now. She had a number of children, so I have empathy, but at the time, I couldn't even be around her.

It's like, how dare you? How dare you be upset over being pregnant when we've tried so hard and we've worked so hard to have one? It's painful. So I have a few suggestions for you as you go through this grief. We're going to have to stop for this week, but our next episode will continue to deal with the grief and loss that comes with pregnancy loss, stillborn, infertility, and failed adoption. So join us for the next episode and I'll give you a few more practical tips on how to help somebody that's going through grief.

So go in peace and we'll see you next time. Bye.