Fine, Like Me
By: Meredith Eastburn
Tags: Grief And Loss, Miscarriage, Pregnancy Loss

Fine, Like Me

Trigger warning: this essay is about my personal experiences with recurrent pregnancy loss.

Last month I had my third miscarriage and I feel strangely fine. Well, not fine, exactly. I’m rather pissed off and a bit lost. I have some specific rage and general hopelessness, and I feel completely scared to want something again. But, can I just say fine? I know it’s not fine, but we’re in month 18+ (of forever, apparently) of a global pandemic with a new, more infectious COVID variant that makes me fine with not having to go into the germy, busy hospital for monthly doctor appointments.

Like I said, it’s fine.

Here’s the part that’s not only fine but actually incredible. I have a daughter, Maeve, who is one and a half years old, and this pregnancy loss hits differently now that we have her because she’s perfect. After the first two losses, we were shocked and scared that we’d never be able to have a baby; but Maeve is here now, my Pandemic Baby of Wonder and Joy. She’s perfectly beautiful, endlessly funny, and so brilliant you just won’t believe me — AND she loves to eat anything and sleeps like a dream. Usually I try not to bring this up because I’m pretty sure the Other Moms will hate me.

She’s basically a unicorn baby, and now that I’ve said it, I’m sure this blissful mirage that is my sticky, sublime toddler will dematerialize into a poof of glittery dust like a magician who disappears himself in a dramatic burst of smoke and sparkles. Somehow, she hasn’t vanished yet, so she has been all the things you’d expect in this situation — a salve, a hopeful reminder, a comic relief, a distraction from heartbreak. She fills a good portion of my day and mindspace, what with her cheeks and children’s books and pillow piles upon which she likes to throw herself.

I throw pillows too sometimes.

I was extremely nauseated during the early weeks of this pregnancy, much more so than my pregnancy with my daughter or the two previous pregnancies that I lost. When you’ve had a miscarriage, any number of miscarriages, you become reluctant to celebrate. To believe the double lines on the pee stick. You negotiate with God (because that’s totally how he works, right?): if this is not meant to be, let it end early, like tomorrow, rather than weeks or months from now. Your brain retreats into a dark cave of mud and fog and low-grade paranoia. I was so “in the mud” with this pregnancy between the nausea and general detachment of my brain from my body (I believe this may be called a Coping Mechanism), that the leveling out of my hormones in the weeks after the D&C actually felt like I was emerging from a deep sleep of denial. Now I’m actually beginning to have full, real thoughts, desires, and motivations. I do feel a bit sick admitting that I feel “better” in that sense.

All of my losses have been “missed” miscarriages; the baby blur of cells stopped living, but my body didn’t get the memo and hadn’t bled or given me any hint of the doomed biology inside me. Actually that’s not true. During my most recent pregnancy, there was a point when I felt like my symptoms had dissipated, some gradually and some overnight. For a few days, I kept bouncing around the house (literally), trying to tell if my boobs still hurt or not, and I’d stick my face over the trash can wondering if it actually just didn’t smell as gross today. I tortured myself with equal parts doubt and fear, trying to convince my brain that, sure, I still felt a little horrible. And then my symptoms really did seem to return, so I let myself feel silly and relieved (that reassurance of feeling like utter crap is one of the delicate and extra special mind games you get to enjoy when pregnant, especially when pregnant after previous losses). But in reality, I would find out the following week at our 11-week appointment that we no longer had a heartbeat.

Each one of my miscarriages was discovered during an OB appointment when the doctor did an ultrasound. The first one came as a complete shock, like the floor simply vanished beneath me when the doctor shared what she was seeing, or in my case what she was not. I remember feeling like I had been kicked in the stomach and was falling backward into a deep black hole, witnessing the moment through a window shaped like the rounded wedge of the ultrasound picture frame, like a section of a spotty black bundt cake.

I remember asking my doctor, whom I loved and completely respected, to forgive me for second-guessing her but could she look again? Was she sure? Should someone else check? No fetal pole, no heartbeat.

The medical field has either the most Victorian or the most clinical of terms around all this — blighted ovum, spontaneous abortion (don’t even get me started on the loaded gut punch this term brings to someone who very much wants to be pregnant), products of conception, chromosomal abnormalities incompatible with life. A man, obviously, came up with those words, but my compassionate female doctor somehow helped us understand what it all meant. She helped us get through that moment, and unfortunately, more similar moments to come in my future.

The future became a tricky place for me after my father’s death (esophageal cancer took him nine months prior to my first miscarriage) and an even trickier place after each lost pregnancy. I used to thrive off of imagining the future. I loved making plans and daydreaming about my future family, home, vacations, and holidays. But I have found the future to be an achingly difficult and blurry place to wander, as though by daring to let it take shape in my mind, I am jinxing it. The floor is not solid in the future, and I sure have some nerve thinking otherwise.

Miscarriage ruins some things for you (besides the obvious and daydreaming about the future), or at least makes some things really difficult to swallow. During the early weeks of our first pregnancy, we had a vacation planned to Madrid and Barcelona, Spain. I had just found out I was pregnant but was assured that traveling was fine. Dutifully and almost delightedly, I abstained from drinking wine, veered away from everyone who was smoking (which was a little difficult because in Spain it seemed like everyone was smoking), and politely passed on the region’s signature soft cheeses and cold cured meats (because listeria). After our return and that 9-week ultrasound, I became irrationally sad and salty about Spain and Gaudi and paella. I’m not sure I can ever go back, no offence to Spain.

As I recovered, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced their first pregnancy, and I’ll never forgive them for co-opting my due date. Along slightly more rational lines, however, it’s not a stretch to say that triggers developed. Pregnancy announcements were especially hard, and seeing friends’ babies all over Facebook or in real life was fine, but you know, not ideal. You can’t begrudge someone their living, breathing child; and to be honest, seeing actual born babies gave me some hope. A bit of sadness mixed in, and hope. It was fine. The worst offender was the Internet itself. Even with its all-knowing bots and spiders and cookies, the Internet couldn’t quite wrap its head around the fact that I was no longer pregnant. It loved to sprinkle my social media feeds with articles about picking baby names and ads for a magical $1500 bassinet that rocks and shushes your baby (and, I must assume, teaches her French and coding and the articles of the Constitution as well while she sleeps).

We were lucky enough to get pregnant again right away, but unfortunately this pregnancy also ended in miscarriage. I was 35 at the time, so each of my pregnancies have been “geriatric” ones (thanks again, Mr. Modern Medicine, for really reading the room when coining your terminology); and we later learned through genetic testing that random chromosomal abnormalities explained my losses. In other words: I’m old. And so are my shriveled up eggs. So there aren’t as many good ones. And Mother Nature knows what she’s doing. What a bitch.

With the second pregnancy, I again had minimal to no symptoms, and I had learned to taper my excitement with a healthy dose of dread. So, at our first ultrasound when my doctor heard a strong heartbeat but cautioned that we were “not out of the woods yet” with a baby measuring several days too small — and looking like a tiny Elvis mermaid — my takeaway was to prepare myself for the worst. At a follow-up ultrasound in the radiology lab a week later, the tech quickly and quietly took all of her scans and measurements but didn’t offer to play the heartbeat for us. She left to run her findings by the radiologist, and she was gone for a long time. Way too long. I laid on the exam table looking up at the ceiling tiles, which had been painted with a scene of sheep in a meadow. I remembered the last song I sang to my father as he died in a hospital bed set up in the downstairs study of my childhood home. “And my Lord he said to me, do you like my garden so green? If you live in my garden, you must feed my lambs, and I’ll return in the cool of the day.” When the tech returned with the radiologist, I knew it was over. This time I apologized for not being able to make eye contact with them through my tears.

I shared my losses publicly because I didn’t see them as secrets, and in grief I find that speaking about who or what you have lost is helpful and healing. It’s helpful when your friends send loving messages. And ice cream. It’s helpful to hear you’re not alone and that many other women you know and love have also experienced miscarriages. (It’s not helpful for people to start doling out advice on freezing your eggs or IVF, just FYI.) I wanted to be open about them so my friends would know they could come to me if they ever experienced the same thing. I was not prepared for people to divulge that they’d had three or even “several” miscarriages. I could not digest the thought that I might continue to lose pregnancies and futures that would briefly take real form in my body and mind.

Now I have fallen backwards through three black holes, silently yelling no, no, NO at my doctor and literally growling through my tears during the last ultrasound. This time, the anger hit first, and the sadness followed a week later. Because of rising COVID cases, the hospital’s visitor policy barred my husband from being in the building when I had this D&C. I laid by myself on a hospital gurney in pre-op for two hours, so long that my butt started to fall asleep. But, I thought, I’m fine. By now, at least I’m not scared of the surgery, and I know what to expect of it. At least they let me keep my phone with me (that never happened before), and at least I was able to have the surgery at all given the COVID surge. (I just deleted “at least I don’t have COVID,” because let’s not get carried away; that kind of optimism seems one step too cavalier, even for someone who is fine, like me.)

So, I guess that’s what I am now: a glass that is half-full and a vessel that is fully empty, my womb again vacant and my daydreams resembling an abandoned movie set until I figure out what kind of audacity I have playing with the future.

At lunch today I opened a fortune cookie that came with my takeout, and it was empty. Fortuneless. How appropriate, I thought. I ate the cookie anyway, breaking off a piece to share with my daughter, who, by some exquisite miracle, still stands on the solid hardwood floor next to me, not vanishing.