I suffered a missed miscarriage in the middle of a pandemic. It’s been over a month since the D&C and it’s still hard to admit. I was 9 weeks along when the baby’s heart stopped. Quite a few people around my husband and I knew, including all of my family, some of my friends, and his immediate family. I found that a lot of people didn’t know how to support me or my husband because normally, they wouldn’t have known I was pregnant. And that irks me. Society has taught us to wait until 12 weeks to announce a pregnancy because of the higher risk of miscarriage in the first trimester. I’m convinced that we are taught this, not to help the women grieve, but so that other people are not “inconvenienced” by the grief. I hate that notion. This happens to 1 in 4 women. Take a minute and think. I know that you know more than 4 women. Chances are, one of them has miscarried and you may not have even realized. 

There should be no shame in a miscarriage, and yet, when I experienced my own miscarriage, along with the grief, there was shame: shame that I had let everyone down. How messed up is that? I was the one who had suffered a loss, yet I was worried about everyone else. My boss and a coworker sent me flowers and I felt like a fraud for accepting them. I kept thinking that I shouldn’t be letting people help me with my grief. I kept thinking that maybe the grief was in my head because the baby was only real to me (and my husband). I’m sorry, but we have to do better. I can’t be the only woman who has felt this way about their miscarriage and it’s wrong that we’re allowing them to feel this way because it’s easier than supporting them through their grief. But then I realized, society has not taught us how to support women going through miscarriages because it’s easier to pretend they don’t exist.

If you know something who is currently going through a miscarriage, please don’t abandon them or ignore their pain. Please don’t belittle their pain either. That baby was real to them. All of the pregnancy symptoms they had experienced made it real. I had people tell me awful things that they probably didn’t think anything of when they said it. At least it was only 9 weeks. You hadn’t become attached yet. The baby didn’t have a gender yet so that’s good. It could have been worse. This is why you don’t tell people before 12 weeks. You shouldn’t be so focused on your dead baby. You can always have another baby. All of those things were said to me. Please don’t say them to other women. It is not helpful. It will destroy them.

So instead, be there for them. Let them talk and listen to them. It doesn’t have to be about the loss or about anything important, it can just be small talk. I had friends checking in on me daily just to ask how I was doing and letting me talk about whatever I wanted to talk about. Those friends were lifesavers, just knowing there was someone I could talk to without feeling ashamed, guilty, or judged. So, be like my friends. Let them talk if they need to. Offer what you can do for them. If they say nothing, check-in periodically. Let them know you are available to them as support. Help them through their emotions because their hormones are making that very difficult for them to do on their own. 

And if you’re the one going through the miscarriage, I am so sorry for your loss. I can’t say I know what you’re going through because each of our miscarriage experiences are unique and different, but I understand that what you’re going through is hard and sometimes feels impossible. I understand how awful you feel right now and how you feel like your life’s falling apart. Unfortunately, there are no magic words that I can say that will help, but each day will start to get a little easier and each day you will feel stronger until you are able to get up and start the slow process of moving on.