I am a mother without a child. Without two children to be exact. My life is otherwise perfect. My husband is amazing, I have a career I enjoy, and a family that is extremely close. Just no children, only a rosebush and tree planted in their memory and a box of photos of my son whose cries I never heard and eyes I never got to see look back at me with life. It is a pain that is impossible to describe but I will try because quite frankly since I lost my children I have come across only two types of reactions in people: quiet genuine camaraderie from the women who have also suffered miscarriages and uneasy apologies from those who have never known this kind of loss or how someone who never lived outside my womb could have such an impact on my life.
We don’t talk about it, us Childless-Mothers. We don’t talk about the time spent in the labor unit listening to the luckier women giving birth to screaming children and knowing ours will never make a sound. That was the worst for me. I was farther along in my pregnancy so they had to induce my labor which took a grueling 4 days to complete. Those 4 days were torture, from my open hospital room door I saw happy people walking around with balloons and car seats. I didn’t want to be jealous of those luckier women but I was, a day that was surely the happiest in their lives was my most devastating.
We don’t talk about the pain that comes from taking down the nursery and boxing up all the toys we lovingly envisioned our children playing with. We don’t talk about how painful it is when we go to the grocery store and have to walk past the baby food aisle. We don’t talk about waking up in the middle of the night and just feeling empty. We don’t talk about feeling like failures for not having a successful pregnancy. We don’t talk about the urge to vomit we have when we see the words “spontaneous abortion” written on the medical charts. We don’t talk about the guilt, the nagging what-ifs, the how could I not have known something was wrong with my child? We don’t talk about any of it.
In the day and age where reality TV and social networking seem to make no part of American life off-limits, Miscarriage seems to be one of the few topics that never gets discussed. Why? It is understandable that those who have never suffered a miscarriage simply do not understand what all it entails and therefore feels no need to discuss a topic so equally intimate and confusing. But what about those of us who have walked through that hell and survived, forced to come to terms with the reality of our situation? Why do we not fight to make our plight a less taboo topic? Why do we not try to build a bridge of understanding between us Childless-Mothers and the rest of the world? Why do we not talk?
We don’t talk because those of us who have been there have the quiet understanding that there is not enough words in the world to describe the pain and the knowledge that those who haven’t been there will never understand.