My youngest sister, the nineteen year old, recently called me and said that she had read
my account of the miscarriage and wanted to express sympathy. But, she was a little freaked out that I had spoken of something so personal, so private, in such a public way.
I told her why I do what I do, but I thought it worth blogging about.
The first tenet of feminism that I learned - when I learned that feminism was a multi-faceted set of theories about female reality and not a dirty word - was
THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL.
That statement is perhaps one of the most powerful things to rise up from the second wave feminists and it means that those things that happen to little old me, the small things, the personal things, the private things, the things we don't talk about outside the family, outside of our own heads, those things are important events that need to be liberated from the shadows where they only half exist and examined.
Blogging about my miscarriage, and whatever the hell else I think about as a mother and a (almost)wife and a woman, is a political act. I am sharing my experience with the world so that the world may better understand what it is that goes on in the private lives of women.
When I write in this space about how the placenta came out of me as I stood bagging groceries at No Frills while Sean and Kieran napped in the car together, I'm not just telling you about something that happened to me, I'm not just trying to bear witness to this process of miscarriage or to trying to connect with other women who have felt lonely and small in similar circumstances, I am letting the light of truth into this shadowy corner of women's existence.
Our mothers and their mothers and their mothers and on and on only ever talked about the personal small stuff in hushed tones or maybe in a self-mocking tone aimed at minimizing the importance of something robbing the truth of their realities of some of its power, denying they had a right to feel pain or grieve or whatever else they felt on the inside.
Blogging gives that power back to the realities of women.
Now you know that you can miscarry while standing in line at the grocery store. I bet some of you who haven't ever had a miscarriage or who have never been pregnant didn't know that.
I didn't know that till it happened!
I stood there, shoving boxes of Hamburger Helper and baskets of strawberries into bright yellow bags, while my uterus contracted, thinking "not here, not here, not here, please don't leak, please don't leak, that's part of my baby leaving."
When I got home, I had to go into the bathroom and dispose of the lump of tissue and congealed blood that was sitting in my underwear. I had to look at it, move it, dispose of it. They don't really tell you that out loud: that you will be looking at and probably handling but certainly fully aware of the movement of, parts of your baby and its former home the placenta.
My midwife explained that many women felt cheated out of closure because of D&C's, because soon after finding out they were miscarrying, they had the baby and the placenta removed from them. She said that by passing the miscarriage at home, I would have more time to let the baby go, more time to process what was happening and make the goodbyes I needed to make.
I would have much preferred not having to be so intimately involved in the expulsion of what was going to be a person in our family. I would have certainly liked to have avoided all the unreal pain from the night we went to the hospital. I would have much preferred not knowing exactly what was coming out of me, when and what it looked like.
On Monday, I had an U/S that confirmed that my uterus was clear and I wouldn't need any assistance with the miscarriage process. I cried on the examining table knowing exactly what it was that the technician was
not seeing. I cried waiting for Sean to get money from an ATM at the other side of the hospital, listening to the
Croncast on my iPod, surrounded by outpatients reporting in, mascara running down my face. I was in a rotten mood for two more days.
Now I'm fine. I feel less heartbroken. I feel like the world is normal again.
