Death of a Peppercorn

or the Peculiar Language of Desperate Women

Every time I think of a sentence to start this story, I dismiss it immediately, thinking I have read this tale a thousand times. Back before it was my story, I had read about these women, their struggles and sob stories, and thought about them with a fleeting sympathy, but nothing more.

When you begin trying to concieve a child (TTC), and delve into the frantic world of fertility online, you learn all sorts of cutesy little acronyms that make up this peculiar language of desperate women. Having sex with your husband becomes BD-ing (baby dancing) with your DH (dear husband). When you take a pregnancy test and it says you are pregnant, it’s a BFP (big fat positive). I couldn’t help but smirk when I read posts from the women who actually used this inane language in the fertility forums I briefly ventured into during that first month that my husband and I started trying.

I read about women who had been trying to get pregnant for months, for years, and many who’d even suffered miscarriages along the way. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them, these poor ladies engaged in these forums, who probably pinned photos of copycat Olive Garden recipes to their Pinterest boards, who likely had birthday parties for their dogs and forced their husbands to watch romantic comedies with them every Saturday night. Because, let’s face it — I can be a snobby, judgmental bitch.

The point is, stories of infertility and miscarriage were always on my periphery. I’d stumble accross something online or in a magazine, give it a quick read through, and move on. Taking my first glance at these forums and conversations, I acted the same way and let these women’s experiences and fear wash over me without giving them too much thought. I was convinced that my story would be different from theirs. My story would be like all my girlfriends’: we’d try for a month or two, get pregnant, and go on to have two or three sweet little monsters who would disrupt our lives and test our patience in the sweetest and most charming of ways. My husband and I would wear our badges of sleeplessness with a quiet, yet smug pride, and cease to remember a time when our lives weren’t ruled by sticky fingers and endless smiles.

But as month two rolled into three, and three turned into more, I began to fear that something wasn’t right. It shouldn’t take this long, should it? I was taking my temperature and checking my fluids to track ovulation. I started using not one, but two different brands of ovulation predictor kits simultaneously (I’m a now a veritable expert at peeing on a stick). I convinced my doctor to run some fetility tests, even though it hadn’t yet been a year and I was only 31. Though my results were borderline, she said we should just keep at it and try to relax! As if the command relax! had ever had any positive effect on anyone, ever.

So, sure. I relaxed. If by relax you mean dive into every single fertility book I could get my hands on, and spend long hours into the night combing through the forums I had earlier been so contemptuous of, then yes, I that’s exactly what I did. I am a great relaxer. I even bought a half-dozen books on mindfulness and meditation, so that I could relax from all the stress this relaxing was causing me.

The fun part of this story comes one month later, when I began to feel a slight nausea one morning and took a pregnancy test on a whim, about five days before I promised myself that I would. And there it was — a faint little second line. I took a photo of it and sent it to one of my girlfriends. “You’re PREGNANT!” her text message screamed at me. I had worried myself for nothing, because here was the proof. I could create life, and this little plastic stick confirmed it. I was a goddess and soon-to-be Earth Mother who would have a passel of children running around her before her day was done. All of that relaxing actually paid off.

My delighted husband and I decided to tell his immediate family and a nice handful of friends. I was so excited and knew there was no way we could keep this glorious news to ourselves for 12 whole weeks. Besides, I’d read somewhere that telling the people you would go to for support in case you miscarried was a perfectly fine way to get around this tacit 12-week rule.

I bought a pair of Giants baseball booties for the baby. We started calling it “The Peppercorn,” for the size that the pregnancy books said the embryo was that week. We began looking at bigger apartments, thinking about maternity leave, and discussing baby names in earnest.

I ignored the slight warnings I received from those few we had told. “It’s still early, you know. A lot of pregnancies end in miscarriage at this stage,” I heard from a old friend of mine who had become a father two years before. Two women in my husband’s family related stories of their multiple miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies on the night that I told them. But I had heard this sad tale before, and again it just washed over me and I didn’t pay them much mind.

But when I woke up one morning, and my breasts didn’t hurt quite as much as they had the previous days, I felt it was a warning I couldn’t ignore. I began to Google miscarriage and loss of pregnancy symptoms and miscarriage rates in early pregnancy. I read accounts from the women in these online forums and pushed the fear back down my throat. I talked to my husband and a few girlfriends, all of whom reassured me this was normal, and I would feel better in a few days.

Except I didn’t. I woke the next morning with the familiar feeling of menstrual cramps starting deep within my center. An hour later, there was blood. I wailed with a gutteral depth I have rarely felt as I realized I was right. I knew something was wrong yesterday, and here it is — a fucking crime scene’s worth of blood and it feels like one too. Like a murder has been committed inside me.

I’ll spare you the details of what happened next — after all, there are plenty of places to read about it online. Ultimately, I came away from the experience dehydrated from all of the crying, anxious as to what the miscarriage meant, and unable to look in the direction of where we kept the big jar of peppercorns in the kitchen.

I was pregnant, now I am not. I was going to have a baby who was due on Valentine’s Day, now I have to pull myself together to attend a 4-year-old’s birthday party, where well-meaning acquaintances will continually ask me if we are thinking about having kids soon. I will “be strong.” After all, I’m still (relatively) young, and we are already trying again. In all likelihood, I will get pregnant again (85% chance) and I will probably not have another miscarriage (only a 5% chance). But it sure doesn’t take away the bitterness of what has happened. The death of that little embryo has robbed us of our naive innocence — the next pregnancy, if we are part of the 85%, will be less exciting, more cautious, and certainly a bit more fraught with worry.

But what still strikes me as odd is that I knew this story before it happened to me. I had read about it before. I’d heard the statistic that one in every five pregnancies ends in miscarriage. ONE in FIVE. I had read it before, but it didn’t sink in until it happened to me. Until the women in my family told me their stories. Until I read the online posts again. Until I realized that in my Facebook feed, with the continuous barrage of happy baby pics and pregnancy announcements, for every four or five babies I learn about there is one that I don’t. We may read about other unknown women who have miscarriages, but we don’t seem to hear about it from our friends and acquaintances who have them as well. They’ve all kept the news to themselves until they feel more confident at 10 or 12 or 15 weeks, and then they joyfully announce the news of this successful pregnancy. It certainly is easier than telling people that you were pregnant, but now you are not, and you still don’t have a baby to show for it.

We need to talk about our pregnancies, because otherwise we will never talk about our miscarriages or other forms of pregnancy loss. We should not feel ashamed for sharing the news early because we are sharing what is real. When we keep the stories of other women as just that — other women — we forget that we are women too. If you’ve got female friends, you have friends who’ve suffered pregnancy loss. Shit, you may have experienced it yourself and not told anyone. Why would you want to talk about something as painful as a freaking death that happens inside your body, hidden away in a dark corner you can’t see or touch?

Ladies, we must. We must talk about these uncomfortable parts of our lives. We should have the courage to stop tamping down our joy and tell the damn world about our pregnancies whenever it feels right to us. If that happens to be in the very early stages, so much the better. If we continue to stay silent, then this story will wash over you as well, and you’ll continue to feel that slight twinge of sympathy before moving on to the next article or blog post. Well, until it happens to you, that is. And when it does, I promise I won’t judge you for CIO over your MC. I’ll even take you out for a cup of RLT, and we can commiserate together.