Not readily a parent

I was barely five weeks pregnant when I had my first miscarriage. Staying in what I’m convinced is the tiniest Starwood-points-eligible hotel room in New York, I woke up an hour before my alarm realizing something wasn’t right. I fumbled through the brutal UI of the patient portal app to message my doctor’s office before throwing myself into a long day of live all hands broadcasts for work. Between the hair and makeup, the selfies and the last minute script changes, I had just about enough to distract me from the cramping until I stopped feigning denial and picked up the voicemail later that evening. I played it on speaker, my doctor’s words telling me what I already knew. “I’m sorry,” she confirmed. “It was most likely a chemical pregnancy.”

Unless you know fewer than five adult women (hey, who am I to judge?), odds are you know someone who has lost a pregnancy. Even increasing this number by an order of magnitude to account for the facts that (a) not all women try to become pregnant and (b) not all women who become pregnant are aware of very early pregnancy losses, I think it’s still safe to say you know someone who has lost a pregnancy. You just may not know who it is. Because, despite it being about twice as likely that a woman will miscarry as get breast cancer in her lifetime (one in eight), it seems that almost nobody talks about these experiences. Certainly not one in four women.

Depending on when you count from — and I wasn’t counting — I was about a year into seriously pursuing single parenthood when not much more than a month after the chemical pregnancy, another pee-on-a-stick test blinked positive. This time would be different, I reasoned, refusing to acknowledge that I had no basis whatsoever on which to do any such reasoning. I’m good like that. It was the day before Thanksgiving and my Mom was visiting from Ireland. We could see the snow falling outside from where we sat inside by the fire. All the hallmarks of an Instagram moment, I think you’ll agree. But, in a rare occurrence for me, there was no combination of emojis and hashtags I could conjure to adequately capture it.

With the financial considerations of at least the “biological” part of becoming a single mom relatively contained by the insurance and fertility coverage my firm provides, the priciest out-of-pocket expense of my treatments up to that point may very well have been the world record number of additional at-home tests I took before the pregnancy was confirmed by two blood tests the following week. Two weeks after that, my close friend Tom accompanied me to the first ultrasound appointment where we both saw the baby’s heart beating — and Tom saw maybe a smidge more than he’d bargained for. My doctor gave me a new progesterone prescription, some sonogram photos to keep, and a hug. Tom and I did what we always did when we had big things to talk about — we went straight to IHOP to toast the great news over pancakes. He ordered the kind with chocolate batter and chocolate chips, perhaps in response to the trauma of his first gynecological experience. We’d shared hundreds of breakfasts over the preceding dozen years, but this one was especially bittersweet. We were each getting ready to move away from Boston just weeks later; me and my dog Henry to Chicago, he and his husband Thomas to San Antonio.

Joy and anticipation took up permanent residence in my every fiber, where they co-existed comfortably with daily morning sickness and exhaustion. Christmas back in Ireland added jet lag for good measure. I didn’t care. I eagerly shared my news with close friends and coworkers. They eagerly shared my unmistakable excitement along with their recommendations for go-to pregnancy apps and books — I received no fewer than four hand-me-down copies of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and was introduced to some of the newer gestation bibles, including Emily Oster’s Expecting Better and Angela Garbes’ Like A Mother. Also shared with me was much very well-intentioned yet very unsolicited advice. My LinkedIn profile already boasted some prior experience in navigating this having dealt with a similar onslaught of well-meaning concern during my brush with breast cancer nine years earlier. “Wait until 12 weeks to announce on social media,” cautioned some, “you know, just until you’re in the safe zone.” I’ve since added “the safe zone” to my self-curated list of poorly labeled pregnancy terms, right beside “geriatric maternal age”.

Closing in on 40, I liked to take the (often misplaced) opportunity to remind people that I was still in my 30s. My doctor liked to take the opportunity to remind me that while 39 was statistically a better age than 40 to deliver, my age meant my pregnancy was “geriatric”, as medically defined. As medically defined by the same almost-certainly-male luminary who coined the term “chemical pregnancy”, no doubt. Geriatric or otherwise, my baby and I aced our prenatal genetic testing, the results of which also informed me I was carrying a little boy. “Will you do a gender reveal?” a nurse at the hospital asked me when I got the results. “You just witnessed it!” I joked. I wanted to proselytize her, explaining my view that we should more accurately call those events “sex reveals” instead of conflating the terms, and that assigning gender isn’t really the role of the parent. But, for maybe the first time in 39 years, I bit my tongue.

“Is something wrong?” Not seeing the in utero somersaults at which I had marveled just weeks before, I knew the answer before I asked the question, mid-ultrasound at 17 weeks along. Yes, for those checking the math, you’re correct. That’s a solid month into the “safe zone”. But there was no longer a heartbeat. Within the same visit, the doctor went from calling my son “your baby” to “the fetus”, and what followed was some blur of me screaming and her explaining options for what would come next. I could barely breathe for days, sobbing uncontrollably on the phone with my mother, sobbing in the arms of friends, sobbing on the floor of the baby’s bedroom holding the tiny rocketship- and hedgehog-adorned onesies he’d already been sent as gifts by people excited to meet him soon.

Nothing else mattered. Sleep and food didn’t feature much at all in my days and nights. For the first time in my entire career, I couldn’t even think about work. Other people responded to my emails and picked up what needed to be kept moving. My teams rallied around me with an emotional support that underscores why I refer to my colleagues as extended family. It’s not lost on me that most people don’t work somewhere remotely like this. I flew to Boston for the weekend to be with my brother and his family. My nephew met me on their doorstep with a hug that conveyed an empathy belying his mere seven years. “I’m so sorry the baby didn’t make it,” he comforted me. Without even a grain of exaggeration, I can honestly say that there were moments in those first days where I truly believed I might die from the grief. But the thought of my own parents experiencing a pain even close to as raw was unbearable, and that reminded me to take each next breath.

Less than a week later, Tom flew in from Texas to be with me and, all in the same day, I said both hello and goodbye to my son for the first time. I held his tiny little hand, staring at his perfect baby fingernails, as it started to snow outside the hospital window. Although I’m not especially religious, I appreciated the non-denominational chaplain who sat with us as I cried. She brought my son a little green and blue fleece blanket and recorded his birth and his name, Nicholas Fletcher McEneaney. Little Saint Nick, his middle name remembering my grandmother, also a single mom, she not by choice. At a year old, my Dad was the youngest of the eight kids she was left to raise alone after my grandfather’s sudden death (it would have been nine had she not lost the child she was carrying at the time her husband died). Luckily for her — and for her children— she was a highly educated chemist and a badass entrepreneur (her business is still thriving). I was discharged from the hospital that evening, in a literal and figurative fog. Leaving the maternity ward without my child but clutching the blanket, Tom drove me home. We didn’t go to IHOP.

If you Google something along the lines of “what not to say to somebody who has lost a pregnancy”, taking your pick of links to click from among the search results will bring you to a remarkably accurate anthology of the things I heard in the days and weeks that followed. But you would have no reason to Google that. And, of course, neither did anybody else. So, as with the very well-intentioned yet very unsolicited pregnancy and cancer advice before it, I braced myself for these drive-by attempted interventions, trying once more to focus on the “well-intentioned” part. This was not so easy when people offered up gems like “at least it wasn’t a real baby yet” and “do you think you did something wrong?” and “you can just have another baby” and, when I hadn’t returned quite fully to work, “are you still on vacation?”

“We become mothers not, as books and websites tell us, when our babies reach the size of an avocado or butternut squash but simply when we declare ourselves so.”

Other than a stunning disbelief that people seemed to think a future baby would serve as a replacement baby for Nicholas, the comments that stung the most, the ones I couldn’t always let go, were various versions of “don’t worry, you’ll be a mom some day.” I am a mom. I am baby Nick’s Mom. That won’t change if I become another child’s parent. As Garbes writes in Like a Mother, “Miscarriage helped me understand that we become mothers not, as books and websites tell us, when our babies reach the size of an avocado or butternut squash but simply when we declare ourselves so.” +1 that. All day long.

But the unwelcome comments, however misguided, paled in comparison to a different set of messages I began to receive. “I never told you this but we lost our first child at 38 weeks,” one of my closest colleagues shared when he called. “When or if you’re ever ready, give me a call. I had a second trimester loss, too,” texted another. Through the sound of my own tears I listened as a friend in California told me about aching through three miscarriages. “You never get over them,” she empathized, “you just learn to carry the pain differently.” Friends, colleagues, even family members shared dozens of previously unspoken heartaches, as if indoctrinating me into a very large but very secret society, one to which nobody actually wants to belong. Or speak about, it seems. What was this? Fertility Fight Club?

Without skipping a beat, parents will recall details of babies lost years before. They say things like “she would be six next month” and “I cry every time I hear the song I sang to him in my belly.” I understand that one. I saw A Star is Born when I was pregnant with Nick and would sing (and I use that term loosely) along to the movie soundtrack over and over in the car. The lyrics to Always Remember Us This Way are hard to hear now, especially when Lady Gaga sings (and here I use the term more accurately) “the part of me that’s you will never die”.

A tech role model of mine happened to message me on Twitter the day after Nick was born, asking if I would be at SXSW this year. I told her that no, sadly, I had lost my son and was flying home to Ireland to grieve with my parents for a while. Even though I had never met this remarkable woman in person, she shared that she had been pregnant nine times. She and her husband have one living child. When I returned from Ireland to Chicago, a parcel from her was waiting for me. I opened it, expecting an advance copy of her upcoming book she’d promised; instead, I found a miscarriage care package, a note of compassion — and a tremendous sense of solidarity.

Grief is fucking hard. And talking about hard things is generally recommended. Yet, almost no one is talking about this unfortunately wildly common source of grief. I’m a strong proponent of therapy in general, and especially so in the case of hard things. But perinatal loss counseling aside, miscarriage is talked about very little at all, even among friends. Even within families. Many living children of bereaved parents are wholly unaware that they have additional siblings, brothers and sisters who died before, during or shortly after birth.

Why so many parents whose wanted pregnancies end in loss don’t disclose their membership in this awful “club” is a complicated topic, rooted in a web of psychological barriers, cultural traditions, and societal norms and stigmas. Yet each year these parents, myself included, will likely struggle through workdays without sharing that their minds are elsewhere, remembering anniversaries of losing babies, anniversaries of never-to-arrive due dates, and perhaps anniversaries even of the day they learned they were expecting. Holidays are another poignant reminder. Today, on (US) Mother’s Day 2019, I had expected to be exactly 28 weeks pregnant, safely into my third trimester. There’s that word again: “safe”.

Gradually, I went from taking things breath by breath to taking things day by day. And I found myself in the same boat as so many others, unwilling to share much of anything about losing my child. (And yes, I can see how reading that sentence written in this piece I’ve publicly shared could be confusing. Hear me out.) Faced with uninformed queries like “do you think you did something to cause the miscarriage?” and “why don’t you just have another one?”, you can see how talking to those who haven’t experienced something similar can be truly unappealing. My own loss and subsequent grief has led me to not only understand why people didn’t share their stories with me before, but also to understand why they rushed to share them with me after.

I believe there is a more than subtle difference between moving on and moving forward.

As I’m reliably known to do in most situations, even where it’s grossly unnecessary, I took a not insignificant amount of comfort in data, knowing full well that those data may not provide answers — and may simply add more questions. I opted to learn the data which could be obtained through 1,000+ tests administered on me and my dead child. No dice. I scoured medical literature and reviews at a pace and volume that I expect would give obstetrics students a run for their money. Other than reminding me that sleep is generally a wiser choice at 1 a.m. than is falling down a rabbit hole of 8 point font academic abstracts, this exercise reconfirmed something critical to me. As with any body of studies and anecdotal observations, it’s usually possible to point to some evidence, however weak, that will support whatever answer you want to find. For me, right now, that answer is hope.

At least as far as grief and fertility are concerned, I believe there is a more than subtle difference between moving on and moving forward. As much as I love numbers, statistics are just that: numbers. Living through two miscarriages and a breast cancer diagnosis, I have been both one in four and one in eight. Yet the correct deduction would have been to conclude that I was likely to end up experiencing neither in my lifetime — statistically speaking.

Aching to find a way to keep Nicholas with me always, I turned to jeweler in Boston who has become a friend (that’s what happens when you have a jewelry habit rivaled only by your statistics habit). With a sense of disquiet, I shared my story with her, and asked if she could custom-make a bracelet, engraving baby Nick’s heartbeat around the outside and his initials on the inside. She was touched to be part of honoring his memory, and could not have been more compassionate or respectful, insisting on multiple copies of the ultrasounds to get the piece just right. My Mom was visiting me in Chicago when the bracelet arrived and we both cried when I put it on. I texted the jeweler, telling her how perfect it was. “Oh, I’m so glad. I wanted it to be perfect,” she replied, “because I know. I lost my baby last month too.”

On Mother’s Day and every day, whether you realize it or not — and my money’s on “not” — people all around you are thinking about children gone too soon. And on Mother’s Day and every day, even though it’s hard, I hope that we start to #talkaboutpregnancyloss even a little bit more. I carried Nicholas and all of his potential every day of his short life and I will love him— and talk about him— every day of mine.