After a miscarriage, you need love. So why are you fighting?
You’re going to fight with your partner, and that’s ok. But you need to understand why.
After we lost our baby daughter halfway through my first pregnancy, I was utterly devastated. But not at first. When I got home from my regular prenatal checkup — the one that swiftly turned irregular when they couldn’t find a heartbeat — my husband took me in his arms and held me close. He looked at me tentatively, like I was so fragile that even the wrong expression on his face could break me. And he was right, although I didn’t quite realize it at the time.
“It’s ok. You don’t have to hold it all in,” he told me, holding my hand as I sat stoically at our kitchen island. I didn’t cry, and that worried him. But I felt numb. Life had become surreal. I was sitting there with a baby in my belly. I had been pregnant just an hour earlier, thinking mostly about pink car seats and maternity clothes. But what was I now?
Later that day, my husband and I wept together, clinging to each other on the couch. In that moment, the dam broke for me and I began to descend into a despair that would define my every thought for days and weeks and months to come. But he seemed to get stronger from that point on. He was sad, but he was moving forward. He still enjoyed food and good TV and seeing our friends. He never had to get back into bed in the dark to cry. He was planning things — a job interview, a romantic weekend in Philadelphia to help me feel better. He offered to tell people so that I wouldn’t have to, to craft a Facebook message letting people know that the pregnancy we had recently announced wouldn’t result in a baby after all. Instead of feeling grateful, I felt left behind and resentful of his fortitude, and at the gulf between us.
Since our loss, I’ve learned that it’s incredibly common for couples to fight — a lot — in the aftermath of pregnancy loss. I wish I had known this when I was going through it, because at the time I felt like the world was ending. I had no idea that it was normal, and so the fighting made a bad situation seem infinitely worse.
One of the most common things I hear from women I interview is that their husbands feel their job is to be strong for their wives. This is such an admirable sentiment, and yet it ends up isolating the couple from each other. The wife wonders why the husband is so focused on her and on their life as a couple— doesn’t he feel sad about the baby? Doesn’t he want to talk about the baby? Why doesn’t he care more about the baby? She feels alone in her single-minded focus on the child she has lost and on what might have been. Her husband, on the other hand, wants to take care of his wife and can come to feel frustrated, helpless, and resentful that nothing he says or does seems to make her feel better (and at times, can even seem to make her feel worse).
Given that a few years have passed and we’ve since had a healthy baby, I was interested in my husband’s perspective on our own troubled post-loss experience. I asked him for his thoughts on why couples fight so much after losing a pregnancy, and here’s what he said:
Regardless of how much you communicate, the husband and wife will still see the situation from very different perspectives. Their views on what has happened and what is to come might be diametrically opposed, despite their desire to be on the same page. The husband might view it as a tragic setback and look forward to trying again, whereas the wife might view it as the death of her child and the end of the road to parenthood.
Acknowledging this mutual incomprehension is, in my opinion, the key to salvaging your relationship after a pregnancy loss. Remember that it is ok to fight. Let yourselves have the chaos of emotion and the fear and the sense of helplessness on both sides, but know that it is normal and that it won’t last forever.
Husbands: your wife will be ok. She really does appreciate your stepping up to handle all the things she can’t right now, but sometimes you need to accept that everything you do will seem like the wrong thing. She trusts you, and she may take out her feelings of frustration and helplessness on you. She lashes out at you because she knows that you’re the only one who will tolerate it. It’s not fair, but it’s reality right now. So don’t stop trying to say and do the right things, even if it feels hopeless. It’s not.
Your wife also needs you to come find her in the depths of her despair. Don’t be scared to show emotion in front of her — she needs you to, and it won’t make things worse for her. So talk about the baby and what it means to you, what it could have meant, what life looks like without it.
Wives: No matter how much you want to shut down and shun the world, let your husband in. He lost a baby and his shot at fatherhood, too. Help him be open about his emotions by being as honest as possible about what you are thinking and feeling. This experience shouldn’t be about him supporting you in your grief, although our society focuses so much on the mother. This is about the two of you going through the loss of a baby together.
For both of you: Also remember that there are hormones involved when a woman finds herself no longer pregnant. I’ve heard many women talk about feeling “out of control” emotionally after their loss, finding themselves in the middle of a vicious fight with their husbands and wondering why exactly they are so angry. After pregnancy loss, the intensity of grief often combines with physical trauma in unpredictable ways, and it can be hard for either the husband or the wife to have patience through such an experience. But it’s important to recognize everything that is happening, so you can cut each other some slack.
In an ideal world, pregnancy loss would bring a couple together and make them stronger. But based on my personal experience and dozens of interviews with women who’ve gone through it, that’s simply not the case — at least not at first. The problem is that as a society, we don’t openly acknowledge the strain such a loss can put on relationships. And so our fighting ends up making us feel even more lost and alone. The fact is that fighting is normal and even healthy, and if you understand the reasons behind it, it can even pull you back together when it feels like your world is falling apart.
