How a miscarriage broke my heart and gave me hope

I didn’t think I could get pregnant. I never had a doctor or medical professional tell me that was the case, it was just a gut feeling; something I always believed since my early twenties.

I’ve never had a pregnancy scare, an ‘Oh, shit!’ moment like all of my girlfriends in college. At the age when all of my friends started getting baby fever, I started planning my studio life existence in LA. I figured my baby maker was broken.

I took a pregnancy test once, just because I was curious what that experience must be like. I pretended like I was preparing for a role that I was doing — but I wasn’t. I just wanted to know.

As I got older, I became more convinced. I have cysts on my kidneys and ovaries which can make it difficult to conceive naturally. I also had a bout with cervical cancer and lost a part of my cervix in the battle. Again, my doctor kept telling me I should be able to get pregnant, but it wouldn’t be easy.

I believed it so much, I gave up on the idea of it. My husband and I had made peace with the idea of adoption or exploring alternate options. He is remarkable and loving and we both felt that with so much love to give and so many children needing love in this world, we could fill that need.

My choice to stay on birth control was not so much to prevent pregnancy but to keep me regulated and supposedly help with hormones levels and keep my migraines at bay. I started getting more aggressive about treating my migraines so I began a daily preventative. That medication causes my already low dosage birth control pill to become basically ineffective. This concerned my doctors, so I agreed to switch to a new pill.

This new pill was a form of Seasonique called Dayzee. It was supposed to only give me a menstrual cycle every 3 months, which she thought would be beneficial for my migraines since they are partially hormonal and they are also much stronger.

I had a terrible reaction.

Within days my personality and temperament began changing drastically. Depression hit full force and to a debilitating extent. Once we associated the pill to the depression, we stopped the pill and called my doctor and a therapist.

I took a week off from taking any birth control and probably had some irregularity switching back on to a regular pill and during all that, I miraculously, impossibly got pregnant. And then I lost it.

The day that I had the miscarriage, I knew it was happening the way you know something is happening deep within yourself. By midday the pain and bleeding was so intense, I knew that something was wrong, but I still couldn’t bring myself to say something — to say it out loud.

By late afternoon, I was sweating with pain and the nausea was like nothing I had experienced before. I was clotting and by calculations, I was only a few weeks along. I was textbook. When I did bring myself to look up miscarriages online and call my doctor, the one thing I kept hearing and reading over and over and over again was how normal this was.

Great, I’m not a freak. This still sucks. A lot.

The moment it happened, I was calm and logical about it — practical. I reasoned that I knew I couldn’t get pregnant on my migraine meds. The baby would have complications, if not severe issues. I could not be put in the situation to be asked to abort. I would not be able to do that. No, my body knew it wasn’t right. I also understood that I didn’t do anything wrong to cause it. There was nothing that I could have done differently to have a different outcome. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I work out, I eat well … it’s just biology.

I went to bed. Then hours later I woke up a crazy person. I kept seeing little hands and toes in my mind’s eye. Little hazel eyes that could have beenmy baby’s. I couldn’t begin to tell you my thoughts that night, because they felt erratic and more like flashes of things — what could have been, what should have been — healthy babies, deformed babies, sexy women who had no babies and seemed totally ok with that…random, rapid thoughts that pulsated through my brain.

In the morning I tried to pretend like I slept. I tried to pretend like it was a normal Tuesday. I tried to pretend like I didn’t just lose a little person. I tried to pretend like I still couldn’t get pregnant.

I tried to pretend that I was ok. But I wasn’t.

I held it in because I didn’t know what else to do with it. My husband seemed so ok with it. He was just excited at the idea that we could have kids. I had one friend who actually showed up at my doorstep with flowers and a card. My mom and dad love me tirelessly, but I just sort of folded it into myself like my depression.

Then I saw my therapist. She asked me if I knew who my people were that I could I talk freely to. For some reason, with this, I said no. I felt scared and I felt ashamed. I felt like I had let that little human life down. Then she did the most amazing thing — she sympathized with me. She told me to talk to my child. She called me a mom, because she recognized I had already bonded. I had never been called a mom before. She told me to say everything I wanted to say to him or her. So I did.

I told my kid and God that I was sorry. I told them if I would have gotten pregnant and had a baby, I would have wanted them and loved them. I cried and cried and cried and cried and said that I hoped that I get to meet your little soul again someday in whatever vessel God decides to deliver you to me.

In the weeks to come I had many conversations with people about getting pregnant. People gave me advice and tips about trying again right away and still going with natural pregnancy, about getting artificially inseminated, about trusting God to do his will in his time, about being ok with not bringing kids into this messed up world in it’s current state, about adopting and just about every why to procreate under the sun.

I haven’t made any decisions yet. But I’ll say this — there is no right answer. There is no wrong answer. There is no shame.

I heard a beautiful story about In-Vitro (IVF) that I never would have believed, but it brought me to tears and totally changed my heart about the procedure. It was this mother’s path to her daughters. I know couples that have no kids that live amazing lives of travel and exploration. I know incredibly selfless people that have adopted all of their kids and promise me they feel as whole and complete as any biological family.

So while this miscarriage broke my heart, it also gave me hope. Hope that for the first time, I actually do have the option to create life. How amazing is that?