Nothing Prepares You For The Devastation Of A Miscarriage

Trigger warning: Miscarriage

To the almost mamas,

I hear you, and you are not alone. The devastation that occurs is not looked over and the pain within your heart is valid. That baby will always be loved and cherished, even if it did not make it on this earth. We may have different stories, but we all have suffered the same. So here’s mine:

I know what it’s like to lie on the bathroom floor, wondering when the sting of rejection will go away from when he told me that it was over and he wanted to be back with her.

A tear streamed down my face as I looked at the two little pink lines staring right back at me.

I asked myself, “What the fuck am I going to do?” He left me last night. I was full-on hyperventilating, thinking about having to raise a child on my own. How could he just leave me after promising this day would come and we would be happy? So much for being happy. It’s funny, isn’t it? Funny how he got to just walk away without any kind of consequence and go back to her and I got to sit here in agony.

I finally got myself up off the floor and told myself, “This is what you’ve been wanting. You want a baby. You can do this. Screw him!” I threw some clothes on, managed to fix my face from my tear stains, and left my house in a hurry. I got to the store and I purchased two more pregnancy tests, but this time, I got the good ones. You know, the ones that say the word “pregnant” on it so there is no way I could’ve been reading it wrong.

I scurried home and decided to wait until the morning to take my next test. I sat down on my bed and wrote in my journal, “My life is fucking over. He dumped me and now I’m having his baby.” I let out a big sigh and tried to go to sleep.

When I woke up in the morning, I shuffled to the bathroom to take the test, and in big letters it said “PREGNANT.” I immediately vomited and cried in fear of being a single mom. “How am I going to do this?” I asked myself. That question lingered in my mind for two weeks, but as the days went on, I found myself getting happier and happier that my dream of being a mother was coming true.

Yes, I still cried every single day, and yes, I still didn’t know how in the world I was going to tell the father or even do this alone, but I knew I was going to be the best mother.

One morning, I woke up in a pool of blood and severe cramps. “Oh no, this can’t be happening!” I screamed to myself. I called my doctor that instant and requested an appointment. The fear that rushed over me was unlike the fear I had before. This was fear of losing something that I could never get back. The fear of losing my baby that I was creating and that I was starting to love and adore. The fear of everything came crashing down when Dr. Sharp said the words, “I’m sorry, looks like you had a miscarriage.”

Immediately, my heart began to race and my body began to sweat as if I was going to faint. My ears were ringing and everything that I was dealing with had come to an end, but not the end I wanted.

That baby was the only thing getting me through this breakup, through life. “What now?” I asked my doctor. She looked at me with sympathetic eyes and said, “It’s now time to destress.” I burst into tears as I blurted, “ I just accepted that I was going to be a mom yesterday, and now it’s gone like that?”

As my day, week, and even month went on, my life was a blur. I didn’t know how to live life anymore. I was going through the motions. I went to work, I cried, sometimes I ate how I was supposed to, and I cried some more. I was devastated. Nobody told me what it was like to lose a baby and the emotional turmoil you go through when that occurs. I told nobody what I was going through because I did not want to burden anyone. Some days I didn’t think I would make it out alive, and I blamed myself for the miscarriage so much so that it made my grieving even harder to overcome. I knew I couldn’t do it on my own anymore and decided to get into counseling, where I could regain confidence back in myself after the break up and after losing something and someone I loved so deeply without even meeting them.

Today, it still stings, but the pain has taught me that life is not guaranteed and we need to cherish every single second of it while it lasts. In this case, the emotions and the love feel so real and are so real that it is hard to continue to cherish someone you have never met or held. But this is a lesson, a painful, courageous, and inspiring lesson that women are resilient. Our bodies and our minds bounce back and become whole again. I am whole again. No, I will never forget what could have been, but I will cherish the inner strength this has taught me.