The Strength and Resilience of Women (My second Miscarriage)

When I realised that today was International Women’s Day, there was only one story I wanted to share. It is a story of resilience, strength and of the immense capacity for loss and healing that each WOMAN holds.

(Please note: TRIGGER WARNING- graphic and potentially upsetting descriptions of loss). 

This photo was taken on Saturday January 16th, the first morning of my last miscarriage. Many of you already know we lost our first pregnancy last year. It was tough, but it was also our first try, and we knew from 7 weeks that something wasn’t right.  On the morning of this photo however, I was 12 weeks into our second pregnancy, what would have been the transition into our second trimester. 

I spent the first 9 weeks of this pregnancy with horrendous morning sickness. I couldn’t roll over without holding my boobs and spent most of the day on the couch. Food repulsed me, yet I was continuously hungry. I was barely able to walk to the end of the street, let alone ride my bike or surf. It was, to be brutally honest, horrible. 

At 9 weeks I noticed I wasn’t so dizzy. Glen’s coffee once again smelled delicious. My breasts were sore but not excruciating, and there was something else I could not describe-except to say I had a “knowing” that something had changed. 

One morning, at 9& 1/2 weeks, I woke up with the distinct sensation that the baby was dead. After hours of deliberating inside my head, I convinced Glen to take to us to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital (on the advice of a midwife) where they wouldn’t see me because I wasn’t bleeding. “It’s not an emergency”, the nurse kept repeating, a sentence I had said to my own patients far too many times. 

I was beside myself with frustration, yet I felt I had no choice but to surrender.  A few days later, I spent New Year’s Eve looking out over the ocean and deciding that from this point forward in my life, when the outcome was uncertain, I would rest in assuming the best. 

For the next weeks, I lived in not-knowing. If I shared my uncertain feelings about the viability of the baby, well-meaning friends and loved ones would tell me not to worry. “Be positive”, they would say, or, “Be careful what thoughts you put out there”-terms of toxic positivity I have come to detest. I was not being “negative”. I KNEW, through the profound and brilliant art of womanhood, what was happening inside of my body. 

Nonetheless, when I felt a hint of period-like cramps on the afternoon of Jan 15th, I told myself (like everyone else had) not to worry. But that night, when the first blood began to flow lightly from my body my words were of rage. “I fkn knew it”, I yelled out loud from the toilet, my heart a mixture of fury, indignation, and sorrow. I put my head in my hands. I had not wanted to be right. 

That next morning, the bleeding light, and my body painless, I told Glen I couldn’t bear to stay home. We packed up the car and went on a big drive along windy forested roads, to some high cliffs over-looking the ocean and to beaches we hadn’t been to before. At second valley, we changed into our bathers and went for a swim. I asked him to bring his camera to take some shots. As strange as that may sound, I wanted this moment to be captured in time. It was the end of something that was never to be, and I wanted it to mean something. 

We swam under the summer sun and relished in one of the truths of life- everything is more bearable in nature. We were sad, but we were soothed by the coral beneath the cool sea and the way the world looked wavy underwater. When we were finished swimming we went to a small cafe for a late lunch. There a giant moth landed on my leg, staying for almost an hour- only leaving when I begrudgingly had to start walking back to the car. 

I was so moved by the presence of the moth that we googled possible meanings. I cried as I read that a moth symbolises the departing soul of a loved one, and that it asks you to trust in the changes, however difficult, and to embrace transformation. I was comforted by the possibility that there is more to this human existence than we perceive, and by the story that whatever soul had chosen to bring me yet another lesson of loss, grace and surrender, had left me with this symbol of comfort.  

We drove home with our imagined future once again broken, but with our love for one another intact. That night, as if the earth knew I had needed a day of ease, the miscarriage progressed into full force. As my uterus went into contractions, I did my best to breathe. Like labour, the pain escalated as each contraction came harder and faster. At times, it felt unbearable and yet I knew I could bear it. For a few hours, the loss of blood bordered on scary. By 3am, the contractions finally subsided enough that I could fall into a deep sleep. 

A few days later, just like in my first miscarriage, I passed a large piece of tissue and with it, the energy in my body completely changed. I knew then, just like I had known when the baby had died, that it’s presence had left my body. The feeling was one of relief, of lightness, and of having my body back in its fullness. 

Now, seven weeks later, my body still feels ravaged. I have been pregnant for 22 weeks of the last year- just shy of half the time. As such, my body has dramatically changed. My breasts are sagging as if I have had a child. I have extra weight on my belly and bumpy lumps of fat around my thighs. My nervous system is stressed and I am finding it hard to completely relax, or get to sleep, though it gets a little better each week. I feel old. And I feel tired. 

And yet, I am completely and absolutely happy. I wonder at this sheer resilience of a human being. The miracle of the “woman” that can grow and lose a child, that knows how to build lungs and hearts inside of itself and then knows how to let them go when something isn’t forming right. Her body that can recover, heal, regenerate and hopefully, when the time is ripe, try again. (I marvel that I can even consider trying again). 

The word that most comes to mind when I think of miscarriage is “cruel”. There is nothing else that describes the experience so aptly. Yet it is being with something that is so immensely difficult and so blatantly unfair that we find our greatest courage and resilience.

Most importantly I am reminded that a woman’s body, when she is deeply in touch with the rhythms of herself, does not lie. We only need to learn to listen to its whispers, and then trust. 

To all the women out there, I honour your resilience, courage and beauty. 

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