It may strike some as odd that I waited the standard three months to tell even those closest to me that I was pregnant, yet here I am… months later, speaking openly about the loss of that unexpected pregnancy many never knew about in the first place. It doesn’t seem like much of a choice; the grief is overflowing and can simply no longer be contained.
I’m more than a little ashamed to say that excitement was not even close to one of the first emotions I felt when those two lines appeared on the drug store pregnancy test. Anxiety. Stress. Even more embarrassingly - sadness.
“Are we ready for such a drastic life shift? Can we do this? Can we even be the parents we dreamt we’d be, at this stage in our lives?”
Thankfully for my own sanity, I slowly came around. The unequivocal high in my husband’s eyes helped. So did imagining the innocent being that would soon be a living piece of me. I’d be lying if I said the stress went away completely, but the pockets of excitement that hit me quelled my anxiety about this unexpected pregnancy.
It’s remarkable, really, how an initial thought that not being pregnant anymore could be the best thing to happen to me could shift so suddenly to the most overwhelming grief I’d ever felt in my life.
Perhaps I was naïve in thinking that a miscarriage was not painful. No one, even the doctors, told me what to expect. I had no idea that the physical pain I would feel would be rivaled only by the emotional pain. And I certainly had no idea that I would feel contractions in order pass what would have been my baby, even though I was only eleven weeks along. I was also unaware that even a week after the bleeding stopped, the pain would linger. It was the most traumatizing experience of my life.
I share this because I know there are others who have felt the shame of not meeting expectations. So many are aware of the heavy and innumerable expectations placed on mothers, but I don’t think it’s as obvious how early on these expectations start. For me, and so many others, it begins the second you realize you’re pregnant. Expectations about how you should feel and the “right” amount of excitement. Even the doctor at my first appointment said, “Congratulations! You must be so excited!” There was no questioning how I was dealing with what was for me, and many others, the most life-changing and jarring news of your life. I know she was aiming to be supportive, but all it did for me was reinforce a feeling of inadequacy.
When I lost my baby and I was sad, there was also a level of expectation. “This was an unexpected pregnancy. You weren’t even excited to begin with. Do you deserve the right to grieve?”
Some may say I imposed these expectations on myself, but I know that’s not true. And it’s not true for so many other women. But you. are. not. alone. However you feel, whether you grieve or celebrate, this may be your first opportunity to define motherhood in your own terms, and I encourage you to do so with gusto.
