oh my blog!- Laura Darby Singh -

This post isn’t for you.  But if I don’t buck up and talk about my feelings, they will literally consume me, and the only reason I haven’t talked about them is because no one does.

It was a beautiful, happy week. I had friends visiting from Dubai and Doha. Every day, my house felt full, and vibrant, and excited. These three friends had never been to Kenya before, and were absolutely enchanted, having just come back from the Masai Mara and having seen the great migration firsthand.

And, after months of trying, I had just discovered I was pregnant. Funnily, I had only taken the pregnancy test to exclude it from my self-diagnosis of exhaustion, nausea, and fatigue. But just the morning I’d taken the test, it was confirmed by doctors at the urgent clinic.

My husband was over the moon, and I was…processing the experience.  I hadn’t expected it; I was in shock.  I have a challenging, intense job in a rigorous career track.  I am writing a book. I am in graduate school. I have pleasantly complicated interpersonal relationships.

We told his mother, and mine. Everyone was excited.  We couldn’t help but tell our house guests. they were excited.  Ever a knowledge hound, I took to googling what I should and shouldn’t eat, what I needed to stop, what was best for me, and for whatever this little thing inside me was going to be. The knowledge acquisition was the most exciting part, and slowly, I started accepting what was happening to me.

Like all big events, all of these things happened in the span of three days. The last morning two of my guests were in Nairobi, I took them to a craft market to shop. The day before, I’d taken them all over, to baby elephants, giraffes, crafts, and it had been a big day.  I hadn’t felt overexerted, because most of the day had been in a car.  But I’d been given words of caution by an older friend of ours, a mother figure, to watch out for bumpy car rides, and touching dogs and cats, and suddenly my knowledge acquisition was being filled with exclamation points and hazard signs.

And in the morning, I bled.  At first, it was a little, and, though it freaked me out, the internet told me not to worry.  But as the day progressed, the blood increased, and was accompanied by crippling abdominal pain. I knew something was wrong, but I refused to go to the doctor. The nearby clinic didn’t have a regular OB-GYN and its closest main branch was ages away in Nairobi traffic.

Most importantly, I didn’t want to let my friends down.  I wanted their memories of the trip to be untainted overall, and we were due to take our third friend to the Kenyan coast for the weekend right after the market. Tending to myself, going to the doctor, would have meant delaying flights, canceling trips…I wasn’t sure what, but every option felt like a letdown to everyone in general.

The only one who disagreed was the husband, but I am a stronger force of will.

I bled and bled and bled, and waves of pain flowed through me to the point of tears on both the flight and the cab ride to our idyllic weekend coast getaway. Determined not to let it discolor my time or be a “downer” to people who had paid good money to come and spend the weekend away, I stifled feelings, shrugged it off, was overly logical, and, only once the evening had arrived at the house and people got up to go to dinner, did I excuse myself, silently and ashamed, into the bedroom to go to bed.  It was 8pm.

I barely slept at all, cramping and weeping and waking continually to a pillow full of tears.

I made a point of not even mentioning my loss all of Saturday and Sunday.  I resolved to have a good day, and I did, and, as the pain subsided, I thought it was all over and behind me. I snorkeled and saw fishes and smiled and laughed.

There is no soft word for “miscarriage.” No way of subtly intimating what has happened to you. And, once you have lost your pregnancy, you must hold onto these insufficient words as you update everyone you were foolish enough to tell so soon. No one has the right words to comfort you.

My approach was to be matter-of-fact, because that is how I approach most trying and tumultuous situations. It happened, it sometimes does, and I’m moving forward.

But I started noticing subtle shifts in my quiet time, an unease when I was left alone to my thoughts, a difficulty concentrating and a feeling that things, usually easy for me, were just too difficult to process or handle.

I couldn’t bring myself to even say to friends “I’m sad.” And attempts to pretend like everything is okay have just backfired for my emotional state.

I didn’t take a day off of work. I didn’t stop any of my routines, but the things that I forgot to do on my huge to-do list suddenly made me feel like a tremendous failure.  Self-regulating my emotions wasn’t working for me, and isn’t, as I find myself too tired to fake it.

I am not okay, and that’s okay, because I will be eventually.  I don’t have to be okay, and if anything, hormones in my body are stacked against me and trying to run uphill at them will only make things worse.

From the beginning of this ordeal, I have focussed on making sure the people around me were okay, most likely at the expense of my own (mental) health.

So I’m doing what I can.  I am making small lists each day of things I want to get done, but if I need to leave a party early, or spend two hours binge watching a show, I am going to.  I don’t have to pretend like it’s not a big deal, because it’s allowed to be a big deal, and I can let it without it being the biggest deal.

Women that I’ve talked to have confessed that, when they were first trying to conceive, that something similar happened to them. An enormous number of women. 

It is estimated that 1 in 4 or 5 pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Yet, according to a study published earlier this year in the journal “Obstetrics and Gynecology,” most Americans believe that number is 1 in 20.

It means that when, in the middle of the night, I wonder whether I should have washed my hands after touching an elephant, or whether I should have been more excited and less cautious, or should have done something differently, that I can rationally tell myself that this shit happens…it’s just that nobody talks about it.

And I don’t blame them.  It’s hard to wrap my head around what is sanctioned emotion and what is rampant wallowing, or express how it feels to me as a woman, or a scientist, or a humanist.

From a relevant article:

It is very difficult to find words that weave meaning around the vast heartache characterizing such loss. The bereaved often find more comfort and guidance in nature, poetry and dreams than well-intentioned discourse

It is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month.  You are not alone.  It doesn’t define me, it doesn’t dictate whatever happens next to me in life, but it is something significant that happened to me.

If I can bring myself to write about one of the hardest experiences I’ve gone through, maybe I can encourage other people to open the channels of dialogue about it too.