today marks four years since my miscarriage. i feel guilty for mourning it because it was a ridiculously complicated situation. i actually planned to abort. the father and i were not in a good relationship. i was only pregnant for a few short weeks, but so much happened inside of my head during that time.
i remember fast forwarding through our future in my imagination, and seeing how we would fall apart and never be a family. i imagined how this would affect our child and was afraid of the pain i would afflict on them. i also fast forwarded through the future of my child, and the one thing i could always picture us doing was swimming. i had fond memories of my mother teaching me to swim, so i pictured myself teaching my own child, surrounded by the comfort of undulating water and echos of children's voices ringing through some public pool in my imaginary future. i weighed these two imaginings and decided the first was more realistic. i couldn't bring a child into the toxicity that was my relationship. the second was a stupid fantasy, i thought.
my health at that time was really poor and i was still undiagnosed. in fact i found out that i was pregnant because my illness took me to the ER. i was admitted to the hospital and spent a week laying in bed agonizing over what i should do. i had also been using drugs and alcohol to cope with my medical issues, which of course only made them worse and was dangerous for the life that had been quietly forming inside of me. did i really want to pass on these genes?
i made a decision. mother nature made a decision too.
the memories of that night are fragmented. it's mostly just nothingness infused with terror, and then there are a few moments that poke through, as if the memory-making part of my brain was coming up gasping for air in those moments. i haven't spoken about those moments to anyone, and usually not to myself either.
i put the memory away as soon as it happened so that i could move on. after playing and replaying the early life of my child, i now saw how dysfunctional my life had become and needed to make changes. i got out of that relationship and within a few months i took a better job in a city with better medical care.
most of the time it's almost like that night and what led up to it never happened. almost, but not quite. and every october it breaks through. there's still a little thread in the background that always tugs on me, love i could never give for the person who never got to live, never got to learn to swim, never got to feel the safety of mom's presence while kicking off for the first time. i even see a face, the same one i saw all those years ago when i would imagine us swimming. the face is from my imagination, yet it feels realer than the fragmented memories of what actually happened four years ago. and every october, grief over what could have been briefly eclipses what is.
given the complicated nature of what happened and who i was back then, i have never been comfortable admitting (even to myself) that what i felt was grief. i had no right to grieve. but emotions just are. they exist whether you think they should or not. and this one is grief. after four years, it finally has a name. i don't know what to do with it, but it has a name.#Grief #Miscarriage #PTSD