If there were a single piece of art that sums up how I am feeling, it might be Henry Ford Hospital by Frida Kahlo:
On July 4th, 1932, Frida suffered a miscarriage in the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. In this disturbing work, Kahlo paints herself lying on her back in a hospital bed after a miscarriage. The figure in the painting is unclothed, the sheets beneath her are bloody, and a large tear falls from her left eye. The bed and its sad inhabitant float in an abstract space circled by six images relating to the miscarriage. All of the images are tied to blood-red filaments that she holds against her stomach as if they were umbilical cords. The main image is a perfectly formed male fetus, little “Dieguito”, she had longed to have. The orchid was a gift from Diego. “When I painted it I had the idea of a sexual thing mixed with the sentimental” Frida said. The snail she said, alludes to the slow paced miscarriage. The salmon pink plaster female torso she said was her “idea of explaining the insides of a woman”. The cruel looking machine she invented “to explain the mechanical part of the whole business”. Finally, in the lower right corner is her fractured pelvis that made it impossible for her to have children. – quoted from FridaKahloFans.com.
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I don’t know which of Frida Kahlo’s three miscarriages inspired this painting, but this image of her, lying bleeding on the bed, is how I feel. I even feel like I cry bloody tears. I started crying in the shower today and had to sit down, forehead leaning on my folded arms across my knees. Looking over my belly that seems flatter than it has been since childhood — a baked bean nestling in firm chubbiness — I expected to see blood, even though my bleeding stopped more than two weeks ago. I pictured the gushing to the visual soundtrack of silently seeing in slow motion the devastating ultrasound, the aching horror that slowly unfolded, creeping quietly beneath my skin, deep in my body.
For now, there is not much more to write. I am sick of myself. Sick of this miscarrousel (yes, I just made up that word) that I’m stuck on. I want to get off, sit quietly in a corner and sing my no baby blues ’til I’m done.
Hi Lauren,
Thank you so much for contacting me regarding “Donate a Post”. I’d be thrilled to have you submit a post. To be completely honest, I haven’t really come up with a specific angle. It’s important to me that the story is personal, that you share an experience you’re going/went through rather than start a theoretical discussion. Clearly this experience is still very fresh for you. I admire your ability to talk about it.
I want Donate a Post to be an emotional resource for women who want to talk about their experience but feel that there’s no one around them they can open up to, or that the ones who will listen won’t get it. One of the most painful experiences for me when I went through a miscarriage after a year of fertility treatments was being next to people who had no apparent difficulty getting pregnant. It was even worse if they offered me their consolation. I once started crying at a friend’s house after she let me talk to another friend on the phone, both of them went through no particular difficulty conceiving two children. It sounds terrible, petty, I don’t know how I would have acted had I been in their shoes, I know they had the best intentions but it was just so painful having to pretend like I know everything was going to work out. I want this forum to be somewhere we can pour our hearts out, complain, enlighten others on what it feels like to miscarry/go through fertility treatments and seek consolation and healing through writing about this and through reading like-minded posts. I did conceive a second child and I hope that that might encourage the readers.
I will post the first post on Thursday, if you’d like to get a feel for what this is going to be like check out my blog that day, but again take absolute creative freedom.
Thanks again, sorry for the long message and I look forward to reviewing your submission!
Hugs,
Katia
Oh Lauren, sweetheart, you know that my heart breaks for you. It breaks for any woman that has to endure the trauma of miscarriage and loss. It is so difficult for those who have never gone through it to understand just how great the loss is. It’s the lost excitement, lost dreams, lost plans for the future. All of those things take time to try and learn how to live with them.
I cried more tears than I ever thought possible and I won’t try to tell you it gets easier, in my opinion it doesn’t. However, you will discover your own way of living with it. There is no time frame for grief and my only advice is to just go with it. Cry, scream, shout as much as you need, gradually you will find the strength to put yourself back together again. Don’t lose hope though. I know it took me an awful long time, but I was diagnosed as infertile, I tried IVF and got nothing, not even a positive test and eventually I just gave up. 10 long years after giving up on it all, I got pregnant, I miscarried at 6 weeks and then again at 6 months. I truly didn’t think my heart could cope with anymore tragedy, but I ended up with my 2 girls and although they don’t make the 14 years it took to get them ok, they do make it a lot easier to bear.
Even now that I have them and even though it’s been 4 years since I lost our son, I still cry about him quite regularly.
You have my email address and honestly, if you ever need someone to just offload to, to scream at, to cry with, then please do message me. You are not alone and I do truly understand the pain you feel xxxx
Nichola, your words are gold to me. Thank you so much for sharing your hard-earned wisdom and your sweet offer of letting me email you. Thank you so, so much xo