Grief has no timeline because it is not a linear process. A lot of people can understand that. What some people can’t understand is how much grief there is over an early pregnancy loss. In my limited experience, it does seem to a handful of people that my grief is disproportionate because I was “only 8½ weeks”.
I don’t think you have to have had a miscarriage to respect that grief is an individual process with no timeline. Just because some people think a miscarriage wouldn’t be a big deal for them doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t respect that it’s a big deal to us. When we are already confused and scared by the intensity of our emotions, such a lack of sympathy only adds to our suffering. So, I decided to do some research on what is ‘normal’ for grief after a miscarriage — even an early miscarriage.
I’ve discussed this with several therapists I know, and I’ve done my own independent research. I’ve compiled a list of articles, written by credible psychiatrists and therapists who study grief after pregnancy loss. What is universally accepted is that the intensity of grief is not tied to length of gestation, but to a whole host of other factors too, including how long it took to get pregnant, how much the baby was longed for, how long the woman’s reproductive story is, and how much support the couple receives after the loss.
Miscarriage Grief is…
…Not Proportional to Length of Gestation
…Proportional to Length of Reproductive Story
…Proportional to the Strength of the Bond with Your Baby
…Not Acknowledged
…Poorly Understood
…Very Real
…Lonely
…Hard on Mother’s Day and Other Holidays
…Felt by Partners Too
And be sure to check out my post on what constitutes an Appropriate Grief Response — reprinted with kind permission from Sudden Infant Death Services of Illinois.
I’ll keep adding to the list. If there’s something you’d like to see added, please leave a comment with the link. Thanks!
♥
Miscarriage Grief is Not Proportional to Length of Gestation
In her article, Miscarriage and Loss, Elizabeth Leis-Newman of the American Psychological Association writes “Another common misunderstanding about miscarriage is that a woman will experience less grief if she loses the baby early in her pregnancy. But most researchers have not been able to find an association between the length of gestation and intensity of grief, anxiety or depression… A woman who has lost her child at 11 weeks may be as distraught as a woman who has lost her child at 20 weeks…”
Dr. Donna Rothert writes about maternal attachment in her blog “…The assumption that women emotionally attach in proportion to the length of the pregnancy is not always true. Eighty percent of pregnancy losses are first trimester miscarriages. Women often don’t tell others about their pregnancy during the first trimester and may try to “keep from getting too excited” due to fears about a loss. However, a woman who miscarries at 8 weeks’ gestation may experience it as the loss of a child and grieve it as such, while someone else may have a later loss and experience it with less intensity.”
But Miscarriage Grief is Proportional to…
…Length of Reproductive Story
Dr. Janet Jaffe of the Center for Reproductive Psychology coined the expression “reproductive story”. Some women’s reproductive story began when they were six years old. If that little girl, as I did, always dreamed of one day becoming a mom, this adds to the intensity of grief. Dr. Jaffe believes that a miscarriage is a reproductive trauma and a loss that needs to be grieved:
“When you have a miscarriage, not only do you lose your pregnancy and baby, you also lose your hopes and dreams of the future. Your body isn’t working the way you always expected it would; you lose control of feeling healthy and ‘normal.’ And it feels so unfair that everyone else can have babies — you want to shout, “what’s wrong with me?” No matter how far along you were, when a pregnancy fails, you lose a part of your reproductive story. You have experienced a reproductive trauma and this loss needs to be grieved. A miscarriage is such a statistically common event (at least one in five pregnancies end in a miscarriage) that it is often overlooked or minimized, but it was your baby that didn’t survive, and the pain you feel is real. Your self-esteem may plummet and you may feel alone in your grief.”
… and the Strength of the Bond with Your Baby
In their Grief Issues Special to Miscarriage article, the Miscarriage Support in Auckland, New Zealand says “…Our loss can be minimised and invalidated by others, which leads us to question our feelings of grief. However, unrecognised or not, it is the strength of the bond with our baby not the length of the pregnancy that determines the depth of our grief. This mothering bond can have begun to form as early as us playing with our dolls as little girls, so our grief is a normal reaction to a broken bond. For recurrent miscarriers, the grief can be compounded by earlier losses.”
Miscarriage Grief is…
…Not Acknowledged
In the Journal of Women’s Health, there is a 14-page article entitled Grief Following Miscarriage: A Comprehensive Review of the Literature which opens with the following statement: “A miscarriage…is a psychologically challenging event. Unlike the loss of other family members, the grieving individual has had few direct life experiences or actual times with the deceased to review, remember, and cherish. There is no publicly acknowledged person to bury or established rituals to structure mourning and gain support, and, often, relatively few opportunities are present to express thoughts and feelings about the loss due to the secrecy that often accompanies the early stages of pregnancy. When others do know about the loss, they often fail to appreciate its impact or minimize it, making comments such as, “It was not meant to be” or “It is for the best.”
… Poorly Understood
WebMD says “Of all the things a woman may go through, miscarriage may be one of the most poorly understood. You may feel terribly sad, yet alone, because some of the people closest to you simply don’t grasp what you’re going through.”
…Very Real
In the article Coping with a Miscarriage, by What to Expect, we are reminded that “The grief you’re feeling is real — no matter how early in pregnancy you experienced the loss of a baby, you’ll feel that loss deeply. Even if you never saw your baby, you knew that he or she was growing inside of you, and you formed a bond; however abstract the attachment, you felt it. The baby was responsible for your emotions during pregnancy. From the moment you found out you were pregnant, you imagined yourself a mother…”
…Lonely
“Miscarriage is the Loneliest Grief of All,” writes Kate Evans in the Independent. She should know. She’s miscarried six times.
It’s “discounted grief”, according to Dr. Connie Shapiro in Psychology Today.
In fact, “Pregnancy Loss: How to Cope” by the Mayo Clinic it is acknowledged that miscarriage is devastating and recommends avoiding pregnant women and baby showers until you can handle them.
…Hard on Mother’s Day and Other Holidays
We don’t celebrate Mother’s Day in my family, so I never found it a hard day until after I’d miscarried. I was really touched by my friends who sent me a text to say they were thinking about me — especially my friends who are moms.
HopefulWorld.org acknowledges that Mother’s Day is Hard: “…[Y]ou are not the only one. Somewhere over a silly Mother’s Day breakfast, there is a woman faking a smile who feels just like you do. Somewhere in a very silent house with no one to call, there is a woman who is tending the ache of her loss, just like you. Somewhere standing in a shower there is a woman who is feeling it all and letting the tears come, just like you.”
…Felt by Partners Too
Hannah Mirmiran, psychotherapist and founder of What’s Your Grief, writes: “Partners suffer as well. No one especially ever talks about how partners experience loss. Partners of women who’ve miscarried often feel the loss in different ways and can experience a wide range of emotions and different feelings, including resentment that they were not connected to the baby in ways that the mother was and frustration that there isn’t a way to fix the situation. Partners may feel helpless and may not feel like there is space to talk about their feelings.”
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Be sure to check out my post on what constitutes an Appropriate Grief Response — reprinted with kind permission from Sudden Infant Death Services of Illinois.
