What It's Like to Suffer a Miscarriage

This is a story with a happy ending—a beautiful child, a son, who makes even the cheesiest love songs make sense, whose laugh can make me cry and whose pain is intolerable. But the journey wasn’t exactly a smooth one.

When I think about getting pregnant after 35—that magical number we’re warned about—and all the complications it brought—the morning sickness, the gestational diabetes, the utterly shocking questions and completely insensitive comments, all interspersed with periodic flashes of marvel: Motherhood? Me?—why do I keep going back to the pregnancy I lost?

Let’s get one thing straight now. The cartoon of the woman gripping her hair in her fists, grimacing that she forgot to have children, didn’t resonate with me. I didn’t forget. I knew that time was passing but it wasn’t important to me. At my 35th birthday—a riotous surprise party in Las Vegas—I held my breath and listened for anything that might resemble the tick of a biological clock, but I heard nothing. It wasn’t that I didn’t like kids—I loved my nieces and my nephews. I just never had that burning desire to have a child of my own. Having a baby, in my view, was not a rite of passage or proof of a life well-lived, so I shrugged and went on with my life.

I was single. I had my own business. I owned my own home. I had the best—and I mean THE best—friends on the planet. I traveled, socialized, enjoyed my life to the fullest. And then, at 36, when the odds of my getting married were eclipsed by my odds of getting struck by lightning, I fell in love. For real. Maybe for the first time ever. And the man I love wanted children and I knew—and everyone who knew him concurred—that he would be the best dad. The very best dad. And then there was a mighty crash as the biological clock I never thought I had started its frenetic ticking. I was 38 years old.

We got pregnant before we were really even trying. I can’t say that the pregnancy was a surprise because, as my brother-in-law is fond of saying, “when you’re having unprotected sex pregnancy can’t be all that surprising.” But we—or at least I—had been filled with misgivings about my ability to conceive after 35. So when the blue lines appeared long before we’d charted a single temperature, we were ecstatic. Exalted. We were beside ourselves with joy.

I can’t speak for my husband but I know that at the core of my happiness was an earth-shattering sense of relief that it all worked—that my long-ignored womb was functional, my eggs viable. I could do this—we could do this. And we had the ultrasound pictures to prove it. A little guy—who initially resembled a sushi hand roll more than a baby—bobbed around in my rapidly expanding stomach. We saw him. We saw his heart beat. We saw him moving, doing somersaults, careening from side to side.

We decided to tell only our immediate families—our parents and siblings—but forgot to mention that they shouldn’t tell anyone. And in a heartbeat, the whole world knew. And we rolled our eyes and shook our heads but didn’t really mind because our joy was palpable and it was all we could do not to shout it from the rooftops. I walked through my days listening to a constant internal chatter about the benefits of girls over boys or boys over girls, and nursery colors and college funds, and all this to the backdrop sound of shouts and giggles and applause.

The pregnancy was easy. I wasn’t sick much—only an occasional nausea in the afternoons. But on two occasions I had some spotting, which my doctor assured me happened to many women. I had two ultrasounds and was reassured each time we saw the tiny heartbeat, the tiny spastic cartwheels. We coasted through the first 12 weeks and then, finally, we opened the floodgates and told everyone.