About this blog
In this blog, I share my experience with four miscarriages, including losing our daughter in my second trimester, Sunday Penelope. I reflect on the quiet kind of grief that often goes unseen, becoming a mom the moment you see those two lines, and grieving the future you imagined. I also share what I wish people had done and the somatic practices that helped me carry my grief.
Some losses are loud. People gather, share meals, and send flowers. Other losses are quiet. They happen behind closed doors, and sometimes only a few people ever know.
Miscarriage is often the quiet kind. People say things like “at least you weren’t further along” or “at least you know you can get pregnant.” It doesn’t seem to count as a real loss.
Yet my body remembers each one.
I have had four miscarriages. It took me a long time to be able to write that or even say it out loud. They were back-to-back over two years, and I started falling into depression. My relationship suffered too, with both of us grieving at the same time. Our last loss was the hardest. We did get to give her a name. Her name was Sunday Penelope.
I was already a mom
Many people don’t see it this way, but I became a mom the moment I saw those two lines. From that point on, my choices were about more than just me. I stopped the occasional drinking of alcohol and I stopped certain medications. I started taking prenatal vitamins every day. I was already making choices to protect my baby.
That’s what being a mom is. It starts long before the baby is born.
Grieving the life I thought I’d have
With each pregnancy, I started to imagine. I thought about due dates and how my family would change. I pictured who my little one might become. When the pregnancy ended, my plans ended too, and I kept having to start over.
That’s what makes this grief so hard to explain. People may think you lost something that wasn’t really there yet. For me, it was already there. It lived in my plans, my hopes, and my body.
Four times, I had to let go of a life I had already started to see.
The losses inside the loss
With miscarriage, you lose more than a pregnancy. You lose all the little things you never got to learn.
Never knowing their eye color or hair color. I still wonder what they would have been like, what they would have looked like. Would they have looked like me or like my partner? These questions don’t have answers, and they never will. The guessing never really stops.
Then the pregnancy announcements. While I was losing mine, other people were sharing their happy news. I smiled, even while my heart was breaking.
These are all losses too.
Never getting to call out their names
When we lose someone, we say their name. We tell stories about them and hear others say it back to us. We laugh and cry in shared memories. That is part of how we remember.
With miscarriage, there often isn’t a name. There’s no first day of school to announce and no name written on a birthday cake. Sometimes this loss just becomes “the pregnancy,” or something no one talks about at all.
Grief that doesn’t get seen
Miscarriage is more common than most people realize. According to the Mayo Clinic, about 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. The real number is likely higher, since many can happen before someone even knows they are pregnant.
Even so, it is a loss that often isn’t fully honored or is quietly dismissed. Those comments usually come from people who mean well, but they can make you feel like your grief doesn’t count.
After a while, I stopped talking about it. Staying quiet felt easier than explaining.
Being quiet did not make my grief go away.
Grief lives in the body
Miscarriage happens inside your own body, so the grief lives there too. My chest felt heavy, and my eyes were sore from crying. I felt like I couldn’t take a deep breath. Some days I just felt numb and like my body had let me down.
I still remember all four of their due dates. When I think about them, my chest gets tight. My body holds on to those dates just like my heart does.
What helped me the most was wrapping my arms around myself in a hug sometimes letting out a big cry and gently swaying. Sometimes resting my hand on my heart and feeling it beating worked too. As for my partner and I, we took walks together, and we tried to notice the beauty in nature around us, the leaves, the clouds, the smell of fresh cut grass.
Writing helped too. I once wrote a letter to get some words off my chest that I’ll never get to say to them in person. Putting those words on paper gave them somewhere to go which helped a lot.
None of this made the loss go away. It helped me stay with my grief without being swallowed by it.
If this is your story too
If you have had a miscarriage, your grief is real. It doesn’t matter how early it happened or how many times. You are allowed to miss them. You are allowed to grieve the future you imagined. You are allowed to give them a name, even now.
LIGHT makes room for losses like these. You don’t have to explain or defend your grief here. You can just bring it.