miscarriages and c-sections

I'll start with the easy one. Caesarian sections are major surgeries and they are traumatizing to the mother and possibly to the baby as well.

Women who are considering elective C-sections need to look at some C-section surgery photos and talk to other mothers who have had to recover from them. If you do not have some 24-hour help lined up, you will have a very, very difficult time looking after your baby. The usual weight limit for lifting after open abdominal surgery is 5 pounds. The average newborn weighs between 7 and 8 pounds.

If you have an elective section, or any other kind, it will leave you with emotional scars. It will physically hurt. This will impact how you feel about your baby.

Moving right along...

Why do women minimize our feelings when we talk about our miscarriages? I kept saying oh I was only 4 weeks, it could have been so much worse... which is true, especially after hearing a good friend's horror story about having to demand attention from hospital staff after sitting around all day waiting for a D&C to remove her dead baby... but when we talked together about our experiences, we both minimized them. Why? And why don't we talk about them more?

No matter how you slice it, a miscarriage is the loss of a new human being. It is the loss of a baby. It is also the loss of faith that your body can produce a viable fetus and carry the baby to term. It is the loss of a future together with that child. It is a loss of your identity as that person's mother. It is knowing that your parents and your partner's parents are missing out on a grandchild, and depending on their ages and levels of health, this loss could be bigger. And whether or not you have children already, be it one child or 10 little monsters, miscarriage is still a major loss. Period.

Miscarriage can also be quite traumatic if it needs to involve surgery. Mine didn't. But it was bad enough as it was. My almost-baby's demise took place in a public washroom. Flushing a public toilet is so NOT the right way to say goodbye to my little could-have-been. Would you flush a baby down a toilet as a funeral?

Listening to my friend tell her story I am amazed she is as together about life as she is. I can't imagine how hard it would be to be forced to be your own advocate for having your dead baby surgically removed from your body. This was a major health system FAIL from start to finish.

And yet my friend said a few times to me, "but it's not like I was 37 weeks or anything..."

Why do we minimize this?

When I was pregnant with my son I kept having the most hideous nightmares. It was my mom who finally figured it out - that it was because I needed to properly finish grieving my miscarriage. Everything unspoken about that loss was haunting my dreams and my life. I knew what I needed to do immediately, and it was work with clay to say goodbye, to change the ending and give my little almost-baby a proper release. I hugged the new life growing in my womb and asked my little one to hold my hand because this was going to be really, really, really hard to do.

We went to the clay shop. In a daze I got off the bus at the wrong stop and promptly tripped and fell. We were fine. The snow was soft. I found the shop and the clay they sold was more than I could carry so I took what I needed and said I'd be back early the next week to pick up the rest.

At home I drew a bath as clay work requires water, and I figured this way would be easiest to minimize mess. Then I poured out my heart to the clay, talking to my almost-baby, saying goodbye, crying, so much crying. I made a clay ball to symbolize the unborn baby and placed it so gently in a clay womb. I sealed it gently and said my farewell, and my I'm sorry about the public toilet bit.

I took the still wet clay creation into my garden for release. I set it atop a pile of snow and used more snow to bury it further. It steamed.

I left my unborn wrapped in snow and walked back inside. I could see the spot from the kitchen window.

Now my son is born and it is spring. The snow has melted, and there is a spot in the middle of the garden where the clay has broken down into lumps. Everything is as it should be, and I no longer have nightmares.

But I still minimize my loss. I need to learn how to acknowledge it for what it is in the company of others. And as a community of women, parents, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, grandparents... we all need to help those of us who still grieve to stop minimizing our losses.