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One year I was pregnant four times. I was 38 and newly married. I got pregnant the first time in January. A few weeks later, I miscarried.

For every season of that year, I have a photo of me holding a pregnancy test with two pink lines marking positive. By summer my smile is tentative.

Each pregnancy followed its own, idiosyncratic course. One ended gently, just days after a home test turned positive. Another hung on 10 weeks, the embryo’s heart stopping after we’d seen it pulsing during two previous ultrasounds. Another pregnancy my doctor tried to save by prescribing progesterone. That only caused the little bundle of cells to cling to me too tenaciously, long after it stopped growing.

Still, each new pregnancy brought renewed hope. So did the battery of tests that found nothing wrong, and the doctor who advised us to just keep trying.

I was no spring chicken, that doctor pointed out. Most early miscarriages are caused by embryos with genetic abnormalities, which are more common with older eggs. Chances were I’d eventually catch a good egg. But what he and no one could understand was why I got pregnant so easily. Usually women my age simply took longer to conceive.

After each loss, my despair lasted as long as the requisite month I was instructed to wait before we could try again. Soon after that, poof, I’d be pregnant.

My husband and I fumbled through that peculiar roller coaster of hope and heartache, inventing our own ways of dealing. We stopped thinking of pregnancy as a baby on the way, instead referring to ours as BOCs, short for “Ball of Cells.” We became expert at managing my morning sickness, knowing which smelly blocks to avoid, which foods not to cook.

I learned to recognize the signs that I’d conceived within days of the event. I’d blink up from my computer at work, or pause while eating falafel on a bench, and the world would appear suddenly shimmery and strange. I’d be hyperaware of my body, the beating of my heart, the fringe of my eyelashes, and I’d know something in me had shifted. A few weeks or a couple of months later, inexplicable despair would hit, something I came to regard as the telltale sign that the pregnancy had ended and my hormones were crashing.

Though only 1 or 2 percent of couples experience recurrent pregnancy loss — defined as more than two miscarriages in a row — miscarriage itself is remarkably common, happening to roughly one quarter of all known pregnancies. But you’d never know it until you mention your own. Miscarriage, like early pregnancy, is still a largely private affair. Unlike births and deaths, it has no rituals to mark it. Even close friends can feel at a loss with no script to follow. Co-workers rarely hear of false starts. One’s life moves on as if it never happened.

This quietness in the face of something that feels, to some women, so physically and emotionally overwhelming can be confusing. It can make it all feel shameful. Even the word “miscarriage” itself implies the woman has done something wrong, has carried her child incorrectly. Perhaps this is why nearly everyone I know who has gone through it has

some theory blaming themselves — that they should not have taken a plane; that they had sex at the wrong moment; that they weren’t taking the right supplement or were taking the wrong one.

The dearth of research surrounding miscarriage only fuels the isolation and remorse. Fertility specialists generally default to treating women who lose pregnancies the same way they do women who have been trying for years to conceive. One reputable clinic wouldn’t see me when they learned I was pregnant. When I explained I’d already had three miscarriages and needed help staying pregnant, the receptionist said that insurance wouldn’t cover pregnant patients and that positive thinking might be what I really needed.

A doctor at another clinic wanted to shoot blue dye in my uterus to make sure nothing was blocking my husband’s sperm from reaching my eggs. When I pointed out that things couldn’t be blocked — I got pregnant easily, after all — he shrugged, saying that was part of treatment.

Two months after I had surgery to remove my fourth pregnancy, I fell pregnant again. Just like the last time, nausea hit hard by week 5, and by week 7, we saw a tiny heartbeat. “Is it too much to ask for that heart to keep beating another 80 years?” I asked my husband, and we laughed and laughed, because we knew exactly how much that was to ask.

But a little over seven months later, I was holding our son.

A year later, his being here feels less like the lucky fluke I know it to be than a wondrous inevitability. While it’s a cliché, I now have trouble imagining life without him. But if I try, of course I can imagine that. After all, I once did imagine that I might never carry a pregnancy to term. Perhaps this is why the mystery of what went wrong and what finally went right continues to haunt me.

I still sometimes visit the message boards filled with women who have had 3, 6, 9 and more miscarriages. A few, like me, are of what doctors call “advanced maternal age.” But many others are in their 20s and early 30s, women who also get pregnant easily and, after much testing, still have no answers. Together they puzzle their way through a world the medical field has largely overlooked compared to the more lucrative business of getting women pregnant. They announce pregnancies with headlines like “It Begins Again.” They share tips for managing the physical pain of false starts as well as the grief. They bond over the belief that after some magical number of losses, they will cradle the babies they long for.

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Kendra Hurley is an editor at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, where she writes about issues affecting New York City’s low-income children and families.