It’s been a month since the miscarriage. It’s odd how I remember so much and so little of that night. I remember thinking it was the most physical pain I had ever felt, yet I wouldn’t now rate it as a 10/10 necessarily. Odd how things get blurry hindsight. Maybe different miscarriages at different gestational ages imprint differently on women, but mine, at 9 weeks, is something I try so hard to hold on to.

I found out I was going to miscarry at 7 weeks. At 8 weeks a second ultrasound confirmed that it would happen, but it didn’t for another week after that. A few days before it happened, I started spotting. Funny how until the contractions started, I always kept a glimmer of hope that maybe the doctors were wrong. Maybe I was the one in a million exception… the case my obstetrician would always remember as something new she learned about the female reproductive system. I hoped the spotting was just normal early pregnancy discharge. I was convinced that my mini at-home ultrasound machine from amazon picked up a heartbeat. I calculated and recalculated the gestational age, conjecturing that perhaps there was a hidden younger twin that would, in fact, survive.

When it started, I woke up at 10pm with sudden pain. I pretty much knew it was going to happen, because the second contraction came shortly after that. At first I didn’t think the pain was huge. Like a bad period cramp. I wiped — burgundy blood. Then the cramps started coming more often. More painful. I didn’t realize that the process resembled real labor until the contractions were something like 30 seconds apart. My body was quite literally squeezing itself out. Every few minutes, it felt like half a cup of blood would spill out of me into the toilet water. I kept wiping, hoping to wipe the mess away.

At this point it’s 2 am, and my husband is already awake pushing a major software release in his upstairs office. I didn’t want to trouble him, but the pain got so bad, that I couldn’t keep it to myself anymore. I think I texted him to bring me something. I’m not quite sure. His presence during the event was blurry and unclear to me. I know he was there. He brought me a space heater, because I was sitting on the toilet with my pants down for hours. My butt was sore and cold. So were my feet. I was literally shaking, and I don’t think I ever understood what that meant until it happened. Every inch of my body was trembling, and the heater somehow helped. I think hearing it buzzing next to me gave me something to focus on… it was a sort of mental crutch that made me feel warm and taken care of.

As I sat on the toilet, all the sensations grew more and more painful, but it didn’t seem like anything was happening, so I tried to lie down, but I couldn’t even stretch out my legs for what it did to my abdomen. I thought I was going to hurl from the pain, so my husband brought me a bucket that I normally use when I mop the floors. It had a dead bug in it, but I was blacking out and didn’t remove it. I never puked that evening, but towards the end, I felt something hanging down from my vagina. It’s insistence on not coming out prolonged the last wave of pain, so I grabbed a piece of toilet paper, using it like a glove, grabbed the piece and pulled it out. It looked like a dark red slug the size of my forearm. Gross. That was probably “it”. I put it in the bucket next to the dead bug. The pain subsided, and I finally dozed off.

The most painful part was letting go of the beautiful anticipation I remember fostering when I first found out I was expecting. At 4 weeks, just before my missed period, I kept telling myself that it couldn’t be me. I would be like most women… I would have no problems. I remember imagining a crystal ball that I would peer into, seeing myself at 6, 8, 13, 20 weeks. I reminded myself every day how lucky I was to finally be on my way to my ultimate life goal, and the statistics were in my favor.

Many women will agree that the first order of business, post positive home pregnancy test, is shear terror. Terror that I would be an inadequate parent. But then you kind of deal with it, and you feel like a better person for being trusted with such a great responsibility. You feel like you deserve that responsibility, because you overcame the terror.

Turns out, when you miscarry, that is the responsibility you feel you didn’t deserve after all. You feel incompetent, because you think you let your child die, like it was in your control. Like a surgeon who drops his scalpel before even beginning the surgery, a mother who loses a baby before it’s a baby faces the world from within her own growing insanity. When you have only carried, birthed, and reared a child in your imagination, losing it brings you to the very brink of madness. The thread of consciousness is vague and inconclusive, and there really is no certainty that it happened. I still don’t really believe it was me, but the world has moved on. I’m back to my old routine. I got my normal period. My parents have stopped asking me how I’m feeling. Who knows if it really happened. A month later, I still keep the space heater where it was that night. I can’t imagine it anywhere else anymore.