Finding the Path After Miscarriage

October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. This commemorative month was established in 1988 to provide education, remembrance, and support for those affected by infant and pregnancy loss—a tragedy that nearly twenty-five percent of women experience during or after pregnancy. The following personal reflection describes in detail a sudden miscarriage. For bereavement and informational resources, visit the CDC website or nonprofit organizations such as March of Dimes and Griffin Cares Foundation.

I screamed in visceral rage between gasping breaths, verging on hyperventilation. Traffic signals and taillights blended with my tears into a kaleidoscopic blur while my GPS instructed me to make a left turn, a task requiring two lane changes—far more than I was capable of in that moment. Using every ounce of cognition I could access, I pulled into the nearest parking lot and called my husband. I couldn’t hold it together enough to get myself home after all, I explained between sobs.

He left a friend with our sleeping toddler and hopped into an Uber while I sat in a Target parking lot, staring blankly out the windshield, slipping into dissociation in a desperate attempt to not face what I knew I was experiencing. A miscarriage. My third consecutive miscarriage. Just days after we heard our baby’s heartbeat and allowed hope to slowly settle in.

This cycle of grief was certainly not new, but this loss crushed me with a weight I couldn’t have anticipated. Three miscarriages were more than just bad luck, but no one cause could be found. I had conceived, carried, and birthed my first child with relative ease, and the myriad tests and procedures I’d endured in the aftermath of my recent losses had all come back normal. For the first time we found ourselves staring down the notion that growing our family was no longer just a question of when but if.

With no clear path forward we grasped at anything we could. We met with a fertility clinic only to be told that IVF wouldn’t give us any higher chances of a successful pregnancy. We spent hours scouring the internet for answers we knew we wouldn’t find. We continually debated how many more miscarriages we could bear.

As I grappled with uncertainty and began to reluctantly consider a future without the second child I had always imagined, a phrase popped into my mind: “radical acceptance.” I’m sure I must have heard the term before, but I couldn’t recall where. I didn’t know exactly what it meant or how to do it, but as someone with a penchant for extremes, the idea, to my thinking, of a radical change sounded like the only tenable way forward and out of my suffering.

After a few days of the words running through my head on loop, I typed “radical acceptance” into Google. One of the first things that popped up was the book by Tara Brach with the same name. The subtitle, “Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha,” drew me in.

I had been on a long but erratic journey into the world of meditation, beginning almost fifteen years prior. For me, this involved sporadically seeking out books and meditation instruction from mainstream mindfulness and Buddhist perspectives and dragging myself out of bed first thing in the morning to meditate in earnest. After some time, I’d invariably drift away from the practice for months or years at a time before returning to it with a renewed sense of vigor when something happened to bring it back into my field of vision.

Without adequate preparation, I had previously attended a five-night retreat that wasn’t the right fit for me and ended up leaving early when a combination of arising fear, confusion, and a relentless head cold left me wondering what the heck I was doing there. Ultimately, I completely lost touch with any semblance of a meditation practice in the chaos that naturally ensued when my first child was born.

But despite my erratic pursuit of the path, the Buddhist world was still warm and familiar enough to me that I immediately took to Brach’s book with a sense of comfort and trust. Her words enveloped me like a hug as I soaked the pages in highlighter. I felt something begin to shift inside me. She taught me that the nature of true acceptance lies in clearly seeing what is happening inside ourselves and regarding whatever we find with compassion, kindness, and love. In time, the tiniest glimmer of freedom surfaced from deep within me.

As I grappled with uncertainty and began to reluctantly consider a future without the second child I had always imagined, a phrase popped into my mind: “radical acceptance.”

With the book still fresh on my mind, I began to look more closely at exactly what I was experiencing. I found that my overwhelming sadness was often steeped in self-blame and bound to a threatened image of who I was and the entire life I had envisioned. All of this together felt insurmountable. But when I began to see those layers and hold myself with some kindness, I found that my sadness could just be sadness. It still hurt, but I could be with it. I could sit still and quietly trace where it lived in my throat and my chest. 

A practice Brach describes that particularly resonated with me was that of saying “yes” to whatever arises for us, greeting even painful experiences with openness instead of resistance. It was becoming clear just how much I had been increasing my suffering by rejecting what I was experiencing. After screaming “no” to my experience in the loudest and most literal sense, the idea of saying “yes” felt radical.

With the limited free time I had available as the parent of a toddler, I settled back into a regular meditation practice and sought to introduce more presence into my busy days. I began to feel a sense of peace and receptivity to whatever life might bring, aware of my feelings as they arose but not at their mercy. I was on a spiritual high of sorts, basking in the lightness of having found not only a way to be with my pain but also a framework for how I wanted to live.

I quickly became attached to this enjoyable state and almost as quickly began to fear that it would soon dissipate. Once I recognized this clinging, I sought to loosen my hold. I had been through enough ebbs and flows with this practice by now to know that I couldn’t rely only on the incidental feelings of bliss to carry me along. But I could use the energy of this moment to find support outside of myself for the times when the path became harder to follow.

I sought out the missing piece that I had never found in the past: community. An internet search led me to a weekly Insight Meditation sitting group at a local dharma center, and I made plans to attend the next meeting.

Having arrived with little idea of what to expect and a naturally anxious temperament, I found my mind racing and my hands trembling through most of the meditation, but no part of me wished I hadn’t come. I fell into easy conversation with the person sitting next to me during the break and started to imagine myself as part of this world. As the teacher began to speak, I was struck by how accessible and relevant her words felt while also resting on a framework of ancient wisdom. 

As I drove home that night, I felt a deep knowing that this unfamiliar place and these unfamiliar people would soon be an integral part of my life. I also felt a sense of relief. After drifting in and out of this practice on my own for so many years, I finally had a mooring. A place where I could learn from my teachers and sit alongside my peers, where I could show up instead of falling away when my internal volition wavered.

With a newfound openness to uncertainty and burgeoning knowledge that I could be OK even if another child never came, my husband and I decided to give it one more try. Positive pregnancy tests had long ceased to be celebratory for us, or even necessary, as I had become so attuned to what the earliest signs of pregnancy felt like in my body. But we found ourselves staring at yet another pair of little pink lines with a mix of hope and fear, held this time with a little more space and awareness.

I chose to fully inhabit my body rather than try to forget I was pregnant, as I had done in the past. I observed the soft waves of nausea and fatigue, ever so slowly picking up force until one afternoon, when I realized they had suddenly vanished. When a blood test confirmed what I already knew, the familiar grief flooded in, but my experience of it was so drastically different from the times before. This time I said “yes” to my grief. I did my best to sit with it and learn what it had to teach me instead of raging against it, shutting it out, or pleading with it to retreat as quickly as possible. Instead of clinging to what I felt life was taking from me, I saw my life as part of the rhythm and randomness of the universe, achingly outside of my control. And yet here I was holding the possibility of living whatever experience unfolded in front of me with openness and love.

My husband and I both agreed: It was time to move on. We didn’t need to keep grasping at the image in our minds of what our family would look like. We could live the life right here in front of us, we could be present with each other and with the sweet, curious, loving son we have the honor of raising. We feel certain in our decision to embrace life as a family of three and have no intentions of trying to conceive again, but we also acknowledge that our minds could change before biology completely shuts the door. Being able to hold this space for ourselves with a sense of equanimity feels like a small wonder after clutching so tightly to a particular outcome for so long. 

With gratitude, I watch as life falls into new rhythms and time begins to erode the sharp edges of sadness. It would have been a gift to mother one of those precious beings that began to grow inside my womb. But it is also a gift that when my heart was cracked and broken, it opened me up to this path. 

More on pregnancy loss from the Tricycle archive:

Healing from Miscarriage

Diary from the Bardo: A Reflection on Miscarriage

Putting a Face on Loss: An Interview with the Filmmakers of Mizuko