Marriage plus miscarriage: a review

Hormone clusterfuck 08 – the July edition seems to be over. Yesterday I am almost — stress almost –felt normal. It’s kind of like getting over the flu. After a few days of feeling like hell, the fact that you’re not throwing up, burning with a fever, or, as the case may be, having crying jags interspersed with eating ice cream for dinner is a vast and welcome improvement. You know, like at least I have my health. 

My husband was happy with my lightened mood too. We debated — was it a hormonal hurricane? heavy downpour with hormonal hailstorms? The weather analogies were many. Grief (and it did take me a while to admit that is what is is) affects a marriage. Ours is strong but not unscathed. And often I know I am mad, or upset or sad but I don’t understand the root cause.

Tonight is a good example. My normally easy going husband did his version of slamming the front door (so a loud, emphatic shut) as he left to play baseball. I was pissy at home before he left and I don’t know why. He works four nights a week and this week is playing baseball two more nights on top of that. I am a 8:30 to 6 kind of person. I am torn between wanting to be with him, near him along the time and then the pendulum swings the other way and I want to be alone. After miscarriage 2 I had recurring dreams that he was hurt, killed in a car accident. Same with my dog. A part of me, that terrified, scared, frantic core was desperately afraid that I would lose someone else I love. And I would not be able to bear that.

You marry your best friend right? Well, now he is pretty much my only close friend. Others I just can not confide in the same way. The shared grief (there is that word again) and the raw emotions and experiences we’ve walked through together allow us to relate and talk in a way I can not with anyone else.

And yet, and yet, I test, I push and I cling. I wait for small or grand gestures (like he will pull up the drive, baseball uniform still on, come back into the house and tell me what’s most important tonight is for him to be with me.

On my subway ride home today I read a powerful article in O magazine called “This does not need to be a secret” about yes, my current topic of obsession. The author, Elizabeth McCracken, writes about the stillbirth of her first son and the joy in her second son, born a year later. After two pages, my eyes prickled with  my tears. And while the subway is full of crazies and one woman with silent tears was not going to draw a crowd, I could not take any more in; it was too strong, too close. Almost home, I could not wait to dip back into her essay and rekindle the almost delicious connection — the sisterhood of sorrow as I think of it. Later in, there was one concept she wrote about that struck a chord and I hadn’t thought of before (great, new angles to this for me to analyze!) She talks about work, walks and wine with her husband shortly after the death of her son…”the freedom to do what we wanted was a kind of torture: look at your unencumbered selves. After most deaths, I imagine, the awfulness lies in how everything’s changed: you no longer recognize the shape of your days, there is a hole….For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We were waiting to be transformed and now here we are, back in our old life.”

Perhaps this is a big part of what is so painful for M and I, and causing some of the misguided and misunderstood actions on my part. We also wanted kids and always thought we would be changing a diaper or two by now. We planned our early married life getting ready to have it thrown into disarray by the arrival of our baby. We budgeted. We bought a house with three bedrooms. We bought tiny baby clothing on sale at Baby Gap. We dreamed. Now it is still just the two of us (plus puppy). On the outside, nothing tangible has changed; on the inside, everything has changed. There is a lot of love there, no doubt, but we always planned to have more than enough love to give much much away.