I asked some of my fellow stillbirthday mothers to help me out with some misconceptions of miscarriage.  This is our list, of misconceptions the people around us had – and said to us – in our darkest days of grief.

I’d like to build a misconceptions list of all pregnancy and infant loss experiences, so if you’d like, you can leave a comment with yours.  Alternately, you can visit our article on bullying the bereaved, and use the special email address there.

In our heartbreak, we felt:

• Like a murderer.
• Like a bad mother.
• Like I couldn’t even protect my baby…from myself.
• Like a failure.
• Like my husband must blame me.
• Like my husband should blame me.
• Like my husband wouldn’t want to make love to me again.
• Shame at my body’s desire to want intimacy again – feeling foolish for desiring sexual intimacy from my husband.
• Wondering if my husband is thinking about the loss during intimacy with me.
• Foolish to want to conceive again.
• Foolish to think I can conceive again.
• Foolish that my “womanhood” is so “incorrect” or “malfunctioned”.
• Deep despair at the loss of effort it took to conceive – wasted time, money, effort.
• Self loathing – vengeance for my child’s death, even if directed at self.
• Tempted to search for blame onto others, including my spouse, others, or God.
• Frustrated that even the platitudes were directed at my baby (“in a better place”) or rushing me into some future projection of happiness (“you can try again”) instead of focusing on my needs and the magnitude of the moment.
• Unable to perceive anything other than the current darkness, and so these platitudes about the future seemed like a foreign language.
• Pressure to move on, as if my body wasn’t actually in a postpartum transition.
• Rejected.
• Weird.

In our heartbreak, we heard:

• It’s over.
• You can forget.
• You should forget.
• You didn’t love your baby, that’s why you lost ‘it’.
• Your life is easier with one less child to care for.
• It was God’s will.
• You should consider yourself lucky.
• Your loss is easier than someone else’s loss (loss of spouse, etc.)
• ‘It’ wasn’t a real child.
• You shouldn’t hurt mentally.
• You shouldn’t hurt emotionally.
• You shouldn’t hurt spiritually.
• You ‘only’ lost the idea of a baby.
• It’s not real labor and childbirth.
• It’s just a period.
• ‘It’s’ just debris.
• ‘It’s’ just products of conception.
• You are not a mother.
• God didn’t approve of this baby.
• You didn’t deserve to be pregnant.
• You should be thankful that you have your living children.
• You can just get pregnant again.
• You are lucky God changed His mind.
• You are lucky to not have a special needs child, that you were spared from this.
• This was God’s will.
• It’s your fault (your weight, your job, your stress, etc.)
• Adoption is an easy approach to parenthood.
• Silence.

Stillbirthday mothers, this is a very hurtful list.  Just reading this hurts my heart.  If in reading this list, you get stuck in pain, please, I ask you this.  Please, get out a piece of paper and a pencil.  Please go through every single one of these comments above, and read it in the OPPOSITE.  Then, write down these OPPOSITE responses.  It would look like this:

• I don’t have to forget.
• God did not change His mind.
• I love my baby.
• Every loss is difficult – mine, and anyone else’s.

Giving birth to our miscarried baby(ies) has taught us many things.  It has stretched us to learn more about ourselves, about our feelings, about our values, about our patience, our forgiveness of others, and about our love.

I asked some stillbirthday mothers to expand on this with me.  This is our list.

• It is good for me to honor my feelings.
• It is good for me to validate each of my children and speak about them as I choose to.
• It is good for me to include all of my children in conversations, in celebrations and in my family as I choose to.
• My experience is worthy of me defining how I choose to.
• I have the right to consider myself the mother to a miscarried child, for the rest of my life, and determine for myself how this role is an important one.
• My heart can hold love for people I have never seen.
• I am here, and I have a place, even when I feel lost.
• It is good for me to cry.
• It is good for me to laugh.
• Happy can remind me of sad.  Sad can remind me of happy.
• I treasure today because tomorrow is unknown.
• I treasure my living children and other living loved ones, not because I was told to, but because I choose to.
• I want to grow and to improve areas of myself in honor of my child(ren).
• We all grieve differently.
• I am not grieving wrong.