January was a weird month. I came home from Taipei with the bird flu. (Or something like it.) It knocked out my entire family for a week and a half. Sometime during the feverish blur, our toddler’s nanny quit and moved out. I scrambled to find childcare and ultimately flew my aunt in from LA for two weeks, which meant a house guest we weren’t originally expecting. When I wasn’t convalescing, I reported a few radio stories, blogged a lot, tweeted even more, traveled to Nashville and back, started teaching my Medill journalism students and drank lots of iced green tea. And all the while, I was pregnant. Kind of.
The adage is that you can never be “kind of” pregnant, but when you learn you’re pregnant with an empty gestational sac — the condo that’s supposed to house an embryo is without a resident — and after an agonizing weeklong wait, doctors find a lifeless, microscopic little bean in a condo collapsing all around it, that seems pretty “in-between” to me. So that was most my January.
I started miscarrying on Chinese New Year’s Day. For the same reason I delivered daughter Eva without pain meds, I’ve always trusted my body to know what to do at the right time. As we rang in the new Lunar Year and the sun emerged for the first time in weeks, my body reliably ousted an embryo that would never become anything more. I felt both disappointed and relieved that my gestational limbo was almost over.
None of this is to say I treat this experience as unimportant — it is physically uncomfortable and emotionally disorienting. But I feel no shame about what happened. The more openly we discuss the range of female experiences, the freer we become. For better or for worse, for a huge chunk of us, the experience of womanhood includes miscarriage. I join a very, very large club. And I am better for being through it.
But dear god, I hope February is a lot more fun.