Essay by Miriam Finder Annenberg
(CNN) — There is no way to prepare.
For nearly two years, I couldn’t go inside one room in my house. If you had come over and cracked the door, you’d be met with stale air, a changing table and a tiny, crib-size mattress still ensconced in its brown cardboard shipping package.
I was 18 weeks’ pregnant nearly four years ago when I learned of my miscarriage during a routine ultrasound. I saw the image of my baby boy on the screen floating inside me, with no telltale flicker of a heartbeat.
As soon as I got home from the doctor’s office, still numb with shock, I gathered up the parenting books strewn about the house. I fished the handful of gifted onesies and baby blankets from their places nestled in colorful tissue paper and celebratory gift bags. I retrieved the sonogram images of my baby from my top dresser drawer.
I shoved all that evidence of our baby and the life we were planning into one of those gift bags, before my brain had time to fully register the pain radiating through my body. I knew I had to do this while I was still in a state of disbelief, before the wave of grief drowned me.
I pushed past the feeling that my body was collapsing, sweeping up all these items and depositing them into the would-be nursery, alongside the changing table and crib mattress. I closed the door and didn’t go back in that room for months.
The painful reality of miscarriage
Between 10% and 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, but the vast majority — 80%, according to the Cleveland Clinic — occur in the first 13 weeks. After we made it past the first trimester mark, I thought I had nothing to worry about. But my baby died anyway.
I learned of the miscarriage in the morning. By that afternoon, I was scheduled for surgery to remove the fetal tissue the next day. It was too much — the shock of the loss, the immediate surgery. I felt I didn’t have time to process any of the information. Tomorrow? But I just lost my baby today.
I knew he was gone, but I still wanted more time with him. I felt so deeply connected to the tiny body growing within me. Not having him as a part of me anymore felt unfathomable. I cried, not speaking, for 45 minutes after scheduling the surgery. My husband held my hand and cried, too. He also had nothing to say.
As I got into bed that night, an overwhelming sense of dread gripped me. I had the realization that my dead child was inside of me. I didn’t sleep that night, not at all. I lay in bed, staring at the clock, waiting for the morning to come.
Life after pregnancy loss
I can’t remember much about that winter.
I do know there were many days when it felt impossible to get out of bed. But I did, often getting dressed and putting on makeup, hoping that would make me feel some sense of normalcy. Many days, I crawled back in bed in the afternoon. Every pillowcase I had at the time was streaked with mascara stains from my tears that winter. It took months to get the stains out.
Part of my pain came from the blame around pregnancy loss.
Although 15% of respondents in one 2015 study reported that “they or their partner suffered at least one miscarriage,” most of those surveyed said they thought miscarriage happened in just 5% or fewer pregnancies.
Not only did respondents underestimate the frequency of miscarriage — 22% blamed the mother for the loss. “Commonly believed causes of miscarriage included a stressful event (76%), lifting a heavy object (64%), previous use of an intrauterine device (28%), or oral contraceptives (22%),” according to the study.
It’s no surprise that I felt guilty, a feeling widely shared by loss parents. My job as a mom was