And with the sound of that dial tone, my grief swelled. I couldn’t un-know the decades of mother-daughter disappointment, just like I couldn’t un-know the devastation of seeing my dead baby dangling from me.
Months later, during my subsequent pregnancy, my mother and I revisited what happened between us. What I came to learn was that my mother had not known anyone who had miscarried – or put more accurately, because of the silence around miscarriage, she wasn’t aware that she knew anyone.
She hadn’t been confronted with having to find the “right” words, until now. Though her comments were unfathomable, it opened my eyes to a larger cultural issue: our lack of conversation surrounding miscarriage and stillbirth.
Though approximately one in four pregnancies end in loss, we are surprisingly silent about these traumas. Shame, stigma and fear – fear of somehow conjuring the loss in future pregnancies; that this was our fault; that something might be wrong with our bodies – keep us quiet. What if we handled this topic differently?
I can’t help but wonder if my mother – and others who have floundered in the face of this kind of trauma – would know what to say if we refused the current state of silence. I am not minimizing my mother’s transgressions. Instead, I am calling for a cultural framework that aims to normalize, destigmatize and provide tools for mothers and daughters (and others) to empathize more wholly.