Miranda's Story

When Miranda first got pregnant, she wasn’t thrilled. 

“Oh my God, I don’t want to have a kid!” she recalled thinking, shrieking. “What the heck am I doing?”

Miranda was thirty-four and had been married to Jeff for six years. “I was just on the cusp of being an ancient person in terms of having a baby,” she deadpanned. “In the medical world, I was legitimately dead already.”

We hadn’t spoken in over twenty years, but Miranda was still the fireball of sarcastic hilarity that I remembered from high school. We were in a grrrl band together then, and Miranda played drums like Animal from The Muppets.

Miranda and Jeff lived in a modest home in New Jersey, near where we grew up on the Shore, and taught dance at a local studio. I imagined her zaniness and infectious laugh afforded her favorite-teacher status amongst her students.

After her ob-gyn confirmed she was seven weeks along, Miranda joked, “I’m not really pregnant though, right?”

“Oh, you’re definitely pregnant,” her doctor said. 

While she and Jeff weren’t trying to conceive, they weren’t being particularly careful about things either. Miranda wasn’t all that surprised when she found out, though it wasn’t until she heard the heartbeat that her disbelief dissolved. With that tangible connection in place, her enthusiasm for having a baby bloomed.

Miranda shared the news with about a dozen friends and relatives. 

“I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to tell people.” Her pitch rose, taking on the tone of an awkward question. “I thought just as soon as you get pregnant, you’re supposed to say, ‘I’m pregnant, yay!’ Nobody told me about miscarriage.”

Like millions of women, Miranda was not aware of the unspoken twelve-week “rule” about not announcing a pregnancy until the second trimester. Given higher rates of miscarriage in the first trimester, many wait to tell family and friends—although a growing number of advocates for women’s health question this standard, as secrecy around early pregnancy means that women who miscarry tend to grieve in hushed isolation, stripped of support from healthcare providers and their own social networks. 

Miranda went back to the ob-gyn for a routine check-up a few weeks after her initial appointment. She lay on the exam table as the technician did the ultrasound. 

“It was the one where you have to drink a bunch of water so that your bladder pushes against your uterus, so when they check you it’s closer to where the embryo is,” she told me, straight-faced. “And you’re about to pee all over everybody, which is so much fun.” 

The technician kept circling back over Miranda’s belly, checking a second and third time. As the room grew quieter, Miranda had a bad feeling. Eventually, he told her he couldn’t find the heartbeat. 

“Well, try harder because I’m really excited,” she told him, half-laughing, half-sighing. “Couldn’t find it? Cool, I’ll wait. Go on, probe me.”

Miranda’s smile waned. The technician kept saying, “I’m so sorry,” as she clutched the crinkly paper beneath her, hoping he wouldn’t give up. 

Afterward, she lay alone in the exam room for what seemed like an eternity before someone told her she could get dressed. 

“I was hysterical, crying, when they finally brought me into my doctor’s office. While I sat there waiting for her, I heard her talking with someone in another room about their burgeoning pregnancy,” she said. “It completely messed with me.”

When the doctor came in, she told Miranda she was sorry and there was nothing that could’ve been done to prevent the miscarriage.

“It is not your fault. This is very common,” she assured her. “It’s so common that it’s probably happened to you before and you didn’t even realize it.” 

“Okay, but . . .” Miranda hadn’t passed any of the fetal tissue. “It’s still inside me, right?”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “Here’s how we can go forward: you can get a D&C, which is where we take it out, or you can wait for it to pass naturally.”

“This sucks so bad!”

Her doctor nodded. “I know, it totally sucks.”

Miranda opted to wait and let nature run its course. 

“Honestly,” she told me, “I don’t really like procedures, so I just wanted to let it pass.” She paused, and her big green eyes grew even wider. “But that’s a lot easier said than done.” 

When Miranda left her doctor’s office that afternoon, she hadn’t fully accepted the loss. As the week wore on, she felt a nagging urge for someone to double-check for the heartbeat. She felt too embarrassed to go back to her ob-gyn, so she visited a local Planned Parenthood office. The staff there confirmed that the fetus was dead and presented her with the same options: get a D&C or wait it out. 

As soon as she left the clinic, she called her doctor to schedule the procedure.

“It was so hard knowing that the thing wasn’t living inside me,” she said, looking away. “I just couldn’t do it.” 

She had the D&C a week later. 

For Miranda, it wasn’t an issue of trusting her doctor. Her ob-gyn was no-nonsense but compassionate. Miranda wanted to believe her, but she wasn’t ready to let go of the baby she had grown so excited to meet. She wasn’t ready to accept the loss. And like so many others, she felt guilty about the miscarriage. “I was convinced I shouldn’t have danced . . . or whatever I was telling myself.”

Miranda’s doctor told her she could try again after having a regular menstrual cycle, but that time came and went. She wasn’t in the headspace to jump back in. She spent the summer trying to reconnect with herself.

 “I remember walking to a friend’s house—just me, alone—and wanting to feel powerful and good about it, not all sad because I was panicking.”

She wanted to know for herself that she could be okay alone, without a child to care for or a baby growing inside her. She wasn’t a big drinker, but it felt important to know she could go have a drink if she wanted. She needed to feel positive about herself, on her own, before bringing yet another soul into her body and psyche. She took her time.

Come September, Miranda felt comfortable enough in her own skin to start trying again. By late October, she was pregnant.

I asked if they shared the news this time around.

“Oh, hell no!” she cried. “Because that next time I knew how to do it.”

Miranda was about six weeks pregnant when she tested positive with her home kit. Two days later, she started cramping and bleeding. Despite the positive test result, she wasn’t sure if she had just gotten her period or was actually experiencing a miscarriage.

Her doctor didn’t mince words. “There’s no such thing as ‘kind of’ pregnant, Miranda. You were pregnant.”

Miranda miscarried again, but she said the experience was far less crushing the second time around. Aware of how common it was, she didn’t feel nearly as bad about the loss. She reminded herself that she’d have more opportunities to try again.

“It wasn’t the end of the world to me like it was before. I knew that if it ends itself, it’s really not meant to be,” she said in a practiced tone. “If you think about it scientifically and pragmatically, it’s not as torturous. You know, nature taking care of itself.” 

Miranda was able to pass it naturally, but she was unprepared for the extreme amount of pain and blood loss. She bled heavily for a couple days, then her flow became more like a period for the following week. 

“It was unpleasant, to say the least,” she recalled, shuddering. “But I was grateful that it happened early, and I was more prepared for it mentally.” She threw her hands in the air, palms up, and shrugged. “I mean, it’s crazy! The human body’s insane!”

We lamented our personal and societal lack of understanding of women’s reproductive anatomy, reminiscing over some embarrassing formative instances of ignorance. 

Miranda, recalling the first time she got pregnant, burst into laughter. “I had to read up on it! ō-vyu-lā-tion.” She patted her eyes. “I’m thirty-five, I’ve had my period for twenty-four years, and I’m like, ‘So the egg comes out of where?’ It’s so lame!”

When I asked how Jeff coped with the losses, Miranda’s whole body sank. 

“It was difficult for him, and it actually makes me sadder to think about his experience than mine. He’s so quiet that thinking about him suffering makes me feel worse.” 

Tears gushed down her pale cheeks. 

“He was awesome . . . and very quietly there for me.” She sniffled, shaking her head. “I remember him asking me what I’d want to watch on TV—something that would last a while. And he just went and bought all of Parks and Recreation for me.”

They watched a lot of Parks and Rec together, allowing themselves the comforts of comedy and easy entertainment.

When Miranda asked Jeff how he was handling the loss, he would tell her how sad he was and remind her that she wasn’t alone. “We understood each other, and I didn’t feel abandoned emotionally or physically. He was really there for me,” she said, her eyes welling up again. “He’s a really good dude. I found a good one.” 

A couple months after the second miscarriage, Miranda and Jeff were ready to try again. They got pregnant right away with Maggie. 

“The third time really was a charm,” Miranda said, grinning widely.

A cherubic little brunette popped onto my screen and whispered, “Hello,” squirming in her mother’s lap to avoid eye contact with me. I could see Miranda’s high cheekbones and pointed chin in Maggie, as well as her playfulness. 

Seeing Miranda in full mom mode, I asked how she’d felt about womanhood and motherhood around the time of the miscarriages.

“This idea of ‘fertile’ womanhood is cut off at such an early age,” Miranda said. She understands there are real biological factors at work but said society also plays a significant role, insinuating that women themselves are no longer viable after a certain age. Thirty-five years old was considered late in life for Miranda to be starting to conceive, but that’s how long it took for her to feel like she was ready to care for another person.

I noted that many women feel like they’ve been written off when they hit their mid to late thirties.

“Right!” Miranda cried. “The message is, ‘You waited too long. Why did you care about other stuff more than this?’” She contorted her face into a mock grossed-out look, then relaxed into a dream-like expression. “I’ve never felt so womanly as I did when I was trying to get pregnant, or was actually pregnant. It made me feel more in touch with my femininity, in a way, whatever that means anymore.” She chuckled. “Those parts are there for a reason! They’re there, they work, and they have this crazy, intricate function that I had not even considered until then.”

Miranda said that even during the traumatic experiences of loss, she saw the inner workings of her womanly body as beautiful and wondrous. “It’s amazing that my body knew that it wasn’t gonna work and made the call to let it go. It really teaches you about loss just by virtue of it working.” 

Miranda said she wished the people to whom she announced her first pregnancy had warned her against sharing the news so early—but in the same breath, she acknowledged how hard it is to discuss the possibility of loss with excited friends and family. “I’ve had friends since then tell me they’re six weeks pregnant, and I say, ‘Yay, that’s great!’ But all I can think is, Why did you tell everyone so early?! I know what might happen! On the other hand, I wish there was more info and intel about miscarriage.” She gasped and threw her hands up in the air, looking around wildly. “Seriously! I can’t believe it’s still like this!”

The contradictions Miranda felt point to how and why the conversation around early pregnancy loss needs to shift. If women felt supported when they experienced pregnancy loss in the first trimester, maybe they wouldn’t shy away from letting people know about their early pregnancies in the first place. Because there’s so little support or understanding of the impact of early loss—heard in comments like, “She wasn’t even showing”—the standard of twelve weeks makes it that much harder for women to speak up and find support. 

“You should be able to tell people that you’re pregnant and then, later, that it didn’t work out,” Miranda argued. “Even before you can hear a heartbeat.”

I asked Miranda why she thought, as women, we’re not talking about it. 

While she couldn’t put her finger on it, she did feel that miscarriage should be more than a mere footnote in the book on pregnancy.

When I pressed her about what would have actually resonated with her, she lit up.

“The information should be there as soon as you find out you’re pregnant.” Her hands whirred at her sides. “It should come with pregnancy tests! Once the thing turns positive or you hear, ‘Congratulations, you’re pregnant.’”

She was having a stroke of public health brilliance.

“Remember that miscarriage is a really high probability.” I listened intently as she tried to pace herself. “You know those TSS [toxic shock syndrome] warnings in tampon boxes that basically said, ‘Don’t leave this in for a thousand years, or else’?”

I nodded, vividly recalling how effective those warnings were. As a teenager, I was terrified of TSS, which occurs in about one in every 100,000 women who wear tampons. To put that in perspective, miscarriage is about 25,000 times more common than TSS.

“It should be in every pregnancy test kit! There should be a pamphlet that gets sent out anytime you might be pregnant: ‘It may not work out. And if it doesn’t, it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t that drink you had when you didn’t even know you were pregnant. It’s not that your body sucks, or you’re not female enough, or you’re too old to do this. It happened because your body’s taking care of you.’” She paused, then added, “Anything! Just more information, preventively.”

She had similar thoughts about what might have helped Jeff feel more supported. 

“There’s advertising on the Internet for just about anything you’d ever want to buy. So why can’t there be something targeting men, like, ‘Hey, are you guys trying to conceive? Are you a dad-to-be? Here’s what you need to know.’” She started giggling. “But make it look cool so dudes actually read it.”

Miranda acknowledged that not every male partner is as empathetic or as kind as Jeff. She was adamant that men should understand that supporting their partners through pregnancy also means supporting them through a loss.

“In fact, your support is monumental if it doesn’t work out. I can picture, slash I know, what happens if your partner is less sensitive and you lose multiple babies. It’s not easy to deal with shaming, in addition to feeling the loss. So, I think sensitivity training would be important, too.”

Miranda was full of public health and education suggestions for policymakers. I asked her what advice she had for women who have struggled with pregnancy loss as she has. 

She leaned back in her chair and let out a big sigh. “No matter how crappy things feel, even those crappy experiences can be a lesson.” Eventually, she said, we remember even the low points in a positive way, as impossible as it may seem at the time of our suffering. That memory and lived knowledge, she believed, enables us to help others and find solace for ourselves.

“Even if you never have kids, you’ll experience motherhood in other ways,” she said, her heart-shaped lips broadening into a smile. “From the second I conceived, to birth, till Maggie and I find each other in another realm—the whole thing of being a mom is so incredible. Watching her grow is the coolest thing in the world. I appreciate it so much it hurts,” she said, simultaneously laughing and crying. “I love the babies I’ve lost, and I love her.”

Miranda’s tight little frame heaved to the rhythm of her sobbing. She apologized as she caught her breath, “I was doing so great, I’m sorry.” 

“Please don’t apologize for expressing such love,” I replied, feeling my eyes water up. Miranda’s bewilderment about her love of motherhood had ever so slightly loosened my grip on finding peace with not having children. 

“Yeah, it’s heavy,” she said. “I just appreciate talking to you about it so much.”

I thanked her for sharing so openly with me.

“It should happen more. It should just be a normal thing . . . but maybe your book will start it!”

I’m still beaming at the thought of this.

This story is an excerpt from the forthcoming book Carry Me: Stories of Pregnancy Loss by Frieda Hoffman (She Writes Press, June 2022).