Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
A few weeks post-miscarriage, and I have questions. Questions like:
What should my body be doing now?
Is it okay that I’m still bleeding?
Is it normal that I don’t want sex?
Can I trust this process to play out, or should I be “doing” something involving doctors or machines or any of the other things I’ve been avoiding thus far?
I text my home birth midwife about the bleeding - not about the sex thing - and she says it might be an idea to get a sonogram at some point, just to check if everything that needs to come out is out.
I have some feelings come up about that. Mainly because me and my lady parts have never had an experience we particularly liked at a hospital and this process feels in need of so much subtlety and LOVE, that I don’t think I could bare it if some person running on caffeine and adrenaline was to touch me or talk to me in a manner that felt anything less than motherly.
So instead I heed the advice of my friend Jen and I take a long, hot bath; the kind that you’re not allowed to take when you’re pregnant. I fill it with Epsom salts and lavender oil and then I wallow for ages. An hour or so later I feel pain and I pass a large, hard piece of something that could be more placenta but could also just be dried blood and bits of tissue. The throbbing pain I’ve been having when I move goes away completely.
After that, the main lingering question is the one about sex. Actually, it’s less of a question and more of a guilty feeling because “I’m not giving him what he needs”. I use the quotation marks because, of course, this is a story I am telling myself, not one that has come from his mouth.
So I do a crazy thing. I talk to him. His response is perfect - empathetic, simple, soothing - and I am left with the knowledge that only I can create suffering in my life. Yeah, me and my crazy story-ridden mind, we love to create crazy. It’s what we do best.