The bleeding lasted longer than I expected, longer than I cared to be reminded.
After my miscarriage, I would characterize the postpartum “care” I got as awful, except that a more accurate way to describe it would’ve been almost nonexistent.
Over weeks of uncomfortable bleeding, I spoke with only one doctor, a male doc who happened to be on call one night about two days into the miscarriage. “It feels like my uterus is on fire,” I told him, fighting back tears of pain, grief, and disbelief. He flatly responded “Yes, that’s what a miscarriage feels like.” Like he would know.
The nurses on the phone were nice enough, and the phlebotomists who drew my blood over and over were just doing their job, all helping to confirm that my HCG levels returned to where they should be for someone who was no longer pregnant. “Wait at least 3 months before trying to get pregnant again,” they told me, and sent me on my way.
On my way I went, researching and reading, crying and praying, grasping at anything that might help make some sense of it. When the bleeding finally stopped, I was left feeling hollow. Why had this happened? Was it something I did? Something my husband did? Something we didn’t do? Why had my body abandoned me and our sweet little babe? The sad truth is that miscarriages are common, occurring in about 1 in 4 pregnancies. Unless you have 3 or more, your doctors will likely tell you to wait and try again. Shoo, shoo. Better luck next time.
A scientist at heart, I couldn’t help but wonder, how long will we have to wait, when will my menstrual cycle return? Will I be able to conceive again? And so I returned to my cycle awareness practice, because despite years of doctoral level study, despite a chiropractic career specializing in women’s health, learning and implementing the fertility awareness method in my late twenties was when I finally felt in tune with my body and its natural rhythms.
I began again to diligently check for cervical mucus daily, every time I went to the bathroom, the way I had been for the years since the birth of our son. For a while, I had little to note on my charting app each night before bed. My body seemed to be resting, waiting, almost contemplating.
And then one day, in all her glory, my cervix began producing clear, stretchy, egg-white quality mucus, the kind indicating that my body was about to ovulate. As I sat there on the toilet, blissful, grateful tears streamed down my cheeks. I couldn’t help but feel like that little message on the toilet paper, that bit if cervical fluid, was a love note from my body.
In that drop of cervical fluid was everything that is means to be a womban, the wisdom of my grandmothers and all the generations before, the circle of birth and life and death, the wild, untamed feminine, Ixchel, the Maya goddess of midwifery and fertility, the cyclical nature of womanhood, the hurt and pain and power of women worldwide, the primal human desire to reproduce, my future daughter… all swirling, twirling, laughing, beating, dancing, all culminating in a gentle little whisper in my ear: “Here she is again… ah yes, here she is again.”
Emotionally, my husband and I would not be ready to conceive a baby for 6 months following that day. But physically, my body was ready. And If she had it in her to keep going, maybe I did too. That little love note didn’t magically erase my grief, but it gave me the courage, the confidence and the resilience to trust that it would get easier. Slowly, it did. Ah yes, here she is again. Ah yes, here I am again.
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