Water babies

Going public with my miscarriage has been a surprisingly supportive and cathartic process. My husband and I decided to send the miscarriage news via email because we didn't want to end up in an awkward social situation should someone asked us how the pregnancy was going.

This "who do you tell" decision felt very similar to the decision I made about who to share my fertility issues with. Initially, I didn't want to tell anyone. I felt ashamed, and frustrated that I could not be successful at this in the same way that I was in my career, interests, etc. Then, I told a couple friends who asked me how "it" was going. The support and information they gave me was tremendous. I learned about acupuncture, heard stories about IVF, and I found out who among my friends I could talk to who had had similar experiences. Prior to that, I only knew two of my friends had had fertility treatment. This was only a fraction.

I ended up getting pregnant at the end of January right before starting fertility treatment. I didn't believe it so I ended up taking eight pregnancy tests. I'll save that story for another blog posting. Suffice to say that the sense of normalcy and shared experience helped me last fall and winter.

With my miscarriage, statistics give some comfort - 20% or greater chance of miscarriage in the first trimester, usually due to genetic issues. But, the stories are what have made me feel normal. I have been surprised at the number of my friends who responded to my email to say they had had a miscarriage, sometimes multiple. And they have beautiful children now.

One of my college girlfriends told me about water babies, unborn or not fully formed humans. In Japan, there are temples devoted to Mizuko kuyo, rituals for water babies. Zen master and teacher Robert Aitken writes, "[The water baby is] given a posthumous Buddhist name, and thus identified as an individual, however incomplete, to whom we can say farewell. With this ceremony, the woman is in touch with life and death as they pass through her existence, and she finds that such basic changes are relative waves on the great ocean of true nature which is not born and does not pass away."

We already had an in utero name for our bump. Ben named it Tex. Good-bye, Tex. I imagine Tex is surfing.