Whoever you are, you know what love is; You love either your parent, sibling, friend or spouse. The depth of it is different for different relationships. You are aware of it too, how you ration your love. But, when you get pregnant you find that love has another dimension, the kind that cannot be rationed, something beyond the threshold that has been masquerading as love, you find their is an entire palace of it to explore.

I found out I was pregnant during June 2019. One day I was myself and the next day I was a host. One day, I was in life with abandon and the next day I was carefully cautious. Pregnancy does that to you. You feel so much joy and start constantly planning ways to nourish your unborn. You become a planner, someone else’s secretary who will make an appearance in 9 months.

I was pregnant and I was naively shocked as I did not expect to get pregnant so soon. We had just started trying. When I saw the result on the pregnancy test the first emotion I felt was anxiety. Anxious of all the constraints and lifestyle changes that a child would bring. I found my second emotion couple of seconds later: Joy.

I told Ram I was pregnant immediately. He was waiting outside the bathroom. We had brought the pregnancy test as a joke; I opened the door to tell him the joke was on us. Its January 2021 as I write this blog. It took me over an year and a half for me to pen these thoughts. I was not ready for this disquisition of my pain. On August 5th, 2019 I became part of a sisterhood that is almost entirely silent. I miscarried.

When the pregnancy test was positive, I got it confirmed with my primary care doctor. I ran down the stairs to tell Ram that now we can be sure. He was sweeping our basement floor. I told him the news and he continued to sweep. The thing about Ram is everything is a delayed reaction. By the time he come to hug me I was busy yelling at him for not reacting immediately. In any case, we again found joy quickly. We celebrated by buying each other gifts and an elaborate dinner. I took the saying eating for two very seriously.  We were ready for every bout of nausea, round ligament pain, cramps, cravings, backpain etc.

The first person that I told was pregnant told me not be too happy as it could be a chemical pregnancy. Soon enough her words were prophetic. I wonder what makes people pinch someone else’s joy. I started spotting blood in the weeks to come. Initially we had normalized it after googling and speaking to friends. What we read and heard told us, that this is normal for first pregnancy. When I started seeing chunks of what looked like clots in my discharge accompanied by stomach cramps, we could not comfort each other anymore to not worry. We called a few ob-gyns and but could not get an appointment. By this time Ram and I were in a raging panic having googled ob-gyns in the area and finding none of them had availability. We finally found one ob-gyn who would see us that afternoon in another city 45 mins from us.  

Ram and I had been having parental conversations. Excitedly guessing sex of the baby, wondering what the baby will look like, who the baby be like personality-wise etc. We had taken tender steps towards loving the fetus. With hope, Ram and I left to see the doctor on August 5th. It was incidentally Ram’s birthday and proved to be the longest day of our lives. After an excruciatingly painful day both physically and mentally, it was confirmed that I am miscarrying.

I was in a lot of pain, every bump Ram hit on the car ride back home was excruciating. Ram who bottles up every emotion was in a state of complete misery. How do we reconcile from this event? How do we move on? Ram was so disenchanted he gave up faith. I went inwards and did not break my silence. Either I cried or I was quiet. We had not told family of my pregnancy, wanting to reveal it as a big surprise. Now we absolutely did not want to reveal the miscarriage. This failure will squarely fall on my shoulders from everyone’s analysis of why this happened. Pre-pregnancy, I had to field many comments and suggestions of getting myself checked as I could have weak uterus or consider undergoing fertility treatment or have some herbal concoction to help my body etc. The idea of a planned baby was alien to many in our families. If we were not having a child, it was because of my body seemed to be stamped in some people’s minds. I was not prepared to deal with anybody’s real or supposed concern about my miscarriage. We chose not to tell anyone initially at least.

We decided to talk to some friends for moral support. One friend told me I should be glad in a way that I lost the baby so early as opposed to losing the baby like her friend had at 8 months. Because in her opinion that would have been infinitely more painful. She probably had a point but this was not a welcomed consolation for a grieving mother. From the time we saw that the pregnancy test was positive, I was a mother and Ram was father for few precious weeks. So I did not feel glad in anyway. I could not put my pain in perspective to someone else’s pain and take comfort from it. After this consolation I walled myself off and went inward.

Ram had to deal with his pain and take care of mine. I needed help to heal physically. I don’t know how he was able to hear my cries of pain as I was expelling with violence the remnants of our child from my body. The entire process took nearly two weeks. As women, we are not even given the blessing of quickness through this process.

              My body took two months to heal. It took longer for us to be happy. We postponed trying again for a few months. With ferocity I spent obsessing over all my activities during pregnancy, wondering which was detrimental. When I kept pressing my doctor for diagnosis on what could have caused this, he sighed and said about 50% of the time first pregnancies ends in miscarriages. The number surprised the hell out of me. When eventually I did talk to women about my experience almost everyone confided that they have been through a miscarriage too and found it hard to cope with it mentally after. Its not that these women did not have support, but they were missing the right kind of emotional support.

Ram and I had between us a palpable fear that we realized will never go away. It will stay with us through every future pregnancy and beyond. A thorn pricking us through every feeling of happiness. A fear that constantly humbles us.

 Now I am a mother a second time, as I lose myself to the never-ending routine of feeding, comforting and diapering, I still think of my first pregnancy and if it were to have seen full term, I would have had a talking toddler now. My daughter who is napping now, will never quite know how fearfully she was made.