The other side of a miscarriage

[aveal]

I figure I should post again about the miscarriage... though really I feel pretty ok emotionally on that front. I have a lot of supportive people around me (especially Werner of course), but I rather quickly got to the place where I moved on. I'm almost feeling a bit guilty for being too "casual" about it at this point. Someone will ask sympathetically "how are you doing," and I feel weird about cheerfully saying "really good actually." I guess I'm still quite scared about how a future pregnancy will go. But I also am deep down optimistic that we will, indeed, have another child. I see this last pregnancy as just not meant to be... and not so much that I had a child who "died," and who I am mourning. Maybe I just have the viewpoint that in the grand scheme of things there are layers of tragedy. Having a stillborn, or having felt a baby move and heard the heartbeat and then know that the life you felt and heard has died inside you would be - for me - infinitely more tragic than my own experience. My ovum could not develop, chromosonally. It could not develop a heartbeat and it had less of a potential for life than the monthly cycles where I prevent pregnancy from ever occurring. I guess that is why I'm not really mourning a lost "baby." I was pretty upset over not being pregnant, and going through the physical trauma of the miscarriage was really awful at times - but I'm feeling totally healthy again (actually, I'm using the fact that I'm not pregnant to get a bunch of heavy lifting done), and optimistic that next time around will be different. It also helped that when I contacted my homeschooling community (made up of, well, a ton of women who have been pregnant), that quite a few of them had had this same type of miscarriage and went on to have healthy children. Between their anecdotes, net research, and the words of my doctor, I'm left feeling relatively optimistic and emotionally as ok as I could be at this stage of things.

And of course it helped immensely that I received so many kinds words and thoughts and offers of support. Thank you EVERYBODY - if I got back to you or not. It helped more than you could know just to receive a caring word in those first few days... even if I didn't feel up to talking about things much back then. And now that I've had time to process stuff, I just wanted to let you all know that I'm doing ok.