My Ghost Pregnancy

I had a massage appointment yesterday, the first one with this practitioner since my loss in July, though I did have a massage after my m/c just at a spa with a couple friends. I highly recommend getting a massage after you have a miscarriage especially one with some abdominal work, you will probably cry during it but you are crying anyway so why not let it out while you reconnect and take back your body. It really helped to get rid of the pain in my abdomen.

After my appointment my practitioner asked me about my massage. I talked to her about it in great detail, from the physical pain, to the emotional anguish, the heightened physical sensations I experienced and the continued sorrow. I cried and used up quite a few of her tissues. I told her about how most people want miscarriage to be as long as the word is -- over in an instant. But miscarriage as we all have seen is a process and even after your body heals there is a lot of emotional trauma of the experience that needs to be worked through.

I told her about my ghost pregnancy now, the one that has me comparing calendar dates and events to where I would be in my pregnancy, should I have stayed pregnant. I told her how hard it was as I approached the dates around the end of my first trimester, and as August closed and I should have been shopping for maternity clothes.

I also confided that I can stand the thought of seeing my pregnant SIL who is due a week later than I was in February. And how every pregnant belly jumps out at me. Or how I can't really look at babies anymore because it hurts.

I talked about things that people had said or done for me that were helpful, more than half of them were things that women said to me here on the Internet. We talked about how miscarriage is combination of life and demise, birth and death take on new meaning in this process.

She thanked me for sharing with her, and admitted that she had never really known what happened in a miscarriage or that it could take so long. She also asked if there was anything she could do, or that I could do to make sure others in my life knew how I continued to feel. I'm not sure though writing a letter comes to mind. I also feel, though perhaps it isn't fair or nice, that I should share this experience in such a way to make it a tear-jerker, like in the movies where they make you cry. Then I would know that I had gotten through to them and made them hurt too.

Last night I had a dream, I've been having such vivid dreams this whole summer. In this dream I was in a clinic and I was losing a second pregnancy. In the next bed over was a woman who was losing a baby in her second trimester and there was blood everywhere. I remember wrapping my arms around her and crying into her hair and she wailed on my shoulder and I told her how sorry I was. It isn't the kind of dream one can forget about easily. I know that it was triggered in part from talking about my miscarriage in such detail, but it shows me how changed I am in that I had no horror at the blood, only sorrow.