The Club

Once you join the miscarriage club, you discover a common underworld with it's own redundant set of cliched yet powerful emotional experience. Until/unless it happens to you, you'd be hard pressed to know just how well-worn the pregnancy loss path is, or to understand the strange disembodied grieving that comes along with it. Depending on where you get your statistic, anywhere between twenty and fifty percent of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. (The fifty percent figure includes pregnancies that abort themselves so early that many women never knew that they were pregnant in the first place.)

And it's not just the miscarriers' club you've joined, but everyone who quietly (or loudly) wants a child (or another child) but doesn't have one, whether the problem is physical (infertility or other health issues), social (no willing partner, for instance), or simply financial (and I see these grieving women in the clinic all the time - those who would welcome a baby but just can't reconcile the stress their existing families would have to bear in order to support it).

With the holidays approaching, I find myself thinking that though we "members" have plenty of goodness in our lives, and though this goodness will claim a great deal of our focus in the coming weeks, there's a hollow sadness we might be bracing ourselves against sinking into. It happens in quiet moments, when we find ourselves feeling too alone. Let's just keep in mind that we're not alone in even that loneliest empty-womb feeling, and add each other to our list of things to be thankful for.

Cheers.