‘I Became a Mother, Even Though I Lost My Child’

By: Sara*

I carried her for 6 1/2 months. I felt her move. I knew her personality, her fierce presence. Last August, at 25 weeks and 5 days, I lost my baby.

After the loss, my mind and spirit were tender. That’s the only word for it — tender, like bruised fruit, like something that couldn’t take much more weight.

During that time, well-meaning people sent me articles about pregnancy loss. Many didn’t hit the mark at all, sometimes almost comically so, but it is evident they were all written and shared with care. I didn’t want to hear how common what I went through was because it felt uniquely painful, but I also didn’t want to feel totally alone. I didn’t want to hear a single “at least”: At least you can get pregnant, at least you can try again, at least it wasn’t post-birth, at least you were in a pro-choice state, at least …

So many of the words I read operated like catalogs of trauma: excruciating detail about what went wrong, clinical accounts of procedures, comprehensive lists of everything that can go wrong, and sometimes even perversions of the loss into an optimism or hopefulness that I wasn’t ready for. When my mind was that tender, these accounts didn’t comfort me. They just expanded my catalog of fears. Oh shit, I’d think. I didn’t even know I needed to worry about that. Now I’m not just sad for myself, I’m sad for this stranger too, and I’m terrified of things I hadn’t even imagined yet.

Statistics that point to low likelihood matter little when you find yourself inside the statistic.

My husband Simon didn’t have what I had — couldn’t have it. He experienced the loss deeply but he didn’t experience her the way I did. That makes me the sole keeper of who she was. And that’s incredibly lonely.

I want people to acknowledge that she was real, that she had an energy, that she mattered. But I also feel protective of what I know about her, of the private knowledge that lives only in me. There’s a tension between wanting recognition and wanting to guard something precious that no one else can fully understand. Most of what I know about her stays with me.

That isolation makes it tempting to gaslight myself at times. For all anyone else knows, how much of what I felt was real? I go about my day now, momentarily forgetting, just to remember when no one around me does — or can — the way I do.

During pregnancy, I did the spiritual work of becoming a mother. I wrestled with my identity shifting from daughter to mother. I made peace with it. I stepped into it. The internal transformation was deeply in progress but not yet complete. Then I lost her, and now I exist in this strange space where the internal work began but the external reality doesn’t match. I am a mother. I carried a daughter. I loved her, knew her, felt her presence. And I’m not holding my child. No physical evidence of the transformation that absolutely occurred.

It’s disorienting. Like beginning a metamorphosis and then being told, the jig’s up and you’re still a caterpillar. No. I changed. The change was real but I’m the only one who knows it, the only one who carries the proof.

The loss lives differently in my body than in Simon’s. My body changed. My body remembers in ways his can’t. And now my body is also the site of what comes next — the healing, the “trying again.” It holds both the trauma of what happened and the potential hope of what might be possible.

The biggest lesson of this experience wasn’t about grief stages or unfairness. It was about faith. Not the kind of faith that demands understanding or explanation. Faith that accepts a reality you cannot comprehend because you’re part of something immeasurably larger than yourself.

What I’m talking about comes from a Jewish lens, from Kabbalah, from a way of understanding existence that looks beyond just the material. It says: There are things happening here that you’re not meant to understand. That’s not a failing. Understanding isn’t the goal. The goal is to make peace with mystery, to accept that you’re held within something vast, and that not comprehending doesn’t mean not trusting.

It’s the metaphysical ground underneath the feelings. It’s what allows me to hold both devastation and peace, sometimes simultaneously.

I never told my coworkers I was pregnant. I was nervous about my career trajectory. I was good at hiding my bump and I kept deciding I’d say something later, when I had to. Then I lost her, and there was nothing to announce and nothing to correct.

After a few months away, I returned to a work environment with this big, awful secret and stepped back into a “normal” I had spiritually outgrown. I refer to my “medical leave” from time to time, careful not to call it a maternity leave or bereavement leave — both of which it absolutely was. I’ve gotten good at the phrase. It’s vague enough to be true and flat enough that nobody follows up.

The protection I bought worked exactly as designed, which is its own strange grief. Some days I sit in a room where the biggest thing that has ever happened to me is not in the room at all.

I have a friend whose work colleagues threw her a baby shower before she lost her child at 26 weeks. Our pain in these settings are mirror opposites of each other. No one brings up her loss, tiptoeing around a glaring wound and no one brings up mine because to them it doesn’t exist.

In different contexts, I have also observed others’ discomfort with my pain, as they have asked invasive questions while performing a mental calculus — asking how they got her out of me, if I did anything that might have caused the loss, if I was sure she wouldn’t make it — not-so-subtly wondering if it could happen to them. From this experience I’ve learned there really are very few questions about the loss itself that would ever make someone feel supported.

I had two friends that nailed it: one who prayed with me every day, and one who never made me feel like my rage, despair or bafflement were unjustified. Both friends made me feel less alone.

In the early days, Simon was eager to move forward in ways that sometimes felt grounding and sometimes felt at odds with where I was. He didn’t feel her kicks. He doesn’t carry the physical memory muddled up with the spiritual. That doesn’t mean his grief is less — it’s just different.

While we were in the thick of this murky, heavy season, Simon came up with a concept: concentric circles. The center of hurt was shared, but proximity to the experience was layered. He and I both experienced the loss of our daughter, the excruciating doctor visits and swirling questions, but only I had the aches of postpartum in my body, clutching my chest on a plane full of screaming babies, attempting to will my milk not to come in. She and I were at the center. He was as close as could possibly be next, but still not exactly there. My mom was next, with the indescribable, immeasurable pain of watching your child writhe through an existential loss. And on it goes.

This framing helped us honor that we had to leave space for the other and our own natural process. It allowed us to listen when we couldn’t relate to the things the other was saying, to witness the pain, anger and exhaustion as the experience of someone you love dearly rather than comparing notes or breeding division by demanding “why don’t you feel how I do?”

Many articles describe the jealousy people feel after loss — the inability to attend baby showers, the heart-sink at pregnancy announcements, the bitter resentment.

I don’t experience it that way. More babies in the world is a good thing and I’m genuinely happy for people who are pregnant or becoming parents. I know jealousy is real for many people, and I have compassion for that. But it’s not my experience, and maybe there’s value in saying that too.

When someone says, “I get it, I’ve had a miscarriage,” part of me bristles — that’s not the same as losing your baby at six and a half months. But I also heard the generous spirit behind it. People are trying to build bridges with their own pain. That’s okay, even when the comparison doesn’t quite land.

What actually disturbs me is parallelism.

When a friend tells me she’s pregnant, I’m excited for her. But when she talks about planning maternity leave at four months in, and I remember planning mine at four months, something in me recoils. It’s not jealousy. It’s the echo. It’s walking the same path I walked and knowing what I know now. Attending a baby shower is not something I’ll do, not because I envy the spirit of it, but because I’m deeply fearful that it could wrongly assume a happy ending.

How do you move through the world not jaded by your experience, but also not naively unaware? How do you let people have their innocent joy when you’ve lost yours?

People don’t know how to talk about late-term loss. It’s different from early miscarriage, different from losing a baby at birth. It occupies this uncomfortable middle space that people struggle to name. And it’s bizarre when people sometimes absent-mindedly forget you were pregnant — that even without a baby, you’re still postpartum.

So they say things, sometimes insensitive things, even when they mean well. And I’m left trying to navigate my own reaction: the anger at the words, the understanding of the spirit behind them, the exhaustion of having to manage other people’s discomfort on top of my own grief.

I’ve had so many internal debates about what to say when someone asks “Do you have any children?”. I dread that one day, hopefully pregnant again, someone will ask “First one?”.

I want to rage that I gained 15 pounds “for no reason” while also being so grateful that my body grew her and shifted in preparation for a different outcome. I feel betrayed when my body goes “back to normal” like nothing ever happened. I’m grateful to be healthy and to have the opportunity to carry a child again, which was not presumed at the time, and should never be taken for granted. And I’m devastated by the language of “trying,” as if the first “attempt” just “failed.”

Then I remember I wouldn’t be any less ecstatic for a second living baby, and I am comforted.

Hoping for the future feels different now. I’m not naive anymore. I know what can happen. I know what the body is capable of doing and yet what can still happen. The fear of future loss is real — the terrifying possibility of going through this or some other anguish again.

It takes courage to stay open to possibility when you know how badly things can go wrong. To want something so much while knowing you might lose it. To let yourself hope when hope has already been shattered once. To surrender to what you cannot know.

*Last name withheld at writer’s request.