My wife and I have nine children, but if you meet us, we’ll only say we have five. That’s because we’ve only ever named five—the five we’ve met, the five who took breaths, the five we brought home. Four of our children died by “miscarriage.”
Medically speaking, miscarriage is the spontaneous loss of a pregnancy within the first 20 weeks of gestation; it is the death of a baby in the womb. As with most suffering, I did not expect to experience it personally; it happened to other people. I certainly never considered it from the father’s perspective. Miscarriage seemed to be—before it happened to us—solely a woman’s experience, a mother’s sorrow. Now I know differently. Moms hurt, and dads hurt too.
My Memoir of Miscarriage
I don’t share my experience with miscarriage as definitive, as though I speak for every father. Each person’s experience with miscarriage is unique. This is mine. I share it with two hopes: First, to free other fathers to speak, to grieve, and to heal. Second, to help miscarrying mothers begin to understand and know how to relate to their partners in the midst of this painful loss.
In my experience, I encountered four little foxes in the vineyard of grief, unwelcome pests that gnawed on the vine of sorrow so that it would not blossom and bear good fruit.
This is my story.
Full Series Links: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6
This series originally published as a post at Risen Motherhood.
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