Missed Miscarriage Quotes

I am not simply missing one child who never grew, but two of them. I always know how old they'd be. What I do not know is who I might have been, had I become their mother.

I didn't feel anything at first when Miss Ethel told me, but now I think about it all the time. It's like there's a baby girl down here waiting to be born. She's somewhere close by in the air, in this house, and she picked me to be born to. And now she has to find some other mother." Cee began to sob. "Come on girl. Don't cry," whispered Frank. "Why not? I can be miserable if I want to. You don't need to try and make it go away. It shouldn't go away. It's just as sad as it ought to be and I'm not going to hide from what's true just because it hurts.

They were told that couples facing infertility should grieve the loss of biological children, the hopes raised and disappointed cycle after cycle, before they moved forward with adoption. For them, though, spending years or even months in mourning didn’t feel right. The miscarriage had been devastating, but they had already resigned themselves to the fact that biological children might not be in their future. If adoption was God’s plan for them, she said, she didn’t mind missing out on the experiences of pregnancy and birth. She joked, when she was ready to joke about it, that if someone else did all that work instead, it would be okay with her. They both just wanted a baby. If they were lucky enough to be able to adopt, they would never dwell on things they had been denied.

Aunty Kavita had told me once that my mother had wanted more children, but that she'd stopped trying after several miscarriages. I couldn't imagine what she'd gone through—how much of my mother's life I missed because I was a child—but I wondered if that was what changed her.

A year later, there is another miscarriage, another lost boy, and then an operation, and Rachel is in a muddle. Another missed carriage, she hears, conjuring a vision of Mama in a typical dash from the house, hurrying for trains to other cities where she will conduct music and choirs. Rachel sees Katya on a railway platform, suitcase and baton box in hand, but Mama is too late, the train hurtles by, screaming through the arches, a great train of missed carriages. Rachel's night-time wish is granted then, that though Katya has left her once again, she must return home as quickly. She has missed her carriage. 'Mama,' Rachel whispers into the night bedroom air, 'Mama, hurry home!

I got up and turned off the coffee machine, pouring the last of the brew into my cup. I sat back down and sipped it, wondering why I bothered; there was no reason for me to be awake and alert. I had all the leisure time a man could want—I was suspended from work, and being stalked by somebody who thought he was turning himself into me. And if he somehow missed me, I was still under investigation for a murder I hadn’t committed. Considering how many I had gotten away with, that was probably very ironic. I tried a hollow, mocking laugh at myself, but it sounded too spooky in the sudden silence of the empty house. So I slurped coffee and concentrated on self-pity for a while. It came surprisingly easily; I really was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, and it was a simple matter for me to feel wounded, martyred, betrayed by the very system I had served so long and well. Luckily, my native wit trickled back in before I began to sing country songs, and I turned my thoughts toward finding a way out of my predicament. But in spite of the fact that I finished the coffee—my third cup of the morning, too—I couldn’t seem to kick my brain out of the glutinous sludge of misery it had fallen into. I was reasonably sure that Hood could not find anything and make it stick to me; there was nothing there to find. But I also knew that he was very anxious to solve Camilla’s murder—both so that he would look good to the department and the press and, just as importantly, so he could make Deborah look bad. And if I added in the uncomfortable fact that he was obviously aided and abetted by Sergeant Doakes and his toxic tunnel vision, I had to conclude that the outlook was far from rosy. I didn’t really believe they would manufacture evidence merely in order to frame me, but on the other hand—why wouldn’t they? It had happened before, even with an investigating officer who had a whole lot less on the line. The

They certainly meant to have more of us. There’s four years between me and Riona, six between Riona and Nessa. Those gaps contain seven failed pregnancies, each ending in miscarriage or stillbirth. The weight of all those missing children lays on my shoulders. I’m the eldest and the only son. The work of the Griffin men can only be done by me. I’m the one to carry on our name and legacy.

A friend tells me that the experiences we have in other countries are untranslatable. I think this also applies to miscarriage. It is hard to describe what it’s like to lose someone I never saw outside of my body, never held, never grew to know or love, but whom I felt intimately attached to and who was already connected to my husband and son. As a Korean adoptee, raised in a white family, I longed to have babies that were related to me. I could only imagine what it would be like to finally look at another person’s face and see myself reflected back. When I miscarried, I experienced yet another loss of a person who was a part of me. It is challenging to articulate and impossible to find words in any language to describe what it’s like to long for a family that was supposed to be, when I am grateful for and fiercely love the family I have. It is the incompleteness that I struggle with. It is missing someone I never knew, but whom I wanted desperately to be a part of my life.

I have been through all the stages of grief multiple times. Sometimes I have been angry at God. Why me? Why us? I would be a great mother — why have I not been given the chance? Through prayer, my answer from God seems to be, “Why not you?” This is not heaven. If it were, there would be no sin, sadness, or grief. Everyone’s children would be happy and healthy. But I feel like God has placed this burden on us so that we can gain compassion and longing for eternal life. Before these losses, I thought of heaven as a far-off place in distance and time, but now I find myself drawn to heaven — not only because of my own children, but all the children not missed as much as mine.

A pregnancy that ended before it could truly begin. A missed period that turned into an ellipsis of a promise, then an interrupted dash.