After my D&C, when I lay shivering in the hospital bed, my doctor placed her hand like a prayer against my shoulder. A question swirled behind her green eyes for a long while, and, finally, she asked if I thought the miscarriage was so devastating because I was experiencing it alone.
When I thought about it later, when I wasn’t groggy from anesthesia and sleepless nights, I wondered if she asked because she didn’t think that a twenty-nine-year-old should have been pursuing donor insemination anyway, and our tearful conversations served as evidence. Or perhaps she asked because my reaction seemed to her unusually extreme compared to her other patients. At the time, the gesture struck me as odd and intimate, a metaphor for our relationship as a whole.
I don’t remember if I actually answered her, but my gut reaction was to say “no.” I assumed any woman who lost a child must have been devastated, must have spent her nights, as I did, crying and smashing glass on the porch. I imagined that even for a woman with a partner to hold her hand, the partner only experienced the loss as a hypothetical idea, a future cut short, where for the woman undergoing miscarriage, it was a physical reality. In that, I was certain I wasn’t alone.
I’ll never know what it’s like going through fertility treatment and pregnancy loss as a partnered person. I decided in my late twenties to become a single mom, and now, in my mid-thirties, I’ve made the decision to try for a second child. I imagine, as with single parenting, that there are ways in which going through fertility treatment solo is easier than it is with a partner, as I don’t have someone else’s feelings to grapple with, and there is no partnership to be damaged by the stress of the process, as I hear so many couples discuss.
But now, undergoing fertility treatment once again, I think about my doctor’s question and confess that in that moment and in the long weeks that followed—weeks of bleeding and autoimmune testing and nightmares and smashing glass on the porch—that I have never in my life felt as alone as I did then. I held on to my doctor’s voice like a life raft. We had created a child together, and now he was gone.
Yet even in those long weeks, I never wished for a spouse. I wished only for someone to talk to, someone who really understood. My one friend who had also lost a baby stopped speaking to me. My other friends, friends who hadn’t yet tried to become pregnant, had nothing to offer but glasses of wine and platitudes. Fellow single women trying to conceive didn’t want to hear such discouraging outcomes, and the books I read on pregnancy loss were couple-centered. I simply didn’t fit.
Now, living my quiet double life, where I teach and raise my daughter and secretly travel an hour to undergo treatment, I once again feel largely alone in this process. Other than the handful of friends who know “the secret plan” of trying to conceive a second child, I manage the ins and outs of treatment mostly alone. I write a lot—in my journal, on a blog—and try to forge connections with women who understand.
Single or coupled, we are all alone in our bodies, and that fact is never more apparent than it is in fertility treatment. If I had a husband, he might hold me as I cry in the wake of bad news. Perhaps he would feel the loss as poignantly as I did. But tonight, alone, I can be selfish in my grief. Tonight, after yet another negative test, I will put my daughter to bed, I will drink wine and order pizza and watch too much TV. I will cry. I will wallow. I will be in my body, in sorrow. And one day, if I do manage to conceive again, I will be a single mother of two. I will, I’m sure, be lonely at times. But I suspect that I won’t feel so alone.