Tucked behind shame and regret, miscarriage is one of the most misrepresented topics in media. It has led to women and men all over the world to cover hide their pain. No one knows how to console, to be consoled in that horrific tragedy. Family members sit quietly in the wings, appearing callused because they don't know how much grief they are allowed or what to say.
I have suffered this tragedy twice. Still, I find myself at a total loss for words to properly display my sadness for others when it happens to them. Ultimately, my grief and their grief aren't the same. Just as my grief and my fiance's grief aren't the same.
Last night, we sat on our bed, drinking some generic cola and settling in to watch Away We Go, our limbs settled comfortably beside each other's. In case you haven't seen it (which you really should...always. It's a great movie), it's a movie about a couple in their early thirties who are pregnant and lacking in funds. They attempt to find a decent support system and are met with parents who have varied ways of raising their children. It's an interesting sneak preview into parenthood for our couple.
I knew most of this going into it. My fiance turned to me and said, "if this movie gets to be too much, we can turn it off." I smiled, making him promise me that the baby would be fine. It's a weird thing because I feel like I have to make everyone promise me that before watching anything involving pregnancy. Even in comedies, I find myself holding my breath before I hear that first sweet cry of a child having come into the world. Every time, my heart both soars and sinks in that heaving, teary breath. Soaring because I couldn't imagine a new mother losing her child like that.Sinking because I had never even gotten that far. He took my hand and promised.
One of the couples in the film were wonderful and relatable, adopting several children. They go out drinking (obviously, Maya Rudolph's character does not drink) and end up at a place having an amature strip night. Melanie Lynskey’s character seems haunted as she asks her old friend about how her pregnancy was and if she was having any complications. Of course, the pregnancy has been fine. Melanie’s character talks of how wonderful it was, but stops quickly to take a drink. I found myself not wanting to know what I already knew, having felt the same thing. As I am in my early twenties, I find more and more of my friends and acquaintances carrying to term and raising a family. It’s a strange feeling, soaring and sinking.
Suddenly, we found each other's hands, the tone just too solemn to keep the airy feeling of the rest of the film. Tears in his eyes, Chris Messina's character explains,"she had another miscarriage." He watches his saddened, drunk wife swing around a pole, clothing still on. "This is her fifth. I know she loves all those kids like, like they were her own blood. But, I wonder if we’ve been selfish. People like us we wait till our thirties and then we’re surprised when the babies aren’t so easy to make anymore and then every day another million fourteen year olds get pregnant without trying. It’s a terrible feeling, this helpless, man. You just watch these babies grow and then fade. You don’t know if you’re supposed to name them, or bury them, or… I’m sorry."
We gripped each other's hands harder, my fiance blinking back tears he has had since we had found out…
He tilted his head to look at me, "this is the first time someone has made me feel like i'm allowed to feel like this.” And I knew that. Because when it had happened, I was strung out on painkillers, sitting on the couch and watching Tangled...over and over and over again. And everyone hung around me and held onto me and told me that it just wasn’t meant to be yet (worst thing you could ever say to someone grieving over a miscarriage, by the way). While he was going through one of the worst times in his life, however, he had to be my provider, my protector, and my proxy for the real world which I no longer felt a part of. Everyone wants to console the woman because she is more fragile, it’s more physical. But the men have it just as bad, only in a different way. They have forms to sign, bills to pay, and a drugged up woman sobbing on their couch at two thirty in the afternoon because it’s snowing and the baby birds in the tree might not be safe.
I really wish Away We Go had been my first media experience with miscarriage. I really do. Because, and I’m going to name a name here, ABC’s of Death was seriously (excuse the swearing) fucked in their logic. I titled this post the same as the title in said movie because I feel like I need a redo. A woman looks in a toilet, tries to flush it, gets a plunger, and we are left with a full screen view of blood and tissue before the title pans over. This is what I mean about misrepresentation of an incredibly traumatic issue and I think Ti West is beyond warped. Albeit, the rest of the movie is almost just as bad. I’m not going to talk about that flaming box of unintelligible, sullied mass.
In Up!, we were surprised by the sadness of the first five minutes of the movie. We shouldn’t have been, Pixar gets realer than almost any movie company out there. Again, there’s something strange about what you take from movies before and after experiencing a miscarriage. Beforehand, you are more upset at the death of Ellie than the allusion to miscarriage. Afterward, you are crying long before Ellie’s death. And for those of you who will try and argue with me about whether or not she did have a miscarriage, think back to the room they painted, the cradle they bought. You don’t do that when you are trying to conceive. I’d like to add that all of our friends think we are Carl and Ellie.
Moreover, however, there is a strict taboo on the issue, leaving it to a monologue or set to depressing music. It seems as though no one is willing to talk about their experiences. People live with this sadness, terrified that someone will tell them it was somehow their fault, that they weren’t somehow good enough at their basic primal functions, women at carrying, men at protecting. I feel, though, that if an open line of communication is established on the subject, it might not be such a lonely experience.
