When I was a little girl playing “pretend,” I would stuff a pillow into my dress, put on my mother’s lipstick, my “Shabbos shoes,” and a purse on my shoulder. I’d push my baby doll in a stroller and give her one of those bottles that made the liquid “milk” or “orange juice” (don’t ask) disappear when turning it upside down.
I had names for my future children. They were twins named “Jack and Jill” (super original, I know). I was the first to volunteer when a mommy needed a helper. I loved babies and kids. I loved the idea of being a mom with every molecule of my soul. Motherhood was my life’s purpose, and I just couldn’t wait to be old enough to be one.
I had no idea what was actually in store for my journey toward motherhood.
When Infertility Became Recurrent Pregnancy Loss
My fertility challenges began with not being able to get pregnant. I used humor to cope, and during improv class, there was a warmup where we needed to use a word with the same letter of our first name as we introduced ourselves in the circle. I was very close to introducing myself as “Barren Beth,” but I refrained, realizing that was a bit too dark for even the most self-deprecating comedians. I went with “Bodacious Beth” instead and gave a sassy snap along with it.
My history of unexplained infertility for years had unexpectedly turned into a pregnancy at 40. Little did I know at the time that my unbelievable alternate universe, sorcery-level miracle of becoming pregnant would soon become my deepest tragedy. To my heart’s demise, it wouldn’t be the last.
As I reflect back on my experiences with recurrent pregnancy loss, I can now zoom out to see the bigger picture of just how horrific repeated miscarriages truly are—and how layered the impact can be for single moms by choice who can’t just “keep trying” with a partner, older women who can’t afford to lose time and cycles from losses, queer couples and those who are donor-dependent, people whose financial resources are running out, those navigating secondary infertility with young and vulnerable witnesses to these highs and lows, and so many others I hold space for in my heart.
The emotional and physical scars from my repeated pregnancy loss resulted in lifelong trauma that I believe somehow changed me all the way down to the core of my genetic makeup.
This wasn’t supposed to be part of my trajectory. I had suffered enough as I went through two decades of being the onlooker as the teacher, the aunt, the nanny, the child therapist, but never the mother. I was caring for other people’s children with everything I had, getting mistaken for their mother by strangers, having to correct people, and then going home alone. For years. I wished, over and over, for something as ordinary as packing a school lunch or sitting in a carpool lane.
I would break down crying for every pregnancy announcement and then feel incredibly guilty that I couldn’t just “be happy for them.” I was, but I also was grieving because time was going by fast and the distance between me and any hope of finally “belonging” was getting bigger and bigger. I felt more and more like an alien even though this was my planet too. I stopped being able to go to baby showers. I removed myself from social media because I would feel gut-punched by certain posts.
I had survived real loss before. My dad died of cancer when I was 21. My first dog Petunia who was my first ever consistent and secure attachment died suddenly from heart failure. I had developed a particular kind of callousness from those experiences, the hard-earned invincibility of someone who has already lived through her worst fear.
“Come at me,” I thought. “Nothing can faze me at this point.”
Then the universe said, “buckle up, bitch!”
What Recurrent Miscarriage Takes From You
After my first loss, I was mad at God. I was mad at my dad in heaven. I was mad at my body. “What a cruel and sick joke to play on such a vulnerable person,” I kept saying to myself. I was still actively miscarrying when I had to go into work because there are no bereavement days for pregnancy loss. As I masked my devastation because I couldn’t afford to fall apart, my only saving grace was that my father finally got his grandchild from me, but that baby was in his arms up in heaven instead of mine.
The second loss was due on my birthday. I took it as a sign. The third and fourth came and went so fast I could only do the math on the month, not the meaning. There wasn’t time. My losses were happening at five weeks, like clockwork, right at the threshold the baby journal was designed to begin. Eventually I threw it out. It had started collecting dust. The stretch mark oil I bought after my first positive test expired before I ever needed it.
I can remember the exact moment I realized a harsh truth of life. I was looking at my dresser that had my fertility affirmations coloring books and the crystal bracelets I bought for pregnancy and luck. It hit me that I knew this exact feeling. The same way I could study for months, take practice tests, and literally be able to teach a course on the MFT National licensing exam, but that still didn’t save me from failing it twice or from fearing I would never pass. I feared I’d never get licensed and all of my hard work in grad school and supervision would be for nothing. I could put everything possible into getting pregnant and staying pregnant, yet still never become a mom biologically.
Doing everything right does not equal receiving your desired outcome. Effort, sacrifice, and intention are no match for infertility.
At that point, I had 4 losses. Some people didn’t even consider them pregnancies because they ended so early, but to me, I lost four specific futures. I remember every due date. Every one of them came with their own unique pain.
* * *
After each loss I tried to do more. More supplements. More appointments. More research. More hope directed at more targets I could control and at the very least, influence.
I was taking a prenatal, a fertility supplement, multiple egg quality supplements, Mucinex for cervical mucus, baby aspirin, and progesterone. I was doing acupuncture and seeing a chiropractor. I listened to fertility affirmations during acupuncture, had fertility coloring books, a red light therapy belt, a uterus warmer (don’t ask), I changed all my products to be free of certain chemicals and fragrances, I meditated, and I saw an energy healer.
I pushed my doctors for more testing and got dismissed with “it’s your age,” “these things happen,” “just keep trying,” “at least we know you can get pregnant,” until I pushed hard enough that one of them reluctantly agreed to look at my fibroids again. Turns out one was lodged between the muscle and my uterine wall, misshaping my entire cavity.
I was right. They weren’t listening and this went on to become a theme throughout my journey.
Oh, and I also purchased a fertility spell from a witch on Etsy. I’m woo woo and I wasn’t backing down without a fight. I think I had her do it again when it didn’t work the first time. I did some psychic and astrology readings to find out more about my future child and it helped. I was on a relentless search for hope and needed something to hold onto.
That’s what recurrent loss does. It doesn’t make you irrational. It makes you desperate in every direction at once, because when medicine hasn’t worked and your body hasn’t cooperated and everything you were supposed to do hasn’t been enough, you will try anything that feels like agency. Giving up before exhausting every single thing I could think of just wasn’t an option.
You feel like a gullible idiot hoping it’ll all work out, but you hope anyway because it’s all you’ve got.
The IVF Trauma I Wasn’t Prepared For
IVF is supposed to be the part where you’re tested further, closely monitored, and backed by advances in science. My gynecologists said it was the next step in my case after my laparoscopy for fibroid removal.
My experience with IVF after recurrent miscarriage is its own chapter of medical and emotional trauma. My RE was so condescending, negative, and cynical. I wanted to shove the statistics he kept throwing at me right up his ass. His lack of trauma-informed care resulted in me having inconsolable crying, hyperventilating panic attacks in my car after every single appointment.
Two egg retrievals. Eighteen eggs total. Fifteen matured and thawed. Fourteen survived. Ten fertilized. Five became embryos. One was genetically healthy.
One.
She was a girl. I had a private Pinterest board for her. I was going to name her Freya Mauve and her hair was going to be so long and beautiful.
My mom flew up for the transfer (as she did for my laparoscopy and both egg retrievals). I had special socks made with pictures of all my guardian angels on them: my dad, Petunia, my grandparents, my great aunt, my great-grandmothers. I wore a “get in my belly” Fat Bastard shirt. My mom got me an “embaby on board” shirt with a pineapple on it to wear after. I ate the fries. The line was dark. I felt every twinge and pull. I tested over and over before my scheduled bloodwork, watching the line get slightly lighter each time, hoping with everything in me that it didn’t mean what others were saying it meant. My bloodwork showed I was pregnant. And then I wasn’t. I found out through a message on the portal after waiting by the phone all day because they said it would definitely be a phone call no matter what the results were. The message was generic and when the doctor called me 2 days later, his voicemail was generic and pretty dismissive.
“That was my last chance,” I thought to myself as I prepared for a therapy session I couldn’t even allow my brain to picture because acceptance for a life without a biological child felt like a death sentence for me. I imagined I would have to live out my life in never-ending pain, far away from anything or anyone who could be a trigger.
Everyone is different and there’s no right or wrong way to become a family. Adoption, fostering, and donor conception via donor egg or embryo are all so special and valid. It just wasn’t a path I was open to for myself, and that’s also valid.
I had a theory that my body was attacking the embryos due to inflammation after my second loss. My providers all dismissed it. If I’m even able to start over, it would be completely from nothing. I’m now closer to 42, with no embryos, no guarantees, and a provider I didn’t trust.
That is a specific kind of devastation and fear that still haunts me.
Pregnancy Loss PTSD Is Real
Most people you reach out to will not know what to say or how best to support you, because nobody wants to even try on those shoes. The people who have experienced loss or losses distanced themselves from me because it was too triggering now that they were on the other side of things with a child.
So while feeling isolated and traumatized, the PTSD hits. The flashbacks pop up while you’re driving on the highway. The anniversaries pass that you’ve maybe deleted from your phone but can’t delete from your mind. The holidays that were supposed to be due dates, like Rosh Hashanah, or became the date you found out you were going to miscarry, like St. Patrick’s Day, or the Mother’s Day when you got your period as you peed on a pregnancy test because you tried for that cycle.
Then there are the babies. The ones born at the same time your baby would have been. You watched their mothers’ bellies grow as yours didn’t, and now their baby is one. Now their baby is two. Now their baby is three, walking and talking and existing fully in the world, and yours is a due date you still remember and a name you maybe never said out loud to anyone. That’s not something that goes away. That’s something you carry every single time you see that child’s face.
People say things without realizing the potential harm of their words. When Mayer was born and I called him my miracle, someone said “all babies are miracles.” I know they meant it with pure intentions, but it felt just as tone deaf as the people telling me to “just adopt,” “your eggs are shit at your age,” “you want one of my kids? You can have ’em!” They had no idea what it took to get him here, how the multiple losses that preceded him robbed me of any type of peace moving forward, how many versions of this future I had already buried. “All babies are miracles” is something you say when you have never watched hope drain out of a pregnancy test line in real time. When you have never done the math on eighteen eggs down to one genetically healthy embryo down to nothing. When your body has never felt like the place where dreams go to die.
What recurrent loss takes from you, and this is the thing that doesn’t get said enough so I’m saying it again, is the naivety of hope. The innocent version of faith that believes good things happen to good people, that effort is rewarded, that the universe is basically fair.
Once that’s gone, you never get it back. Every pregnancy after, every positive test, every scan, every appointment, you are preparing yourself for the worst. You cannot unknow this type of trauma and loss. You cannot unfeel what your body has experienced through all of this. The trust is broken, not just in medicine, not just in your body, but in something deeper. In the version of the world that was supposed to have things “work out” in the end.
That’s a spiritual loss on top of every other loss. It just lives in you, sometimes loudly and other times quietly, but it’s a part of you now.
Pregnancy After Loss Didn’t Erase What Came Before
I eventually got pregnant with my son at my final attempt possible with IVF. I advocated for myself and did not back down. When they said the extra tests weren’t necessary and wouldn’t make a difference, I did it anyway with a doctor who would. Last retrieval insurance permitted, only five eggs retrieved, four mature, three fertilized and one single embryo.
I didn’t know if the embryo would come back healthy, didn’t know if the embryo would stick, didn’t know if I’d be able to carry him to term. I was hesitant to find out the sex because knowing last time that I lost a daughter was heartbreaking. I was right about the inflammation and discovered other things from the additional testing that I believe led to my son arriving safely in my arms.
His arrival did not undo what came before it.
The trauma didn’t stop, it just morphed. Every call, text, email, portal message and appointment was a negotiation between hope and dread. I was a frightened passenger throughout my entire pregnancy. When his movements slowed, I didn’t think: that’s normal. I thought: here is the ultimate irony that will break me if I got this far only to lose him. The hypervigilance that five losses instilled in me had no idea how to process safety.
It followed me into postpartum and into motherhood itself. The losses didn’t end when he was born. They just show up in new ways.
There is a grief that belongs to the losses and a separate grief for losing the version of yourself who believed that doing everything right would lead to living the life you want. That the universe gives back if you just manifest hard enough. That good things happen to people who wanted them badly enough and worked hard enough and that your entire future doesn’t rely on probability and unexplained chance.
Both of those griefs are real. Both of them deserve space.
If you are somewhere in the middle of it right now, I am not going to tell you it will all work out. I don’t know that. Nobody does. What I know is that the grief follows you not because you are doing something wrong and not because you are being punished for something you did in a past life. It follows you because what happened matters. All of it.
Every due date you calculated before you told anyone. Every name you gave before you were ready to say it out loud. Every hand you put over your belly in the dark while you listened and sang “Make You Feel My Love” by Adele as you cried.
It mattered and still does.
Your complex and layered grief is valid. As much as you need, whenever you need.
