What to Expect When You're Not Expecting

The afternoon following your miscarriage, you’ll resent the book on your nightstand. You lie in bed in your colonial-style house on the Chesapeake, the bay windows opening to the wide expanse of water. The vastness always evoked a sense of possibility, but you don’t see that now. You only see broken promises.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting taunts rather than teaches you about what’s happening inside your body.  You won’t want to remember the hope and excitement of reading the seminal guide to pregnancy and parenting. You’d thumbed through all the pages, excited to watch your baby grow month by month. But your fetus never reached month three—the initial growth of muscles. Baby teeth. Minuscule fingernails.

The chapter on pregnancy loss comes near the end, although miscarriage typically occurs in the earliest stages. Before twelve weeks. You have to thumb again through all the pages, the third month, the sixth month, labor and delivery, postpartum…to read about a blighted ovum.

You won’t know what the doctor means when she says you have a blighted ovum. You turn the word over in your mind like you always do with unfamiliar phrases. Blighted. Slighted. Knighted.

You won’t tell many people, but the few you do will help you understand the universality of miscarriage. So many other women have experienced the positive pregnancy test and the subsequent loss. Those are the women you lean on now.

You won’t lean on your friend Carly. The two of you marveled at the gift of your firstborns being so close in age, your homes so close in proximity. You took your baby boys to the pool, you shot goofy Christmas photos of them, and, yes, you took for granted you could have another baby.

But no, you don’t lean on Carly because she quickly and easily gets pregnant again, and you can’t bear to see her blooming breasts and bulging belly. You’re not proud of your jealousy; that she has what you want.

You won’t want to hear the whispers about your pregnancy path. Your boss will notice your chubbiness at Carly’s baby shower. She’ll ask a mutual friend if you’re pregnant, and you’ll recoil at hearing this later. The thought that you looked pregnant, even though your swollen body held a vacant uterus. You vow to lose weight. Maybe it will distract you from the pregnancy trials.

While you were often ambivalent about having children, you knew upon delivering your son that your body was made for this moment. This is why you suffered through the awkward teenage years, buds becoming breasts, cramps causing aches. This is how you advanced from rejection to celebration of the female form and the miracle of growing a new life. Now, you’re not only willing, you’re eager to repeat the cycle. Your desire to parent overshadows any fears or uncertainties.

You’ll be surprised when secondary infertility blindsides you. The miscarriage, you thought, was an aberration, not a harbinger of future experiences. But it represented only the first of several losses.

You keep holding the dream of raising children whose ages fall within two years of each other, but each passing month ebbs away at that goal. You feel guilty that the baby in your arms doesn’t feel like enough, that your body doesn’t feel like it’s doing enough, that you don’t have enough time to make this dream come true.

You won’t want to keep going to your OB/GYN after he dismisses your concern about getting pregnant again. “It’s too soon,” he’ll say, not acknowledging that he delivered your son in a “high-risk” situation because of your age. He expects you to try for a year before he offers any solutions, a year in which you’ll only grow older.

You’ll wish you could turn back time, like Cher, to the years when you wouldn’t have been a high-risk patient; when you’d instead have a high risk of pregnancy if you didn’t use condoms, IUDs, pills, or other means to keep from having the baby you want now.

 You won’t want to give up, so you’ll find a fertility clinic.

Don’t get your hopes up, though.

Despite the adorable newborn photos that line the waiting room walls, the framed thank you notes, the soft pinks and blues—you’re holding a ticket to a roller coaster ride that won’t end until you’re swaddling a newborn or shuttled through the exit lane.

You won’t want to track changes in your body; instead, you’ll reject your body for letting you down. The fertility drugs will change your shape, your breasts will swell, and so will your hopes, but don’t rush to buy a new bra, and don’t bother with maternity clothes. Not yet.

Likewise, stand in front of the microwave all you want, eat the deli meats and fish that wouldn’t be good for the baby.  You’re only fooling yourself if you start practicing pregnancy precautions. You might overeat for solace but don’t eat for two.

At your son’s daycare, you’ll want to still the longing that arises when parents pull up in SUVs that hold two or three, not just one, child car seat. You wonder if they take it for granted, the ease with which they grew their family while you only grew dreams.

You won’t want to befriend the family that really guts you, the one with two children, Brady and Casey. In college, before you met your husband and thought about raising a family, you’d tell friends, “I want two kids, and I’ll name them Brady and Casey.”

How can another family be living the life you’d pinned your hopes on?

Eventually, you’ll trash the What to Expect When You’re Expecting book, relinquish the maternity wardrobe, breast pump, and ovulation calendar. But not all at once. With each moment of letting go comes a new depth of loss, the loss of what wasn’t to be, the loss of expectations not met. And you never expected that.

-Judy Galliher

After retiring from a career in corporate communications, Judy Harju Galliher started devoting her time to writing personal essays. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Pangyrus, Hippocampus, and The Manifest Station. She earned an MFA from Spalding University and is learning how to handle the unexpected twists and turns of life.