How To Survive A Miscarriage With Karin Holmes

Karin Holmes miscarried her baby after just six and a half weeks of pregnancy. Her miscarriage and the trauma of a necessary D&C plunged her into the crashing, lonely isolation of an invisible loss where she blamed herself for failing her baby and couldn't figure out how she was supposed to grieve. She's speaking on the uniqueness of miscarriage, what not to say to a mother who's miscarried, and her book, How to Survive a Miscarriage.

Transcript

I'm so excited to have one of our international listeners and guests here on the show. Can you start us off by telling us your loss story? Yes, Sure. Well, First of all, Thank you so much for having me on your podcast, Shelby. It's a really huge honor. My loss story starts in 2011, So that's seven years now. My husband and I, I guess like most couples, Were talking about having children and how that would be. I was a bit like, Yeah, That's nice, But I'm still young and let's not get ahead of ourselves. But as life always happens, I fell pregnant very unexpectedly in May 2011. So that was definitely a huge surprise. I just didn't expect it, Even though we were talking about it, But I guess in my mind, I was sort of just telling myself it's too early and all that. So my reactions to being pregnant were very mixed. I was confused, I was scared, I was just not sure what to make of it, While my husband was very, Very excited. I was in a state of just shock and I was unsure. I was in a really, Really stressful and awful job and I felt that I could actually not have a child, I could not look after it, I felt completely unprepared. And so that was when I went back and forth, Back and forth for a few weeks and I just could not make up my mind what I was supposed to think about being pregnant. As it happened, My mind was made up for me when I started bleeding and cramping at around six and a half weeks pregnant. So just when I was coming to terms that, Yes, I am going to have this baby and oh my gosh, I'm going to be a mum, Sort of these positive feelings kicking in, It all went wrong. And I ended up going to hospital, Where they were quite blasey about it, Like, Oh, It's still early in a pregnancy, It's very common to lose a baby. And I was in disbelief because I was thinking, I just decided that I want this baby and now someone is telling me that I'm going to lose it. And because of the type of miscarriage that I had, There are a few different types and mine is called a missed miscarriage. So that means my body attempted to get rid of the pregnancy but wasn't successful. So some pregnancy tissue passed but most of it stayed in the womb so that then obviously creates potential health hazard for me because it can go toxic and get worse from there. So I needed to have what they call a D&C, So dilation and cure and tardure, Where they basically scrape that womb and make sure that any tissue and the embryo will be removed. And to me, That was really a traumatic way of losing my baby because I went into the theatre pregnant and I came out not pregnant anymore and I didn't know, You know, Sort of where my baby went or to me it was a baby, I guess to a healthcare professional, It was maybe just a lump of cells. And that really put me into quite a deep depression and a lot of, So my grief started off in a very dark place for sure because I was grieving and I am grieving a child that I've always loved but I've never met. My heart breaks for you in this and it's so hard, Especially in medical situations, To go in and not know what's happening and then you almost don't realise it until after it's all over and there's not time for your brain to kind of catch up to that and you're like no no no I just signed this energetic contract that said this little being is mine and then all of this is over and you're like wait, I didn't really get a say in this either. Yeah, Yeah definitely and I remember because my bleeding started at work and I was driving home and I remember pleading with my baby to say please please please stay with me, I'll be a good mummy, I'll try, I'll try please please stay with me and yeah I kept on bleeding so it was definitely for naught and yeah so to me it was really a rude, Rude shock because to me my world had just ended in a way but you enter a hospital where it doesn't really matter which is part of how I guess the system works but that was just that I guess this interest or sort of the sort of gentle pressure I received of let's not make a big deal out of this I found really hard to deal with and cope with and obviously I complied because I was in such a shock I just said okay I'm trying not to cry I suppose. So it was a really yeah a lot I'm still upset about the fact that I lost my child in a hospital, I don't mind hospitals otherwise at the best of times but such a clinic, Sterile environment it was just awful, It really was. And they tend to be places too that are devoid or like resistant to emotion because if you do take the walls down in a hospital whether you're a care provider or you're a patient or you're a family member kind of just watching all this happen if you let the walls down there is this you have to create space for emotion and space equals time and grief especially and even taking you know five minutes to cry about something and to just have a moment with it is time that I suppose in the medical system's mind could be used for quote unquote more constructive or life-saving activity and so there's not a lot of space in our medical system to grieve. I'm wondering now if you have given yourself that space if you ever gave yourself that opportunity to break down? Yes I have, Not willingly because see how it happened with my loss so I ended up being an emergency procedure so they sort of rush you through the system I suppose and which makes it even harder or at least for me made it even harder to try and catch up what was going on because I started off the day sort of normally expecting I knew I was going to go for an ultrasound and see my doctor but I never expected to then be wheeled into an operation theater the same day so I needed to suddenly it went really quickly so it felt like time was dragging on for a really long time waiting for that ultrasound to confirm that my baby has died and all of a sudden like ten million things happens at once so I really actually I call it a crashed the moment I got home because at home that was the following I stayed the night and then the following morning my husband could come and pick me up and that time where I was lying in my bed it was quiet in our house it was just me and my husband that's where it really hit me that indeed I just lost my baby and it all had sort of just fell apart then. Like this is like an instant plunge into darkness and what did that I mean this seems like totally new territory for you have you had like a background in loss before had anything of this level of trauma ever happened to you before where you kind of have no reference to go on? No that was definitely my first contact with loss or at least with a loss I lost that meant so very much to me so and I sounds really really stupid but it is true I did not really know that much about pregnancy loss either so I didn't even know that this is common and that I'm not the only one because it certainly felt like I was all alone in the world so that was a whole new level of learning or sort of coming to terms with so this is definitely huge shock for me just in the grief in itself experiencing a loss in itself I'm not used to that and then having yeah I every loss is complex in my opinion but I feel mine was a bit more complex because I have lost someone I have never met but was part of me and that is definitely the part that I grappled with the most because I felt so empty afterwards in these days and weeks after and I was unsure if that's okay to feel that way or am I just supposed to get up out of bed and go back to work and pretend nothing happened so it felt I still remember this really just feeling unsure like what am I supposed to feel what am I supposed to do because if I had lost my my mom or my dad everyone would be like oh gosh that's terrible I'm so sorry but if you say I have lost my baby early in pregnancy everyone's like oh well oh yeah get over it so I felt very isolated I felt very lonely and life didn't make much sense because to me it is and was a huge deal but no one cared so sort of finding my feet again in a world post loss has been hard definitely has been hard. What was the story that you were telling yourself? Oh well it was a bit dark to start with because like many other women who who lost or lose a baby in pregnancy or maybe even during birth or after birth naturally we blame ourselves so my story was all about I have failed I have failed my baby I had failed my family I had failed myself I can't even get the one thing we technically supposed to do on this planet right I can't carry a baby so there was a lot of blame there was a lot of shame guilt anger so really dark strong emotions that dominated that my story for a long time because that's the only thing that made sense to me. I was that definitely part of that is definitely that I just didn't know how to grieve I did not know anything about grief I didn't know that it's okay and it's even normal to have such strong emotions and but also on the other side that it's also okay to feel good again one day so I was in the into I feel like an internal conflict of good and bad sort of battling it out because I had no guidance on how to progress on this journey and I failed for a long time I just sort of stumbled across and left and right and fell over again because or you know going in circles because I just did not know what I should be doing. And that's such a familiar story to me and I'm sure so many other grievers who are listening because the first time that we experience loss not only are we experiencing all of these emotions for the first time but we have to come into contact with all the stories about loss that we've ever told ourselves or that anybody has ever told us through our entire lifetimes so I you know things like be strong go back to work or be strong for your husband or your family members or things like that or if you're gonna cry go to your room and do it or don't cry at work or you know if you just get busy and stay distracted time will heal all like things like this and I'm curious to know for you when was kind of the crack in this when did you kind of reach a place or maybe what called to you to say maybe there's more than what I should be doing maybe there's more than this dichotomous good bad should be doing should not be doing in in your grief process because this this image of this really vivid image that you shared of stumbling and walking through and left and right and falling over yourself is so familiar because the grief is very at first especially it's just very non-directional it's like somebody conked you over the head and it's like okay now walk in a straight line and you're like I don't even know where my feet are and I'm laughing horrible experience because for the most part we we schedule our lives and we kind of have our map planned out and everything but I'm wondering when kind of the first glimpse of that was for you that's like maybe this is not everything that grief is for me. That was actually when I reached out to a support organization here that has a support free support line where you can call up and you can talk to someone it's called SANS and they do a lot of work with with pregnancy loss and obviously a lot of their members have had losses later on like miscarriages stillbirth so I was a bit apprehensive calling and saying oh I'm actually struggling with a miscarriage because I still thought okay I'm supposed to not make a big deal out of this I'm supposed to get over it I felt weird or not abnormal for having all of this grief and but I called anyway and I just spoke to the most lovely understanding and kind lady who for the first time other than myself and my husband took my loss and my grief seriously and said to me yes you are entitled to this and yes it is a real loss and I was just blown away that a total stranger would give me this kindness when others around me would not who knew me and were supposed to support me were not doing that but a complete stranger would and that triggered I guess that triggered finally part of my healing because I felt that yeah I'm not crazy actually this is real and my emotions are real and I need to listen to them I need to work through them with them and that felt even though it was painful to talk about it it felt oddly empowering so and it was very much a surprise because I expected to be brushed off and instead I was taken seriously so that was huge for me and still is still is and something that I have taken away with me and want to incorporate into my work as a counselor and someone comes to me with grief that we need and I need and want to take it seriously and give that much needed validation because as a society it seems we sort of set up terms as to when a loss is acceptable to be talked about and basically the longer and even it's sort of like we were most supposed to be most upset if someone dies young or has maybe is a family man or woman and has small children and then they die and then that's that's like totally acceptable to be upset but even when someone old dies then we like oh well they had a good life so it's just this approach of like there seems to be very small window in life that we are supposed to be okay with grief but if you fall out outside of that window where you lose someone who's either really really really young or hasn't even been born yet like my loss or is really really old and has had a supposedly long and good life then you fall out of that understanding category and you just have sort of be you left on your own to deal with grief that because it's just it comes across to me as it's just not good enough to give attention to. Yeah so it's not big enough or impactful enough or your relationship wasn't as deep or stronger yeah yeah stories. Yep. That's very true. Yeah and even you know even someone like like your loss Shelby where you lose your mom people who might often say well but you're you're growing up so what do you need what do you need your mom for? Yeah oh god and that breaks my heart even hearing it because it doesn't. No I'm sorry. No no no it comes up for mother loss and it doesn't come up very often but when it dies it's just like wow I can't believe you said that and then you look at your loss that's so almost I don't want to say invisible but it's not it's it's not something you see you don't write it up in the obituary it doesn't go in the news but you know things like that it's so like and then to hear that you receive things like this like 20 times more than I ever would for my loss it just breaks my heart because the feeling that I get in my heart hearing that is that you know that invalidation of like oh you're already raised you're out of the house what do you need a mom for I'm like oh my god you know this lack of understanding for how important this relationship is and was to me it's just wild and to I don't know if I've ever fully grasped miscarriage child loss pre-birth until you kind of phrased it in that window because yeah because I've never I'm not personally a woman who has ever wanted children I told my mom when I was five I said this is not on my list of things to do and she said you know she was like all right but make sure if you ever do decide to have kids that you really really want them because you're stuck with them once you have them you're stuck with them forever basically and I mentioned it again at 14 and I mentioned it again at 21 and she's like it's okay if you don't want to have kids and so this this maternal attachment I've always had and this is something I'm admitting for the very first time on this podcast is as a 25 year old female bodied cisgendered woman I've always had a hard time connecting to this maternal feeling even before my mom died a lot of people like oh you're just blocked because your mom died and you don't have a maternal influence anymore I'm like no I've just never felt this desire to be a mom and there's there's some shame in that too but um but I've never been able to to fully I feel like latch on to the story of of losing something that's so intimately connected to you until you rephrased it that way so thank you for that that was that was incredible I wasn't expecting that today and I'm just like overwhelmed by it and it's really cool um yeah and I kind of want to segue into how you got into your work as a counselor if that's something that you pursued after your loss or if it's something that you were in and then really got deeper into after you went through this experience with your baby so personally um it was the see it's always good hindsight hey um no it was it triggered um it started my journey to become a counselor because I felt so so so lonely after my loss and um loneliness it's not necessarily bad but it was it was awful like just like literally I felt the world is just I mean in sort of a cage and the world moves around me and treats me like it wants nothing to do with me and to I felt like I did I didn't I didn't matter anymore certainly my baby doesn't matter to anyone and to it's hard it's really it's heartbreaking it's soul destroying to realize that you're in the midst of grief and darkness and no one cares so I decided that no I decided I knew I knew that I I cannot put up with this because it's not fair it's not it's not right it's simply highly inappropriate that we force women to just um grieve in silence if at all um to to deny um that this life existed um because I do honestly I would like to challenge anyone to actually think about how it how they could try and imagine how it feels when someone dies inside of you that's like a whole other level of of um messed up yeah and again and I've never heard it phrased that way either but that's that that's striking me again and just like to have another human die inside of you is pardon my french but holy shit like yes it's mind-blowing and we see things like miscarriage things like late-term abortions things like stillbirths portrayed in movies and media and stuff but that that feeling is never completely relayed until you experience it yourself yeah and and it's it's it's really I mean it's hard to say but that is what it is essentially um because any other loss I'm really not against I really don't like sort of say no you know my loss is so much worse than yours because they're all terrible but it I feel strongly that it adds that complex level of feelings of um especially in early pregnancy where you don't feel anything because babies really don't make themselves known until a bit later when they kick you and annoy you and push on your bladder and all that um but nonetheless um that baby was alive um my baby was alive and then it was not and um I just I would like to then to say okay this is why it's a real loss and um that I just want to my original motivation to become a counselor is to make sure that no one ever has to go through this alone like I did and being left alone with this complex feeling and this just the complexity of all of it all that you knew one day you were pregnant so someone a baby was growing at the next it was not and technically from the outside you look the same you know nothing changed yet and um I just yeah I want to make sure that no one has to go through this alone ever again um because it's not right it's it's it's a moment where we need our our village or our people around us the most because someone just died and it should not matter if that someone was with us for six weeks or for 65 years it should not matter a loss is a loss and I that's why I'm really passionate about trying to change that that any loss is a real loss and we need to give people the room to grieve them it's so perfectly phrased and I'm thinking about this community of women that you are directly supporting you're like I'm in this for you I'm in this for everybody but I'm in this for you to make sure you never have to do this alone again and what has been your your contribution to that specific community of women to all of these moms oh um oh goodness that's a hard question well I'm hoping I can contribute by by being a counselor and seeing people either face to face or online um and I'm hoping that um so I've written a book because I'm before I was a counselor I was a journalist so writing comes naturally to me and has been obviously the first go-to thing to do for me to try and cope with my loss so I started writing and eventually that again driven by that feeling of loneliness and just desperation and feeling so unsupported I I thought about okay what would I want people to know what they should do to support someone who has suffered a miscarriage so that's how I started writing at first just for myself and then eventually a whole book came together because after my very positive phone call with the support organizations I ended up going to meetings and joining online groups and I ended up talking to a lot of other loss moms and so bit by bit my book came together which is yeah how to survive a miscarriage a guide for women their partners friends and families because I tried to obviously give practical advice to women who are the main in my opinion main sufferers of losing a baby but also for their partners who are often on the sideline not knowing what to do and dealing with their own grief that apparently also no one cares about and advice for your friends and family so how do you how should you support someone either a woman or a couple who has suffered the loss of a baby and hopefully my my book can serve as a contribution to helping others through their grief. That's so phenomenal and I'm so excited to share this with the rest of the grief growers who are listening to the podcast today and I'm interested to know maybe maybe one or two takeaways from your book that were based on your own experience in terms of the ways maybe that you were not helped that you wish you would have been by friends and family or maybe something that you wish people knew about women experiencing a miscarriage. No yes because because I had a lot of negative experiences after my loss so I in the book I put a list together of things that you do not do not say to a woman who just suffered a miscarriage so that's you know things like oh it's very common or you're still young you can have another or focus on the children you have. Heaven needed another angel all of this just like awful awful things that people say because just to sort of frame it for maybe for not everybody knows that but in in medical terms a miscarriage is considered until week 20 of a pregnancy and after that if a baby dies it's considered stillbirth. Don't ask me why we need to make this this differentiation but basically I'm talking to women who mainly lost babies early or late miscarriage and you know even it doesn't matter because like why would you say things like that so it's like oh no and I heard them and it's like no no no no no big no to that and I but also what I was really have been passionate about for my book was really practical advice because I didn't know when I started out on my grief journey that it's actually okay to have a ritual or yeah proper coping strategy anything that helps make the loss more sort of graspable just more I guess real. Like you can touch it. Yes exactly exactly and so that's what I wanted to put in the book like it's okay and please even do that please do that pick a ritual and do that if you want to plant a tree in memory of your baby do that if you want to bake a cake every time ever you to do that the due date if the baby comes around then do it like even throw a party come on like there's no limit do what feels right for you and what helps you heal because no one told me I can do that I needed to work that out myself so that's a really strong message as well because we need as women and as partners we need to do what feels right for us to heal and remember our babies and keeping their legacies alive in a way that fits for us and nobody else. So once you receive that message yourself of permission to create these rituals and permission to feel all of these things what did you maybe and or your husband do to honor your baby and or what are you still doing to carry forward into the future? So our baby's due date was February 11th so every February. Oh that's coming up now. It is. It is. So every February 11th like the first year because the first year after that's it's hard it's very raw it's very upsetting so we I baked the cake and we lit a candle and we just sort of you know said to each other you know baby would have been maybe one year old now and so we did that and it but it changes for us every year some people and that's what I say to people as well by the way like either you do the same every year or you change it up whatever feels right because as then so we've done that for quite a few years but I have to say with me it actually changed to the so the day I lost my baby was July 1st and I went in for my procedure and it has become actually more significant dealing with that day than the due date so normally July 1st is is the day for me where it's just awful and I'm sad and I'm upset and I struggle through the day obviously you know reliving everything and thinking about and that is another thing that that the miscarriage sufferers and deal with we are left with a lot of what ifs so you know my my baby would be seven by now so like what what what would he or she look like what would they do in school yeah what kind of interests would they have and that's those thoughts definitely always stay with me thinking about what if and would have been sent and that adds definitely another level of of heart and hardness so hot cheap on to the grief because no one can answer that no and those questions will they kind of remain in your imagination you can't really do too much with them other than continue to wander and I'm curious the way that you phrase that what do you believe to be true about grief now it's true that it changes us it's it's true that it's awful and beautiful at the same time because it teaches us so much and not only about us definitely bad us but maybe about how we perceive the world and it helps even a really hard lesson to learn but it helps clear a lot of things out of your life be it that maybe that you walk away with people that no longer serve a purpose or you you stop doing something that you want to enjoy it and now you no longer do because the grief in a way to me opens our eyes at a moment where we were not ready to open them but we have to do it anyway and that is challenging and uncomfortable and it sucks most of the time but the lessons that are sort of behind it once we have our eyes open are really empowering and enriching and and dare I say it I'm kind of grateful for sometimes although that's that's definitely hard maybe to understand because you know like yeah loss is awesome no I've never really said that before no and no and we shouldn't we really shouldn't but we need to and that is maybe that's the hardest part that is for me and was for me is that the fact that out of something so awful and and got wrenchingly terrible something new can grow and that new can be beautiful and full of love and yeah pushing us onwards to keep going and it's it there's always that pinch of sadness that out of something really really really heartbreaking we learned a beautiful lesson yeah there's always like I don't know how to phrase it better than there's always like 10% sadness or 5% sadness or 1% sadness I just continue to carry with you all the time and that's such a great visual for it because I believe I said in a previous episode that grief once you enter into a relationship with it it's present for the rest of your life and and society likes to tell us that there's an end to grief or that time heals all or you know stay busy and eventually it will go away like things like that and it just doesn't it doesn't end but but things like you said like ritual like giving ourselves permission to honor all of these emotions that are coming up these are ways in which we can not only deepen our relationship with grief but with ourselves as grieving people as well it's very much an exploration and in feeling the spectrum of human emotions and being able to connect more deeply with other people as well which it sounds like you've been able to do in your work and through your book How to Survive a Miscarriage.

Reviews

I resonated deeply with Karins experience- the shock, the way the medical model deals with miscarriage, the complexity of experiencing someone dieing within you, loosing a part of yourself, how society doesn't take if seriously, and the deep profound learning yiu sxperien through the process of it all- which like Karin I am hugely great-ful for, but always accompanied with a tinge of sadness. Thank you for sharing your storey it has been hugely validating and has helped me as I sat and turned towards my grief today. Lots of love to all who have experienced this type of loss💖