Losing Chloe

It took me years to realize I'd had a miscarriage in 2010.

Photo by Praswin Prakashan on Unsplash

I haven’t told this story to many people that I remember, but it’s been weighing on my mind, so here we go.

The Backstory

In 2010, my husband and I were months in on our plan to have a baby. But as anyone who is actively trying (and failing) to conceive can tell you, the change from frequent sex for fun to scheduled sex for conception are two completely different things.

This inability to purposefully make a baby was frustrating to say the least, and it took a toll on my mental health. Hubby (then fiance) was great, but I took it as a very personal failure. I spoke to my obgyn, my primary care, but we were told we had to wait a year before we could try anything.

Add in that I was… what did they call it? Maternal age.

At 35, I was old for the whole baby thing. Impossible? No, but for me (and a lot of women my age and older), it just added another layer of difficulty to the process.

We stopped testing in February 2010, because I could not take it, and the stress of it all was giving us false hope when my periods were late. We went back to having sex when we wanted, and I think we’d started to make peace with the idea that it might not happen.

End of March, my period was late, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up.

A Blast from the Past

I received a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize, and since this was 2010, I didn’t just send it to voicemail. Honestly, I should’ve.

I would spend the next few hours on the phone with an old ex who’d decided to call to apologize for how he’d treated me when we’d dated in 1994 before he committed suicide.

Hours of trying to talk him out of it.

Talking to his estranged wife, who btw, was not thrilled that he’d spent more time finding me to do this than he had on their marriage or with their kids.

Fielding calls when she updated me on what was going on.

I’ll spare you the gory details, but he’d done it, and only the arrival of emergency services kept him from being dead.

Tragedy Strikes

Twenty-four hours, the bleeding started.

Already a hot mess of emotional turmoil, this felt like an ill-timed, late period. Not only because of the phone call, but just another month we didn’t have a baby.

By the end of the first day, the pain had ramped up, but I brushed it off as an uptick of my normal period pains.

By the morning of day two, I was passing blobs, and the pain didn’t let up.

For a week, this continued. Pain, blood, clots.

I went to work wearing a tampon and an overnight pad.

Then day six, in tears over the pain with plans to go to my obgyn, I passed the biggest clot I’ve ever passed, roughly the size of a half dollar.

Day seven ended uneventful, and I really felt… I felt spent.

And I didn’t go to the obgyn.

The Realization

In 2023, as I prepared for my impending hysterectomy, I was scouring the internet for personal experiences. And while yes, I found a lot of information about the procedure, but I also found a lot of stories about why other women were having/had it.

Like miscarriages.

My heart sank as more than a few descriptions of first trimester miscarriages resonated with what had happened back then.

I’d had a miscarriage.

I’d had a miscarriage.

The words felt unreal yet somehow so… right.

I told my husband what I’d figured out, and he agreed that it sounded like what happened to me. And while he had been angry before over how upset I’d been over the phone calls, he was livid now that we had conceived and lost our child because of someone else who felt entitled to come back into my life as one last feel-good moment.

Moving Forward

Thankfully, we conceived shortly thereafter, and I wouldn’t trade our son for the world. But now we can honor the existence of a sister who could not be.

Thanks for reading.