Tart: Tiny True Stories #19

What miscarriage and abortion can really look like

Welcome!

to the nineteenth edition of Tiny True Stories! If you’re new here, hello, and thank you! I’m so happy to see you.

This is a monthly newsletter where I share supershort true stories you can read in 5 minutes or less. I also share recommendations for other things I loved this month—food, books, poems, memes, anything. Tiny does not just mean short—I write about the forgotten, small, mundane stories of our lives, where most of us spend most of our time, and look for their unexpected magic. This month, again, after all the continued cruelty at the national level, I’m thinking about how trivial and how necessary our own domestic lives are.

This month’s Tiny True Story is one that I just published in The Sun, and wanted to share with you.

This is my story about miscarriage and abortion. I wrote about the language of miscarriage in an earlier post, but this one is different. This is a story of how I waited for my pregnancy to get better, and when it didn’t and wouldn’t, I decided on an abortion. I’d waited long enough, hoping for the baby’s heart rate to improve, and once that torture was over, I could not wait (and it was unsafe for me to wait) anymore.

I hesitated even posting about this, as there are states where even miscarriage, something we have NO control over, is being criminalized. But the fact that I feel scared makes me feel more angry than scared, so here the f we go. It’s clear that most of the inhumane laws surrounding miscarriage and abortion either don’t know or are pretending not to know what it really looks like. I truly would not wish this experience on my worst enemy.

Thank you very much to the thoughtful and kind editors at the Sun, who were willing to publish this intentionally brutal piece. I tried to write it without metaphor, in blunt sentences, to show the reality of this extremely difficult time. I tried to start as many sentences as I could beginning with the pronoun I. People often say memoir (by women) is too self-involved, too sentimental. But isn't sentiment, isn't feeling the whole point of writing anything? In this short piece, I wrote I 102 times. I wanted to be seen, to be the subject of my own story.

Thanks also to the doctors and nurses at the hospital who were gentle and kind. Thank you to everyone who shared their stories with me after reading mine. I will never forget them.

Below is an “unboxing” video of the issue with an incredibly unflattering intro screen. (Don’t feel too bad for me; I had a massage right before I filmed this!)

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Today’s Tiny True Story

“The doctor says ‘Do not panic.’ The doctor says the baby’s heart rate is low. The doctor schedules me for an appointment only a week later, just in case.

I do my best not to panic. I hold my friends’ two-month-old son. I think of how tiny and perfect he is. I think about how my baby is the size of a blueberry. I think of how tiny and perfect blueberries are, how a piece of sweet, tart fruit feels like magic, how my older daughter loves blueberries, how she doesn’t know about the new baby. I am trying to think about anything else.

I know the baby is still an embryo. I know it’s early enough that it’s not even a true heart, or a heartbeat really, just ‘cardiac activity.’ Still.

A week later the doctor says the baby’s heart rate is even lower. The baby’s heart sounds strange, with an extra beat where one shouldn’t be. The extra beat isn’t a fluke--it keeps happening, boom-ba-boom, boom-ba-boom. It sounds like an error message. I correct myself: it sounds superhuman. I pretend the baby is a superhero with a superhuman heart. The doctor does not tell me not to panic. The doctor says she’s sorry, but the news isn’t good. The doctor says she’s so sorry. Superheroes don’t exist.”

You can read the rest at The Sun here. Endless thanks to the editors, who were willing to publish this heartbreak of mine.

Okay, I did squeeze in one metaphor. Photo by NOAA on Unsplash

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Today’s Letters of Recommendation

1. We just got back from Charlotte, North Carolina, to visit family, and I had an incredible brunch at Haberdish that kept me full for the entire five-hour plane ride home, and then some. I had the special, which was homemade biscuits topped with their signature fried chicken tenders, sausage gravy, and bacon lardon.

2. My husband bought me an adult coloring book for Christmas, and while my daughter has forced me to share it with her, I loooove using these acrylic paint markers to color with.

3. We all got norovirus recently. These bags are the MVP. Gross, whatever, having kids and being a human is gross, and these help.

4. Donate to Planned Parenthood. Allow others to have the kind of compassionate care I received, that our government seems to want to torture women by erasing.

Comments are open for your stories, if you would like to share them.

Until next time,

Jill