Dr. Sunita Osborn about loss of a pregnancy

Welcome. I don't believe we're live until I see us live and see you saying hello in the comments. Then I believe it. So when you're in, say hello in the comments and I'll be looking on Facebook to see if we're here. All right, good. It looks like we're live everywhere. Dr. Osborne, thank you for being here. I'm so thrilled to have you today with us.

Thank you so much for having me. And please call me Sunita.

Oh, thank you, Sunita.

Yeah.

All right. Say hello in the chat. Say hello here on Facebook. Welcome, everyone. I'll give everyone just a few moments to find their way in here. As I said, I want to find us, too. So that means I know we're actually live once I find us. I saw us a minute ago. All right. Hi, everyone. Let's see. We got people here from North Hollywood. We got people from the uk.

North Hollywood, uk. What else is there? Right. There's all kinds of places in the world. Connecticut's here. Great, great. Welcome. And let me see if I can find us on Facebook here. Great. Here we are. Who's here? Lisa's from Grand Rapids. Hi, Lisa. Kitty from Puerto Rico. Hi, Audra. Lisa. Nice to see folks coming on. We're going to be doing one of our talks today, so I'm so excited that everyone is here and finding their way in. And I know it always takes a few minutes to find us on Facebook, so I will give that a few minutes. By the way, let me just say it is next week the Facebook group is going to be one year old.

Last year, after everything got grounded and we were at home and I started getting emails from people saying I can't go to my grief group. I thought, oh, I'm going to start going on Facebook once a day and started this group. It is funny. People were like, you can't do it every day. And I am like, I have nothing to do. So I was doing it every day. And to commemorate one year, I am going to come on every day next week and do a topic 1230 Pacific every day, Monday through Friday next week. So join me if you want, everyone. And tender hearts, folks, you'll get a link to be there too, if you want. All right, let's begin, as we always do, with a moment of silence and send love to those who are no longer physically with us. So join me in that moment.

Thank you so much for doing that. I'm so thrilled to have you here. Let me.

I was going to talk about what we're talking about. Today we're obviously talking about miscarriage, but grief is also grief. And I love looking at your work and see how many gems you have that just are so helpful in grief. So I would love if we could just start with who you are and your story and how you came here and thank you for being here.

Yeah, thank you so much for that and how I came to be here. Thinking about miscarriage is my story with wanting just to be a parent for so many of us didn't begin just a few years ago, but actually began in childhood when I just first started imagining myself actually being a parent, imagining having a family of my own and coming from just a really, really close knit family myself. It was something I always dreamed of, pictured, had ideas in my head of what it could look like. And then it was a few years ago that my husband and I realized that we were. We were ready. Or actually I realized I was ready. He needed a few moments, a few months to catch up. He got there eventually and we took a look at our lives. We were close to family, we were living in the suburbs, and we decided, okay, let's do this. Let's start this, this adventure. And we were lucky enough to actually get pregnant pretty quickly. I think the moment that that pregnancy test said positive, I remember thinking, like, everything is going to change for me in my life now. And that was true. Not quite in the way that I expected, but I immediately started forming ideas, hopes, expectations, dreams about what is this little person going to be like, what are they going to look like, what are they going to sound like and whose personality are they going to have? And all of that just. It excited me so much in my mind. There was just countless dreams and hopes and images that I had. And especially once we were able to see that little baby on the ultrasound and see her getting bigger and bigger, that excitement just grew and grew where we just. We were just very, very happy thinking about what this could be and having so many conversations about things like holidays and cousins and family events and all of that kind of stuff. And in our minds, and I think for so many of us, we had the idea that the equation to parenthood almost feels linear of like I have when it comes to pregnancy, pregnancy equals I have a baby now. I know there's so much in between that, but in our experience, all we were doing was allowing ourselves to hope and to get excited. So when we found out that we were having a miscarriage at 10 weeks, I remember being blown away by that. Blown away, devastated, confused, angry. So many different things. A lot of unpleasant emotions as well too. And I remember thinking too of, you know, there's the loss of the baby. But that loss was so. It wasn't just one dimensional. It felt like there were so many different losses that were there for us as well too, where we're experiencing loss of all those dreams, all those hopes, all those ideas we had too, for ourselves and for our baby. And the loss of parenthood is what I felt like at that moment too.

Something that we experienced shortly after, and I think a lot of folks who experience miscarriage have this hope too, is that if I can get pregnant again, maybe quickly enough, this can be just a sad footnote in an otherwise very happy story. So that's what we tried to do. We decided, okay, maybe if we could try to get pregnant again, then we can just move forward with that family that we were hoping and dreaming of and we were fortunate enough to get pregnant again. And similarly, even though it was scary, very scary to even let ourselves believe that, okay, maybe this is going to happen for us, certainly experienced a lot of anxiety during that time just thinking about, what if this happens again? Should I let myself hope? Should I let myself get attached? And I will say I struggled really to attach to that second pregnancy, just thinking, well, what if I do get really attached and I lose her too? Can I come back from this? Will I be able to keep going? Even knowing that I was pregnant, I was already picturing the future, picturing all the worst case scenarios, things like that, hoping that maybe if I prepared myself somehow it would just make whatever did happen in the future better. And again, we were able to see her grow in ultrasounds. We were able to see her heart beating. We were able to see legs and body parts start to form. And just looked at that with such wonder. And I think there was a point where I started to slowly give myself permission to hope that, okay, this is happening, this is happening for us. We can be excited. And then a few months later, we found out that we were having another miscarriage. And I remember one thinking, okay, preparing for it this time did not make it any less painful. It was again devastating and shocking. And I remember just thinking, okay, this time this is not going to be a sad footnote in my story. This is becoming a huge part of my life and we need to slow down and understand what this actually means to us. And so my husband and I, we came together and we grieved. We grieved not only the loss of these babies that we had hoped for, but the loss of so Many things. That loss of parenthood that we were hoping for, the loss of the sense of like, trust and control. This idea that if I want this so badly, could this happen for me? The loss of even just a sense of belonging at that time too. A lot of times with miscarriage, you're around friends and family who are starting their own families and you start to wonder like, what is my place in here? And you start to have questions like, am I less of a woman, less of a man because I'm not able to start a family or have a child? You start to question yourself to your very core. And those were the things that not a lot of people were talking about. And that was something I remember being very struck by, is we were quite open about our experiences at the time. And there were so many conversations I had with people when we would share about our miscarriages and they would say, oh, yeah, that happened to my mom too, or my sister, or to me as well. But I would never hear about it when they were experiencing. I would more hear about at the end or the end of their story once maybe things in their life had changed. And I remember thinking about, why aren't we talking about this? Because I remember not talking about it made me feel so alone in my experiences. Made me feel like, is there something wrong with me? That I am, I am devastated by this. But no one around me seems to be sharing and talking when I know it's so, so very common. And so it became so important to me to be able to try to have conversations, conversations just like this. Let's talk about it. Let us take this out from the silence here and acknowledge that this is a huge, life changing, devastating event. And let's support each other in that too, because I remember that's something we really experienced during that time is incredible. Isol as well, that sense of, does this matter? Where do we belong? And so it's why I'm very happy to be here today, us having this conversation, because it does matter and we need to be having more conversations about it.

Thank you. There's so much about your story. I have a lot of questions. Yeah, so much about your story that I could easily go.

That shows up also when a child dies, that shows up when a spouse dies, that shows up when a parent dies. And so I notice my mind going, well, that's a universal thing in grief. That's a universal thing in grief. And then I realize the problem isn't that it's a universal thing in grief. The problem is we don't give miscarriage the attention we would in those other types of grief and then the bigger layer that we don't even do the other types of grief. Well, at least the world doesn't. So let me first start with.

Where were you? Work wise. You're a psychologist, you've written books. Were you already a psychologist when you became pregnant? Did that come later? I'm trying to think of how that.

Yeah, so I was a psychologist at that time. I've been practicing, gosh, I think for maybe six, seven years or so. And during my experience as a psychologist, I've worked with countless people who've experienced different sorts of grief. Like you mentioned, the loss of a child, the loss of a partner, and also the less accepted forms of griefs or the less talked about forms of grief like infertility, pregnancy loss, divorce, things like that. And I had navigated so many conversations with people supporting them through grief and it was only just during my miscarriages that I found myself on the other side of the therapeutic couch, really walking through my own grief and being at a point to being like, okay, now I get it. I thought I got it before, I didn't get it until then. And it was during that time too that I really started to lean into working with people who've experienced miscarriage specifically just because again, I think it's such an underserved population. You're 100% right. I think as a society we are ill equipped to deal with grief. And miscarriage especially gets pushed into the shadows.

You know, we didn't have a chance to talk about this. We were talking about our work before we came on. And when I was writing Finding Meaning the last book, I innately thought, okay, this is not going to be a book that's just about the death of my son. It's also going to be a book that is there to help people with all kinds of losses. Death of a spouse and death of parents and all kinds of losses.

And then when I got to miscarriage, I was surprised, I got pushback and people were like, but you haven't had one. Is it sort of your story to tell? And I went round and round about this. And the thing that I finally came to, if this is going to be a general grief book.

It would be so wrong to omit miscarriage. And I was like, I don't care if I get taken to task that like I did something wrong. I can't write a book and not name it. That's part of the issue.

So. And it was heartbreaking for Me to interview so many people, men and women, who had dealt with miscarriage. So first of all, tell us how common it is because that's always surprising.

Yes. Yeah. One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage and one in 20 pregnancies end in stillbirth. Sorry, not one in 20, one in 100 pregnancies end in stillbirth, but one in four, which is just shockingly high for miscarriage.

And I also think about this as a made up statistic. It feels like it's 1 in 4 who have a miscarriage and it's like 1 in 100 who talk about it.

Yes, yes.

And because of that, and this is something Michelle Obama said, you know, it's fascinating. I went back and I looked at, you know, I wanted to find real life things. I looked at Barbara Bush and the death of her child and Michelle Obama and talking about miscarriage, about how if you don't talk about it, there is a natural tendency to lean towards something must be wrong and that brings about shame. It's not talked about it.

Yeah, I completely agree that not being able to speak about it feels like such an incubator almost for shame where just this silence, there's a secrecy and all these different beliefs start to just go through your mind of, especially with miscarriage. It's something that there's a lot of self blame there of like, did I do something wrong? Was it that thing, that cheese that I ate or was it because I didn't take my prenatal vitamins early enough or is there something too much exercise.

You know?

Yes. And I think the hard thing is I typically will hear those beliefs and ideas only in the safety of the therapeutic space, like when I'm sitting with a client where they feel safe enough to talk about it, but so rarely amongst a group of friends or in conversation with others. So I just know, like you said it's 1100 that those conversations are actually able to happen and someone is able to feel witnessed and feel the compassion and empathy of someone that they care about instead of just letting those thoughts just run wild in my head and take me to a pretty scary place.

Right. So what did you do with that? Because this happens to everyone in grief.

Yeah.

We all feel a little self blame. We're thinking, did I do something wrong? And I think that's so heightened in the secrecy of miscarriage. So how did you personally deal with what did I do wrong? Am I defective? What were your thoughts?

Yeah.

And your solutions?

Yes. Yeah, it was a few different things. I will Say so first was.

I felt really lucky that I had a lot of supportive people in my life that I could share those thoughts with. My husband being first and foremost one that I would have these thoughts when I'd be driving home from work where I would be mulling things over in my mind. Like one that comes to mind is I really worried. I was like, is your family going to hate me for not being able to give a child? It felt like such an archaic idea, but in my head, I just couldn't get that out of my head of, are they going to think less of me because I'm not able to produce a healthy grandchild for them? And that kept spinning in my head. And I remember thinking, gosh, this is such a ridiculous thought. Maybe I shouldn't even say anything about it. But I finally worked up the courage at some point when we were driving somewhere just to share, like, I have such a ridiculous thought and I need to just share it with you. And I just said like that. I was like, I'm worried your family's going to hate me because I can't get on the child. They're going to blame me for this. And he immediately, as I knew he would, was compassionate, empathetic, and shared that. Like, I completely understand why you're feeling this. And at the same time, that is not the case. No one blames you. This is not your fault. And I think what's helpful about that is while I knew that logically you can't cure guilt with logic or gratitude or other things like that, I needed compassion and I needed self empathy from people or empathy from people who knew me and who cared about me and who could witness what I was experiencing. I think part of what I did in those moments is that I found my witnesses. I found people who I knew would be able to listen to me and hear me out. And I didn't even need them to tell me that, like, okay, logically this is what it is, or it's not your fault. I just needed them to hear me and say, like, I am with you right now. Even just their warm eye contact a lot of times was enough. So I think for me it was just being able to expose those thoughts out loud felt incredibly helpful and at times being able to write them too. I think something that's so great about this group is being able to even just write it on different forums and community groups and seeing other people in miscarriage groups say the same thoughts that I was having of like, I feel like it's my fault. I Feel like I'm struggling was like a bomb to me that when I would. I hated that they were experiencing the same thoughts. And at the same time, it made me feel like I'm not crazy. I'm not alone for feeling these things right now. So I think where I mostly went was just again, community. And it was. It was going to my people.

We. It's. It's a fascinating thing. You'll appreciate this as a psychologist. We. I did something in my tender hearts group, that's one of the groups we're in yesterday that I've never done.

People said, it's a triggering thing. Why would you do that? And here's what we did. I did a talk on magical thinking. And magical thinking takes many forms. It takes the form of, oh, I didn't exercise, or I tripped that day. I did this. And it also takes the form of. And this is what we decided to do. It takes the form of, if they were alive today and I could go back and do it, who would they be? What would be going on? And it's fascinating. When I said, well, we're going to talk about that openly, People are like, I. A few counselors, like, are you sure? And I'm like, I got to tell you, as a professional, I would be so freaked out about doing this. But now that I'm someone who's been in grief myself, I do this all the time. I just want to actually do it out loud and say, we're not crazy. And I think that's part of what's so healing and grief and is to have a place where you can go. So we're not going to censor here, right? We really be ourselves. And, you know, because if you ever said anyone, I'm wondering who my child would be today. People would be like, sunita, please don't do that to yourself.

Yes, don't do that.

Or if you ever said, God, I wonder, did I exercise? They'd be like, don't. And yet you need to wrestle with these concepts. And like you said, just have them witnessed.

Exactly.

Just have them witnessed. So I'm also curious. There's what goes on in your mind, But I mentioned our grief, illiterate world. I see this in all aspects. That's what's so universal about this. I see this in all aspects. I've seen it when people have had a loved one murdered, people go, where were you? I've seen this when people had had a child die, well, did you do this or did you do that? And I'm sure in Miscarriage, People have to ask you questions that are just so triggering, like, did you take prenatal? Did you. And how do you deal with it? Might even be an innocent question, but there is an implied somebody did something wrong if somebody died or someone's not born.

Yeah, I think you are completely right there. And I definitely got variations of those kind of questions of, well, were you taking your prenatal vitamins? Did you go to the doctor early enough? Did you follow all the instructions that they said, did you drink this much coffee? And things like that, which you can just imagine. I'm already having these thoughts about what did I do wrong here. Gosh, those went a long way and reinforcing. Okay, let me examine my behaviors even more now. And at the same time, part of also where my mind went is that I know when someone sees something terrible happening, they want to do as much as they can to distance themselves from that thing of, like, what makes you different somehow? For me, that I can then maybe do something different so I don't have that terrible outcome that you have. So it would be so hard for me because I would typically, I would get a question like that, be stunned often into silence, maybe rant about it for a while to. To my husband about, can you believe this? This is so insensitive and hurtful. And then I would also come back to a place of I get it too. I get that they are scared, that they are worried of like, what made this happen and how can I make sure that I don't end up in that place. And if it's a relationship that I cared enough about to invest in that hard conversation, I would share that with them of you asking that question. I imagine the intent was this, but this is what it brought up for me. Can we talk about this? Because this is really sticking with me now. I think it's something that definitely needs to be talked about because it can do so much to really reinforce a lot of that self blame that we're already sitting with. At the same time, I try as much as I can to be curious about what is making that person ask that question right now. If I'm at a place where I actually want to hear it, then let me try to have the conversation with them.

What's hard about that is.

First of all, you're in a place when you're in grief. You deserve care and compassion and to be witnessed and to be sat with. And then you have someone who.

Unfortunately isn't really without being aware of. They're not even coming up to you going, how can I help? How can I be present? Like you said, they might even be going without saying any of these words. Your grief is making me so uncomfortable. I'm afraid what happened to you might happen to me. I remember working in a hospital for decades and someone would come in in a horrible car accident. We're like, did they wear their seatbelts? Because we want to know, if we put our seatbelts on, we're never going to be them. If we take our prenatal vitamins, we're never going to be you. And so we wanted, just like you said, we want to make sure it's not going to happen to us. And there's actually no consoling going on.

Not at all.

And it's tough. It's tough because.

You know, I mean, literally, I heard someone say to someone, I know my grief's making you uncomfortable, but let me just tell you the reality. And that's a high place to come from in grief. I mean, usually in grief, you're sort of white knuckling the day. You're not like, I'm going to be in a teaching mode.

Right, Right. I am not capable of thinking about it at that point there. All I'm feeling is whether it's white hot rage, whether it's disappointment, whether it's sadness. Maybe it's a combination of all of those. Which I will say, at times in my grief, I would often delegate some of these almost like tasks with sense of, like, I'm going to need this person to go talk to them. Because right now what I need is just to, like, keep moving through my day. Survival is what I need. So I'm going to need you to go deal with this person and make them stop asking me these questions, which I think it's hard for us to ask for those kind of things sometimes. To be able to ask for the help, to be able to say, you know what, I'm not going to have the conversation right now. Maybe it'd be a good thing to do, but I'm not up to it 100%. Please be able to, like you said, white knuckling it. That already takes so much energy. So let's just make sure we preserve your energy just to go there and then hope that we have someone on our support squad who can help us.

So as a psychologist who works with people who are dealing with life, dealing with grief, grief comes to your door.

What was that like for you? How was that experience different? Did you. I mean, I would imagine we think, oh, my Gosh, you're going to be like, insightful, amazing, and you're going to bring all this knowledge to your grief. What was it like?

You know, I was not very insightful. It felt like. And I felt like I was definitely not very adaptive. I felt stuck. I felt bitter at times, actually bitter quite a lot. I actually remember reading a review once of a podcast that I was on and someone had mentioned, like, she's great speaker, and she sounds really bitter and really angry about what she's feeling. I was like, huh, Gosh, have not been called that before in my life, but I think after my miscarriages, I was brought to a place I had never been to in my life before, that I was feeling emotions like, angry that I was the one who would experience this. Bitter that other people around me were having healthy pregnancies and feeling stuck and angry at myself, too. So now I'm mad at myself for having these distressing emotions in the first place that I couldn't get out of it in some ways. And I think a lot of the times, too, is when I would try to think about, okay, what would I tell a client? What would I try to support someone else? What would I tell them? And while those were all maybe helpful things, in those moments, I was like, I don't want to do any of those things right now, actually, I don't have the energy. All I have the energy to do right now is just name what I'm feeling. And that's depending on the day, depending on the hour. Sadness, anger.

Bitterness, jealousy, confusion, all of those different things. So it was interesting because while I had all the different tools so available to me, I could not find the energy to reach for it. What I would find the energy for is just to be able to, again, use that phrase, white knuckle it through the day, allow myself to almost compartmentalize when I need to do the things that I need to do. And apart from that, give myself permission to be incredibly just not okay and messy and all the raw feelings in the world. And I think really that did wonders for me, being able to just let myself be that way for as long as I needed to.

And you shared with me before that I can questions and all that. So how did your grief. What. How different was your grief from your husband's grief? Did it work well together? Did at times it not align? What was that like?

Yeah. So us going through our miscarriages was the hardest thing our relationship has experienced up to that point. For sure. We had different experiences of the pregnancy where for me, and we talked, he and I had talked about this too, is the minute that that pregnancy test was positive, I felt this huge sense of attachment to the pregnancy. And while my husband was so excited about it, he was experiencing it differently. And just throughout that time, grief and loss too, our ways of coping with it was so different. Where for me, like I said, I was in the raw, the messy in that things are not okay. I am upset and sad and devastated. The way that he copes with things is trying to stay in the positive and to try to look for the silver linings. And I would get very angry if he would ever try to share those silver linings with me. Any of those statements of like, I can remember a specific memory, us coming out of the hospital after our first miscarriage and him saying, you know, at least it happens early, or at least we weren't that attached to it yet, right? And I'm just biting my tongue thinking I'm going to explode right now if I say something to you. So I'm just going to hold this in and just try to just work through what I'm feeling inside. So one of the challenges we had is that our ways of coping were very different too for him. And we, we that we ended up going to couples therapy, which we had been in for a while, but really being able to have the space to focus on this together is that for me, when I'm experiencing something that is really hard, like grief, I need to be able to talk about it. I want the permission to be able to not be happy, to not be able to put any kind of bow on it and just share that I am upset and I have no idea when that's going to end. But this is where I'm at for him. He really needs to be able to find hope and find positivity and things like that. And we struggled to support each other in those very, very different places. And something we found later too, after our second miscarriage is while I had done a lot of that kind of upfront work and being able to share what I was experiencing talking about it, his grief actually came months later. And I've noticed this with a lot of couples that I work with too, is that the non pregnant partner at times experiences delayed grief months after the loss because they feel so focused on, I need to make sure that my partner is okay, that they're taken care of. And everyone typically is focusing on the partner who physically had the miscarriage too, that the other partner almost gets left out of the story to a Certain degree. So my husband, months after the loss, started to say the things that I was feeling months ago. So almost like we were experiencing on a completely different timeline as well.

It's interesting with so many.

Men that I interviewed who said, you know, the question they got from everyone was how's your wife?

Yes, exactly.

And there was no how are you?

So I think that does get missed. And the other thing that we have to say here is as a man.

The day after my body isn't still changing.

Right, right.

I mean you're physically experiencing so much that we're not.

So I think that's also such a challenge that of course we're going to be in different places.

Right? Yeah. I think that is so spot on. And it's a reality that so many people either aren't aware of or again don't talk about as well too that for many of us, including myself, that after my miscarriages it's common that hcg, which is the hormone that's present during pregnancy, is elevated for weeks, sometimes months after your pregnancy has ended, you're still feeling all the pregnancy symptoms and things like that. For some women, they may have stretch marks, other body changes that every time you look in the mirror you can't forget what has happened. And like you said, for men, they don't have those same kind of physical reminders on the daily that is telling them that this thing happened. So I think you're completely right that the timeline of course is going to be completely different because we're going through dramatically different things. But we have this hope and expectation that oh, but you should get it because you're the one person in the world at this loss is, should mean as much to you as it does to me. So for us it was definitely psychologically, yes, yes.

Physically. The other thing, I don't know if you know exactly. I don't even know if there can be an exact thing. I heard it takes the woman's body six weeks up to a few months to actually get back to the pre pregnancy state.

Yeah, I don't know the exact number, but oftentimes it'll be at least a couple of months and especially it's going to depend on what kind of miscarriage you've had as well too. So for example, whether you have to do surgery versus it being at home and things like that, it can take quite a while for your body and the hormones and things like that to regulate again, which can be really challenging for people, especially if they want to be able to try to get Pregnant again. That there's this idea of like, I don't have any control, it feels like, over my life because I want to be able to continue sharing my family, but I'm not in control of that. I have to wait until this has left my body and my doctor says it's okay. Yeah.

So I have a couple of more questions for you. By the way, if anyone has questions on Facebook, you can feel free to put them in and we'll answer them. If you're in tender hearts, you can raise your hand and we'll answer them also.

All right.

So you're pregnant.

Yes.

So you're pregnant. You have a book coming out this week, the Miscarriage Map Workbook, which, by the way, is so helpful with grief in general.

Thank you.

Especially dealing with miscarriage. But it's just, you know, there's. And I gotta tell you, I'm just such a fan of writing and getting things out of our mind and putting it on paper. So I love the idea of that. And so this begs a number of questions, but. So you've got a book coming out on miscarriage, you've had two miscarriages and you're pregnant.

What's that like, anxiety provoking. Incredibly. So. The experience I've had in each of my pregnancies have been so completely different. With the first one, there was the immediate just like, excitement and happiness of like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that this is happening. And just all the hopefulness and celebration in the world. The second time there was a like, oh my gosh, this is happening again. And as I mentioned earlier, this the fear and the fears about attacking and letting myself actually hope and get excited for this pregnancy. And the fears again of, like, what if I do hope and I just have to fall flat on my face again and go through everything that I've been through. And we waited about two years before we even considered getting pregnant again. Because after that there was a sense of like, we need to slow down. We need to be able to really, truly process what has happened for us here. And I will say, even with that time, it still made it scary. Incredibly scary that when. Even though I wanted this so much that when I got that positive test again, it was a similar kind of response to the second one of, oh my gosh, this is happening, this is happening again. I think the only thing that really felt different here was that with my first two pregnancies, I had so many ideas around, okay, if I was just careful with this, if I just did this and Maybe this wouldn't happen this time. I got to a point with this pregnancy where I learned, okay, you can do all the things and you can't prevent anything from happening. Which was both oddly comforting and terrifying at the same time. So I think just throughout this pregnancy there's been this experience of fear and hope and excitement as well as some renewed grief, too. As I get excited for this pregnancy, it certainly brings up just reminders of the two pregnancies that we had before. The thoughts of, I wonder what those. I wonder what those little girls would have been like. I wonder how they would have been. I wonder if they could have had. If they were here, we would have had three girls. So all of those different ideas kind of go through my mind as well too, of not only the excitement, the fear of this pregnancy, but it just brings up just our past experiences, which I think happens to a lot of folks who've experienced miscarriage, is that you're so excited and at the same time that grief can really be re triggered when you're pregnant again.

When are you due?

Roughly in two and a half weeks, actually. So pretty soon.

All right, you're coming in for a landing.

Yes. Yes.

Wow.

Yeah.

And.

You know, the honesty you have and the vulnerability is so important.

On some level. All of us in grief have to make these little and big decisions to live again.

Right.

Allowing yourself to go on a ride of pregnancy again, have another go at it.

Is a bit of a decision to live again. Do you. Did you know that? Or were you more like, let me just make sure I've addressed the grief as much as I can and knowing it's going to still come up.

Yeah. You know, it really was a decision point for us after our second miscarriage where we had lived in the. We were living in the suburbs, we were ready for family life. And for the first time we start to think about what would it be like if we didn't have children? What would that path in our life look like? It was something that we had never explored before, but there was something that also felt important about being able to acknowledge that this huge life changing thing happened. So now we're having huge, life changing conversations as well too. So we started to think about, okay, let's imagine that for a little while, let's take a pause, give ourselves time to grieve. And I think again, we needed that in order to see, first of all, what did having children really mean to us? I think for us at least, what we experience is that we always knew we wanted it, but we never took the time to really question and think about it together as a couple. So being able to take that time and realizing, okay, yes, we do want this, and we were willing to endure the fear and the anxiety and the confusion and all the different things to try to make this happen was a decision point that we came to. But we needed that time. We needed that time to be able to slow down, to process, to reconnect, to individually be witnessed as well before we could actually come to that decision point two years later.

Right?

Yeah.

Let me read a couple things people have written here. This is from Facebook and just know also, we'll be in Tender Hearts fully in a moment. So if you're in Tender hearts, you can always go into the link that you should have in your announcements and schedule. All right, let's see here.

There was one person who said that.

She works in this field professionally, and you're spot on. Lisa says, my brother Andrew was a stillbirth when I was 8 years old. I still wonder how our family would have been if he lived. And I am 48.

Katie says, Love you dearly. And this is tough for me. I had seven pregnancies and only two survived. I still can't talk about it. Big hugs to everyone.

It's a lot. It's a lot to deal with, isn't it?

It is.

All right, we've got Guatemala here. Wonderful. AJ says as a perinatal mental health professional and as a woman who experienced a miscarriage, I can relate on so many levels.

Lisa says, my four year old. As a four year old, my brother Benjamin was angry for years. He never got to have Andrew as a little brother. It took a long time for adults to realize that was why he was acting out. I was mostly sad. It's interesting. Have you thought about.

Sometimes we talk about that as the shadow child. How.

Is it a boy girl? Do you know or. Yeah, it's a girl.

Yeah.

So when she's older, will she know? Have you thought about that fine line of sharing and not sharing and all that?

Yeah, I think it's definitely something that we plan to share because it feels like such an important part of our story and actually her middle. We've already thought of her name. It's going to be Anya Olivia. And Olivia was actually the name that we'd always chosen for a girl. And for our second pregnancy, we had wanted to name her Olivia. So we incorporated her name into that. And so it's something that we've always known that when she is ready, we want to be able to share this with her. And it feels so important to do that, too, to be able to make this be known, because it's a part of our story now. I mentioned earlier there was a point where I had hoped that if we were able to get pregnant again and quickly enough, that this could be just a little sad footnote in an otherwise just happy narrative about our life. And at the same time, this is not a footnote. This is a huge part of our life. This was two losses that we had, two babies that we lost. And it's going to be something that's going to be a part of our family just history that we plan to definitely share with her.

I grew up with.

Strange feelings on my birthday. It was just. I don't know. It was just somehow as a child, I knew something was up about my birthday. And of course, as a child, you think, well, I don't know. What is that? You know, you don't know. And years later, as an adult, decades after my mom had died, I had found out that she had had a child before I was born. And when I began doing a search to see if I could find out what happened, the person who was like, they have detectives that do.

Said to me, you know, all right, we found a baby born February 16th. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's me. That's my birthday. And they were like, yeah, no, this is too old for you. And I'm like, wait a minute. My mother had a child before on my birthday.

Wow.

You know, and it was like, what would it have been like if at some point she said, you're so important? And if you ever see mommy being a little sad this day, you know, even as an adult, if I had sort of known that. So it's interesting how those things, you know, come up around these, you know, loved ones who were no longer here.

You know, I think it's so important that you share that, too, because it makes me even just think. One of the most validating interactions I had once about our miscarriages was with my husband's nephew, who was maybe like, five years old or so, and they had maybe seven. He. They had shared the news about our pregnancy and then shared the news about our miscarriage. And I remember him making a comment of there being like a ghost baby. That was. He's like, I can see the ghost baby. It's in the house with us. And I remember everyone was, like, mortified of like, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry that he said that. That's so inappropriate. And I think I'm like, oh, someone's finally talking about it. And he's picking up on something here that whether it's it's me, maybe I imagine it's the emotion that I was carrying into the room. And he was able to notice that. And being able to talk about that openly felt incredibly validating to me. And I think important for him too, because he had all these questions and had a sense, like you said, kids can pick up on this kind of thing. They have a sense there. So I felt so important to be able to actually to acknowledge that and have a conversation about it. Felt. Felt really good.

What is the difference between a miscarriage and a stillbirth? I know the timing, but go ahead.

Yeah, so a miscarriage is when it occurs, or stillbirth is after 20 weeks. And miscarriage would be before that time period. And miscarriage is much more common. And I will say a lot of times perinatal loss in general gets kind of like umbrellaed together. And while as you mentioned earlier, too, grief can have so many similarities across different types, there definite can be just qualitative differences based on what my specific experience is, whether it's a miscarriage or whether it's a stillbirth.

The other thing I learned doing my chapter on miscarriage is.

In the medical system, people seem to either do it really well or really poorly.

Yes.

And it was amazing how, you know, there were the people who sort of knew how important this was and how to deal with it, and there were others who just some of the. The names I would hear and how what was your baby was being referred to. I was like horrified.

Yes.

And so. Oh my gosh, got to do such a better job than.

Yeah, I completely agree. That was something that actually I remember it affecting my husband quite a lot of. On the paperwork when at least the hospital we went to our miscarriage and then the surgery we had to do afterwards was referred to as a spontaneous abortion, which felt, of course, very different from our experience of how we were living it and having to hear that word be repeated or that phrase repeated over and over and over again and other types of medical terms that were just quite painful to hear. And even just some of the responses from people as well, too, of at times I would be just crying in the office as I'm hearing this news and someone saying, it's okay, this just was not meant to be. It was God's plan or different things like that. And I know that there's a good intention there. And at the Same time, all I could hear was like, you don't get it right now. And I imagine you are uncomfortable with my griefs. You were trying to tell me something to make me stop crying or being unhappy.

Boy, we can miss the pain.

Yes, yes.

The other thing I was amazed at when I was working on writing about miscarriage. I do as I do so many times. I have a dictionary, I looked at miscarriage and I saw a failure. And I'm like, oh, my goodness, this is like an old dictionary. How could you? And then I went online to new dictionaries and it's like, wait, you're still defining miscarriage as a failure in the dictionary? How's that possible?

Yeah, it is shocking to me how the terminology has not caught up in any kind of way and how it just reinforces all those painful beliefs that we were talking about earlier of blaming and isolation and guilt and shame and all of it.

All right, we're going to move. We're going to wrap up in Facebook here and go into Tender Hearts, but I want to just talk about this for a moment. The Miscarriage Map Workbook. Oh, my gosh, it's so good.

Coming out this week, right? Amazon everywhere. We can find it. I'll put up a link. And how can people find you? Website, social media, all of that?

Yeah, they can find me at www.sunita doctorsanitaosborne.com, as well as the group practice that I work at, Modern Therapy in Houston. Is mymoderntherapy.com wonderful.

And once again, is the Miscarriage Map Workbook. Like I said, I love a workbook. And so much of it is about grief and the universality of it. And I love that you are sharing your story so openly. So thank you for that. For those of you on Facebook, remember, this is next week. A year ago this started. So beginning Monday through Friday of next week, I'm going to go on at 12:30 Pacific.

Every day next week with a different topic like I did last year to commemorate it, and we'll get together again. It was so important. I'm going to put up a video that I did around that so you can hear me talking about it. I hope to see you next week here as we go through that. Dr. Osborne, thank you so much for sharing yourself, your story, your work. It isn't easy, and it isn't easy, I know, to be in the field and write about it and go through it and share it, so. So thank you so much. If you're in Tender Hearts, hop over to the link. We're continuing in there. And we'll just say goodbye now to our Facebook family, and I'll see you next week.

Thank you. And thank you all so much for being here.