When I was in college, sometimes the only private place I had to go was in my car. I drove all over Oklahoma City that first year, getting lost and finding my way back again. Sometimes, I even ventured out into neighboring towns, depending on the breadth of contemplation I was undergoing at the time. I came upon many crossroads, forks in the road, and endless highways. At dead ends, I had to turn around and go in a different direction altogether.

People don’t talk about miscarriages. Much. Maybe its something they want to keep private, or maybe there’s some external pressure to keep it under wraps. For me, I’ve been quiet about it—for the most part—because I didn’t want to make anyone else sad and I fell in line with the notion that ladies don’t talk about such things. But I’m ready to talk about it. In a way, I need to talk about it. There’s a pull inside me to find out and connect with other women who have shared a similar experience, and how can I do that unless I put it out there?

In November, I joined a club I never wanted to be in—the pregnancy loss club. My loss is minor compared to what some women have gone through. I was only seven weeks along when I had a D&C to take care of it. It’s easy for me to compare my loss to others and feel the need to get over it. I’ve been sucking it up all this time, but, as trauma tends to do, my not working through it has compromised my emotional well-being.

We all have our own unique ways of dealing with things, and I don’t mean to suggest that women should or shouldn’t go public when they have a miscarriage. But through therapy (yes, I see a therapist—loud and proud therapy participant right here), I’ve discovered that I need community. And it helps me to tell my story.

In my case, I was pregnant with a “blighted ovum”. You can look it up, but my doctor told me that there was probably going to be something wrong with the baby, so nature took its course. The problem was that my body still thought it was pregnant, so I was going into the doctor sick as a dog and happy to be so, thinking that the raging hormones making me sick was a good sign. “This is a loss. You’re going to grieve,” my doctor told me. It’s true, but this has been a strange grief. It hasn’t been anything like the losses I’ve experienced before. In all of my other confrontations with death, I grieved for what was. Now, I grieve for what could have been.

From the moment I learned I was pregnant, I knew it was a little girl. We even picked out a name, which I will keep to myself since I might like to save it for a living child one day. When I called my Mama to tell her I was expecting, she said, “Well my, my, my!” and was so excited that her words started getting ahead of her on the phone. We started calling the freshly fertilized egg “Lizard” as a code word, because when we asked our four-year-old if he would like to have a little brother or sister, he said without hesitation, “I want a lizard.”

I called my doctor and we formulated a plan to titrate off my meds. I stocked up on prenatal vitamins and cut out all of the things you’re supposed to cut out when expecting:  wine, soft cheese, raw sushi, cold lunchmeat. We made an appointment with the obstetrician, and Joey made plans to go with me. Even though I was sick as a dog, I gained fifteen pounds from eating bland carbohydrates. I could see the weight gain in the mirror at the gym, but all would be well once I was able to announce my pregnancy to the world. Then everyone would understand the extra pooch over the waistband of my pants.

In the waiting room at that first OB visit, Joey and I began to formulate what we would say in that first Facebook post. A second child wouldn’t warrant the same type of announcement as our first child—where we shared the news via a family event and a special email out to all my co-workers. A Facebook post would be sufficient, but we wanted it to be worded just right. The child might look back on it years down the road, and we would want that child to feel loved right from the start. They told us it was probably too early to see everything in that first ultrasound, so they had me come back in for bloodwork a couple of times and scheduled a follow-up ultrasound. The bloodwork came back with good levels of heightened pregnancy hormones, and that made everyone in our small circle confident that everything was just fine. I was so confident that I told Joey he didn’t need to come to the second ultrasound.

In the waiting room that second time, I watched a teenage girl with a nervous smile—a girl that I had taught a couple years before—go back with her boyfriend to be seen on the OB side of the office. I had been pregnant the first time alongside some of my students, and I found it strange. Here I was, once again, sharing in the maternal journey with someone half my age.

The rest of it went by so fast it is almost already a blur in my memory. I remember being told by the ultrasound technician that she did not see the fetus, and I took a deep and accepting breath. My doctor said, “It’s not working out”, and I cried. Afterwards, I went to the bathroom and overheard an excited mother breathing a sigh of relief about something and talking to the same doctor about next steps in the pregnancy. It occurred to me then how strange it must be to work in a profession delivering devastating news to one person, then turning around to deliver happy news to the next in line. I felt sorry for everyone who had to care for me through this process. How awkward it must be for them, I thought.

There was certainly a great deal of pain initially, but a prolonged suffering has been in the aftermath. I can’t bear to open Pinterest right now because the social media gods have decided to fill my feed with baby stuff. It’s not so bad when a friend posts that she’s expecting; for the most part, I’m genuinely happy for an expectant mother. It’s hard to see the medical bills from the procedure I had to undergo, so I’ll be triumphantly glad when I can pay those off. Medical jargon is what it is, but the fact that the type of miscarriage I had is referred to as a “missed abortion” gets under my skin.

The most surreal part of the whole ordeal was signing a document that designated where the fetal remains were to be sent. In my case, the embryo was absorbed back into my body; of course that didn’t stop anyone from taking the other tissues to a lab and charging me for it.

I’m here at this dead end and it is time to turn around. I’ve been sitting here for months trying to figure out a way to forge a path through, to pave over uneven, rocky ground and get over it. But sometimes getting over rough ground just tears up your car.