When you don’t tell people, they are oblivious to how deeply you are suffering

Iwill never know what I was doing that moment when your hearts started beating. And I will also never know what I was doing the moment that those same hearts stopped.

Life is comprised of the stories we tell ourselves, and wow, do I have a story for you. My identical twin babies, riding on the wings of Hashem’s brachos, and all the tefillos and mitzvos that were being done in your zechus.

Identical twin girls! I could envision you sleeping together in a single crib, cuddling up against each other. I could picture you, one in each giant arm of your off-the-growth-charts three-year-old brother, while he beamed for the camera. Your older sisters would spoil you. Our eldest, our ben bechor, would be the hero you’d look up to, and at his bar mitzvah a few months after you were born, you’d lie in your double stroller gurgling while he read from the Torah. As you grew up, you’d dress in matching outfits and whisper to each other while you giggled late into the night.

Now I must tell myself a different story, a story that will get me through the heartache and pain of never seeing any of those moments occur anywhere but my mind’s eye. I must tell myself a story that will make sense of how this could possibly happen in the second trimester when we naively thought we were in the clear. A story of how we will now move forward with a different reality for our year ahead, and for the rest of our lives.

Miscarriage is a visceral pain not often spoke about, which in some ways makes it all the more painful. When you don’t tell people, they are oblivious to how deeply you are suffering; they stop you in the grocery aisle to joke about something, or shoot the breeze, or ask you about something incongruous. They smile at you and can’t understand why your usual cheeriness doesn’t match theirs in return. It’s like you have a personal-yet-invisible-rain cloud over your head that makes everyone else puzzle over the fact that you are the only one drenched on an otherwise sunny day.

There’s so much you can’t know about someone as they go about the mundane necessities of life, as they stand next to you searching for the unblemished bananas, and stock up on sale items. But know that almost everyone you encounter is fighting their own battles.

The pink line barely showed on the pregnancy test, and I remember looking at it from various angles just to be sure. That same murky uncertainty followed me through the next month of the pregnancy.