What to Say and What to Do If Your Wife or Partner Has a Miscarriage
Once you find out that your wife is pregnant, especially for the first time, you will never reach the depths of despair that tears you apart when you learn that she will have a miscarriage. But this is just the beginning.
There are days leading up to a true miscarriage. Then the physically painful process of miscarriage. And after that, the emotional devastation continued.
I cried. Lot.
With my wife.
And alone.
If you are experiencing this, or have already experienced it, this is nothing new. And if not, I hope he never finds out. But it’s important to know what you must or can do to help your wife or partner get through the miscarriage and everything before and after.
Here are a few things you can do after losing your pregnancy.
Know your options
After the doctor comes out of the doctor’s mouth that the ultrasound did not confirm the heartbeat confirming what you already feared, you will both be numb. You don’t want to do anything other than lie in bed, cry and disappear.
No matter how devastated and frustrated you are, just remember that your wife will be more emotionally broken. She, like no one else, will feel that she is doing nothing but accompany suffering. And it is right. You have to stay strong for her. Strong enough to get out of bed and know what comes next and what to do next.
Help her find resources to learn about different ways to end a miscarriage, such as this post, which talks about several ways to terminate an unsuccessful pregnancy – naturally, pills, surgery.
My wife went through it naturally. Our doctor told us to go home, wait for the natural miscarriage, and then return for the examination to see if there is anything else to be done.
But explore all your options and decide what will be more convenient for you and your wife.
Stay awake, pat her back
If your wife has a natural miscarriage, it can happen at any time of the day. My wife had a miscarriage late at night. I made sure she didn’t go through it alone.
She was in pain all the time. I did everything I could to comfort her. I made sure not to fall asleep during all this and rubbed her back. Later she told me that I could not help her better than what I did.
Be that as it may, do what you need to make her feel comfortable: stay up, massage her back, massage her feet, give her a warm compress.
Tell her she’s not broken
Your wife will say this inwardly and out loud. With tears in my eyes and an earthquake in my throat. That she’s broken.
She will wonder if something is wrong with her. It should be. Because why else would a living being die inside her body? This is her fault.
So stay close to her. Keep her. Pain is both physical and emotional. And you will never know if one is worse than the other. So tell her she’s not broken. It’s not her fault. No one is to blame for this.
And you can even back it up with scientific evidence. If she has surgery to terminate a failed pregnancy, you can check to see if something has happened to the fetus. And if everything went well, you can learn what you can do to prevent another miscarriage in the future. It’s also important to note that miscarriages often happen just like that, and this can be the most frustrating experience to deal with.
Tell her how you feel
Let her know that she is not alone. What do you feel, how the world is crumbling on you too.
You try to stay strong for both of you, but you also feel hurt. Tell her that she hasn’t lost her mind over the fact that her heart is broken over the loss of someone she has never met.
It is very important for her to go through the process of grief and healing. But that’s a lot about you too. And you need to release whatever is bubbling within you so that you too can heal.
Feed her
Deep depression sets in. Taking care of yourself and your wife is physically important, especially for someone who has just lost a lot of blood and nutrients during a miscarriage.
Some people may find it easy to eat as it helps them cope with grief. But others, like my wife, were not interested in food or water. Make sure both of you are still drinking fluids and eating enough.
Talk about it
You may not be able to tell other people about what happened for a while. But this is important because not many people do this. So when you feel ready, tell people that you were expecting, but you had a miscarriage. When people realize that miscarriages are happening more often than they think, it helps. Those who have gone through this, and those who will not feel alone.
My wife and I didn’t have a chance to tell people we were pregnant before she had a miscarriage in 2013. Some might suspect that we were leaving for several months. As we slowly began to talk about what had happened, we learned that many others had indeed gone through the same thing. It really helped to learn that miscarriages are common. Because we realized that this was happening. It’s not just us. We’re all right.
Normalize the discussion of miscarriages because it really helps.