Women

I've been carrying a secret. It is a heavy, invisible secret that moves drunkenly around my mind. It's a secret that is hard to talk about with anybody but my husband. It's a secret that has become the conversation of my prayers.

It's the miscarriage secret.

And as soon as somebody finds out about my secret, they tell me theirs. Never have I traded secrets with so many near-strangers. "I had two of my own," the older nurse putting an IV in my arm tells me. Then she gently moves the hair from my forehead like I'm her daughter.

When my husband leaves work for a doctor's appointment and doesn't come back that afternoon, he has to explain to one of his colleagues. His colleague understands the miscarriage secret. He tells my husband his own and says to treat me kindly because this secret is something I will never completely forget.

I was 11 weeks along when my husband and I saw the ultrasound tech's face tense up. I read the news in her body language before I could comprehend the silence that reverberated throughout the room in the absence of a heartbeat. The sadness met us forcefully. We wondered at the pain we felt for the loss of someone we never knew.

As I experience the grief of miscarriage, I am struck by the hush-hush method with which our culture treats an extremely widespread women's issue. In some ways, I'm grateful for the privacy granted me. In the first few months, it was an extraordinarily painful thing to talk about–even ...

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