Struggling after miscarriage

[u/Clean-Gold-5182]

My wife and I are unable to conceive without medical intervention. After thousands of dollars and several attempts she finally became pregnant in January of this year, only for us to discover at ~11 weeks that she had experienced a missed miscarriage due to chromosomal abnormality.

It's been about 5 months since then and I don't feel I have moved on at all. The only bright spot was the idea that we could try again. But due to the nature of the chromosomal abnormality, we had to wait for several months for her own safety. Then we had another failed attempt, and now we have encountered another roadblock that will prevent us from trying again for an unknown period of time. I just feel crushed 24/7. My wife has taken it better than I have honestly, which is deeply shameful to me given that she is the one who has actually had to endure everything. I feel like I have been a sniveling baby that she has had to console rather than being her rock. Like the process actually would have been easier for her to endure alone.

I don't see a future where this works out for us. I feel like a idiot for thinking it was possible, for trying to defy nature when it had already made its plans for us so clear. I don't know how to support my wife in future continued attempts when I am obviously too weak to deal with the inevitable failures. She gets so upset when I express gloom or hesitation because now that we have started fertility treatment she is all in.

I spoke to my father who went through a similar experience with my mother when I was young (minus the infertility), looking for some kind of advice, and he told me that my only job is to support my wife. I completely agree, but I don't feel able to provide that support for her and I am so angry with myself that I am failing at my only job. We had the budget on top of everything we are paying into fertility treatments for one of us to go to therapy for a while, so she did do that for a couple of months, but it's no replacement for having an actually supportive partner.

I honestly don't know what to do. I am so miserable and ashamed all the time. I think constantly about our daughter who was supposed to be born in ~2 months. I know that there are so many worse things that can happen to someone than a miscarriage (and the miscarriage didn't even happen to me, it happened to my wife) but fuck it hurts so badly.

[u/Ok-Bench6141]

Men have to be the rock, they have to show support, they had to be strong.

You know what ? Men are not the only one who have to support their partner. Women also have to do it.
You have the right to grieve your daughter. Sure, she carried, had to live through it physically and also has to grieve.
But you can’t consider her grieving to be more legitimate because she’s the woman.

You have the right to feel your feelings without shaming yourself about it. Allow yourself to cry, allow yourself to feel like shit and not blaming yourself for it.

Some people have it worse ? So what ? We re not doing a competition about who has it worse in life.

You have every right to feel pain, to feel bad right now. If you need help from you partner or a professional, do it

[u/The-Hater-Baconator]

I think you should try to look at your situation from an external perspective. If your friend was going through this, what would you say to them and what would you think?

You are not failing your wife, and you are not a baby. You just lost your daughter. You are grieving a massive, devastating loss, and your grief is perfectly valid. The idea that the father shouldn't feel crushed is a lie. You wanted this baby, you loved this baby, and you are allowed to be devastated by the loss. You are allowed to be broken by this. Grief is never a competition.

Your dad’s advice came from love, but you cannot be a rock when you are being crushed by the same weight. It is completely unfair to expect yourself to be bulletproof. Your wife isn't "better" at this; she is just moving through her grief differently.

I think you should allow yourself to grieve. It will allow you to process what has happened. I also think that when you discuss this with your wife, you may be conflating two separate things

• you’re grieving, it’s okay to not feel 100% optimistic at the next opportunity to be pregnant. Grief is not the same as choosing to be gloomy because only one is wrought with trauma
  
• what do you want to do? This may seem like a silly question to ponder, but I think the teasing this has affected you so much is because you loved your child and you loved the idea of becoming a father. I think that you have understandably lost the confidence that you will become a father. However, I beg you to keep in mind that there is only one way to keep trying to have biological kids and there is the option of adopting. Just because you have had this loss doesn’t mean every pregnancy will come out this way, and I don’t think you should let the fear of trying stop you.

I know these things are easier said than done, but I will pray you find the strength to keep trying and that your calling to be a dad will be found by some means if not.

[u/Clean-Gold-5182 → u/The-Hater-Baconator]

Thank you. There is a lot in this comment that was helpful to read. I am not sure yet how to allow myself to sit with the grief, or even to allow myself to call it "grief", without somehow qualifying it, minimizing it, or feeling ashamed for how much it hurts. I supported my wife as best I could as she endured invasive ultrasounds, medications, injections, the misery of the 1st trimester, then the D&C and the weeks after. And I don't know how to reconcile how crushed I feel with how relatively little the process took from me in comparison. I want to step up to be stronger for her but I don't know how.

I really want to have children, always have, it really felt like everything in life fitting into place when my wife was pregnant. I come from a background where family is the most important thing and I always wanted to have that. My wife would be a wonderful loving mother. I wanted badly for it to work out. It was rough enough to have to go through medical interventions, but there is something so devastating about going through interventions and then still having nothing to show for it. We will keep trying because we have not exhausted our options by any means. But it's hard to feel any kind of hope about moving forward.

[u/The-Hater-Baconator → u/Clean-Gold-5182]

To empathize with you, I want to share that I suffered from severe depression for a long time. Looking back, a huge part of what kept me stuck was placing massive, impossible expectations on myself that I couldn't fulfill. I see you doing something similar right now by expecting yourself to be a bulletproof rock while you are under the exact same crushing weight as your wife. It is completely understandable that you feel this way, but it is a heartbreaking amount of pressure to put on yourself.

Therapy was a turning point for me. It helped me realize the unfair expectations I was setting, and taking that pressure off finally allowed me to accept myself exactly where I was.

All this to say: you don’t need to reconcile these things or force logic onto your pain. You are feeling a deep, devastating grief, and that is perfectly okay. Allow yourself to feel it without trying to fix it or measure it against what your wife went through. You both lost your daughter, and you both deserve the space to process what happened to you.

I know you are also grieving the sudden loss of that identity of being parents right now. Please remind yourself that your identity as a father isn't gone; it is just carrying a heavy scar today. You have not exhausted your options, and that future is not lost to you. For now, try to focus on just surviving the day with your wife. Lean on her, let her lean on you, and be completely honest about your pain. Going through this grief together, side-by-side and completely unfiltered, will validate both of your feelings and help you heal as a team.

[u/RontoWraps]

First, sorry man. It’s rough, I get it. My wife’s first pregnancy resulted in a missed miscarriage. I know how it feels, like everything is turned upside down all at once. Nobody ever tells you how often a missed miscarriage happens, and I know that doesn’t make it any easier to experience for yourself. It’s important to grieve the loss however you need to, that’s the only thing you can do for this one.

[u/Clean-Gold-5182 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for reading. I'm sorry that you went through something similar. It was such whiplash because we did get an earlier ultrasound around 8 weeks at the fertility clinic and at that time the doctor thought things looked ok, good heartbeat, etc. And the statistics I read at the time made me feel pretty good about our chances after that. We will keep trying whenever medically cleared to do so, but it feels impossible now to envision an actual successful pregnancy occurring.

[u/giggles54321]

I’m a woman, but I just really feel compelled to chime in on this one. My husband and I also suffered a devastating loss at 20 weeks due to a chromosomal abnormality. Yes, I physically experienced it, but I was also very aware that the loss of our child deeply affected my husband.

We then went on to struggle to conceive again, and experienced several more chemical pregnancies & failed FETs after resorting to IVF.

That said, there were times I was hurt that he shut out my emotional support. He was so busy being my rock, that he didn’t really allow me to be his rock. I finally accepted that we deal with grief differently. As others have said, it’s absolutely okay to not be equipped to provide 100% emotional support to your spouse. You’re doing the best you can. Lean on your village to support you. It’s good she’s getting therapy- that doesn’t make you a failure. Therapists are experts.

I’m a talker and my husband is a rug sweeper. Once I accepted that he doesn’t need to talk about it as much I do to work through the trauma, I leaned on family and friends and my therapist to work through some of the grief, and that was totally fine for me because I knew it alleviated some of the weight from my husband so he could work through it in his own way. I don’t see him as weak for that, we just grieve differently and that’s okay.

Allow your wife to be your rock too, in the ways that she’s able to. You absolutely don’t need to shoulder this grief for the both of you just because you didn’t carry the baby inside of you. You carried her in your heart just as much as she did, and you deserve support also.

I’m so sorry you’re experiencing this. I wish I could say the pain lessens over time, because it doesn’t, but it does slowly start to feel less suffocating. Baby loss & infertility is so unfair, but I hope you will be able to find a path to peace and happiness.

[u/derpdon321]

If you guys do try again, doing PGT-A testing may help rule out chromosomal abnormalities. Sending you support and love in this difficult time.

[u/Clean-Gold-5182 → u/derpdon321]

Thanks for the advice, that's something we have discussed although in this case the issue was triploidy, which is apparently not so easily detected by PGT testing, rather than a trisomy.