Excerpt by Elizabeth Narins via Cosmopolitan.com
Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced his wife’s pregnancy on Facebook. With the news, he shared that the pregnancy hadn’t come easily — the couple experienced three miscarriages in the past two years.
Mark’s message drew lots of attention because duh, it’s Mark Zuckerberg, but also because you don’t often hear frank talk from guys about what it’s like to deal with a miscarriage. Oftentimes, it’s considered the woman’s loss and a guy’s job to provide support.
So Cosmopolitan.com reached out to three men from across the country who’ve lost unborn children to share their stories.
Michael Barber: “I didn’t share the news with anyone.”
Michael, 34, and his wife Melissa, 27, with their son Moses, 9 months.
Courtesy of Michael Barber
We’d just gotten engaged when my wife Melissa, who was 23 at the time, got pregnant. We had no idea until she started heavily bleeding at work, and her doctor said she was having a miscarriage. Because I didn’t even know about the baby, it wasn’t that traumatic for me; Melissa had a tougher time with it. Personally, I wasn’t particularly depressed or relieved or worried we wouldn’t be able to have kids. I just accepted that it was nature telling us the egg wasn’t sitting right. I didn’t share the news with anyone because I’m generally not the kind of person who likes to talk about personal things.
Shortly after the first miscarriage while we were still planning our wedding, Melissa got pregnant again. This time it was totally different: We told both of our families about the baby and started getting our home kid-ready.
But four months into her pregnancy, Melissa started spotting at work. At the hospital, the doctors delivered the bad news: She was going to have a miscarriage. We could barely process the information before they sent us home.
Melissa was devastated and blamed herself, so I tried to hide how much it was hurting to me to show her that things were going to be OK.
Losing that second baby hurt me just as much as it hurt her — it was both of our losses. I didn’t know whether we’d be able to get pregnant again, and I was very upset. I wondered why it was happening to us, but the doctors just said it sometimes happens when the baby isn’t healthy.
I didn’t talk to anyone besides Melissa about it because I’m the kind of person who holds stuff in. I didn’t think anyone would want to hear a guy complain about something like this, but I’d say I was mildly depressed.
For two days after we got home from the hospital, Melissa and I stayed up talking without watching TV, going on the Internet, or using the phone. We talked about our lives together, the future, our childhoods, and how we wanted to raise our kids. It was a pivotal point in our relationship and a time I’ll always remember. It was like a good thing — strengthening our bond — came out of this terrible thing.
We decided to take the second miscarriage as a sign that we should wait to get pregnant until after our wedding. We didn’t really start trying again until almost a year later, not because we were scared we’d have another miscarriage, but because we were preoccupied with wedding planning and wanted to do things the “right” way. Now that we have our son Moses, we feel like God waited to give us a perfect baby at the perfect time.
Read the full article here: http://bit.ly/1hDFwKI
