Josh Reiman

One of the most difficult relationship lessons I’ve learned is that I don’t have the answers to everything that may afflict my partner. Sure, once in a while I may be able to provide an idea or loving insight that helps, born from the intimate connection I share with her. More times than not though, I’ve come to understand that the best I can do is be present and show support for her, while she processes and figures out the way forward in a manner that works best for her.

When I started to really understand this dimension to my relationship with my partner , it felt revelatory. My instinct is to find a way to make pain, sadness, or discomfort for her go away. But with enough experience, I finally learned to accept that I don’t have the answers most of the time, and that this is okay. In truth, it is probably the biggest lesson I have learned in my marriage. 

And yet, I still fail to practice it all the time. 

I regularly struggle to find the balance between listening, showing empathy, and knowing when it’s the right time to suggest a way forward. This context was my starting point when my wife and I began to have a string of non-viable pregnancies, a term I prefer over miscarriage. ‘Miscarriage’, to me, feels so unfairly descriptive of a woman’s body doing something in error, when she has done absolutely nothing “wrong”. 

When our OBGYN brought up birth control seven months into my wife’s initial pregnancy, we almost laughed. We were both approaching forty and the idea of going back onto some form of contraception at that stage of our lives when we wanted more children was not something we were interested in. I was already excited about the prospect of having another one, too. Without even planning for it, six months after our son was born, we got pregnant. Given it was so soon following our first pregnancy, we did not think much of it when that pregnancy turned out to not be viable. However, over the next two years we continued to get pregnant over a handful of times. Sometimes they would last seven or eight weeks, but more often, the pregnancies ended themselves earlier. Those early weeks were always so full of hope, nervousness, and fear - a classic recipe for constant anxiety. Sometimes I would experience these feelings in succession. Other times I felt the weight of all of them, as if they were stacked on my heart, one on top of the other. 

My wife and I started to develop a routine to our experience of loss, however, it was a routine that devolved with each passing non-viable pregnancy. Excitement at the beginning and belief that this time would be different gradually turned into a process of retaining some level of hope, but preparing ourselves for the worst. 

I realized I lived each day post positive pregnancy test dreading the moment my wife would inform me, “I’m bleeding.” I received the news many ways, at her side, via phone call, text, or the most wrenching, my wife bitterly walking by me in our house and saying the words not so much to me, but out loud, in my vicinity, so I would know but also indicating she wanted to process this alone.

What is hard to say out loud, but is the truth, is that emotionally and psychologically, with each loss, the sadness I felt was increasingly surpassed by fear and anxiety of how it would impact my wife, and in turn, how her reaction would impact me and our household for the coming weeks. In theory, I understood, going back to our early years together, that the painful emotions she was experiencing simply needed to be felt and processed at her own pace. I needed to help her feel supported while she navigated a deluge of pain, sadness, and frustration. I felt no judgment toward her, or her anger, or her grief. But it is hard to live in a home where those feelings pervade your communal space. I was also slow to recognize I was so consumed in bracing myself for her emotional release and how I would respond that I was not tending to my own emotional needs. 

Even though we experienced recurrent pregnancy loss, I continued to feel optimistic one would eventually work out. I was relatively quick to move on and look to the future, something that is admittedly easier for someone in my position, as the one who was not physically experiencing the loss. Moreover, I am someone who processes my emotions by talking about them. In this case, attempting to understand a web of complex emotions by trying to articulate them to my wife and friends. Losing a pregnancy can be such a painful, private experience though. My wife, understandably, felt that after the heartbreak from the first few losses that this was not something she wanted out in the open each time. This was less due to shame about the loss, and more because she did not want to feel like she needed to respond to each message of sympathy, thereby prolonging her own grieving process. By solely focusing on the caregiving part of myself, and ignoring how to process my own grief, I was slowly crumbling inside. At my lowest point, I found myself at work, alone in a hotel conference room, sobbing on the phone to one of our closest shared friends about everything. 

These experiences led my wife and I to therapy which helped us understand how to take a step back and talk deeply about how we each process grief, and how we can work together to support and respect each other’s needs during  difficult times. We talk more now in advance about who we want to open up to about grief or sensitive subjects that involve us both. It gives each of us an opportunity to say if we are uncomfortable with the other sharing with a particular person. 

It’s been said that the essence of Toni Morrison’s work is that it “shows us through pain all the myriad ways we can come to love.” I have to remind myself that grief and loss will always be a part of life, and that surrendering to this process actually allows for new beginnings. By choosing to share my life with my wife, I am also signing up for the complicated moments between us that accompany tragedy. I can become better at loving in my life through the pain that will inevitably touch me.

It will always tear at my heart and cause some anxiety when I see my wife struggling to navigate her own sadness or grief. However, recognizing that those feelings are hers to authentically experience and that I can find people to release my own grief with makes me feel equipped for the next time we encounter grief in our lives.