When Losing a Pregnancy Leads to Losing Friends
I didn’t know if our relationships could hold my grief and their joy all at once. So I disappeared.
As the mother of a gregarious 5-year-old boy, I experience parenthood in all its wonder and burnout. I’ve also had four miscarriages, which I continue to grieve. Those losses have led to others: I’ve let go of close relationships with friends who got pregnant with their first, and then second, and then third babies. At times, I’ve found their joy too painful to watch.
When people casually post their ultrasound photos on Instagram, I shut my eyes and breathe through flashbacks of my own devastating scans. If we aren’t close, I “like” the post and then unfollow them. No one has ever confronted me about it; I’m not sure they’ve even noticed.
Once, a good friend’s pregnancy was so painful to me that I ghosted her more blatantly. We
