How I Survived My Miscarriages

Reading Diane Noomin's feminist comics made me feel the full extent of my own grief.

I first got pregnant at the start of the pandemic. It felt like perfect timing. There was nothing to do but watch TV, walk around and get sick in the privacy of my own home. The outside world was perilous and unrecognizable, but my life was full of meaning and possibility.

Nine weeks into my pregnancy, I FaceTimed my husband at from a routine scan - because partners weren't allowed into the office, he was waiting in the car. It was during this meeting that the unimaginable happened: no more heartbeat. My husband couldn't see me behind my mask, but I'll never forget his expression - helpless, anguished. As he drove me home, I updated the app where I had tracked my pregnancy, clicking a button to "Report a Loss." The message boards of happy pregnant women disappeared and I was reassigned to a new forum for women who had suffered a miscarriage.

I felt compassion for her, which was the point of input i needed to feel compassion for myself.

On this board we all wanted to know what we did wrong, compare notes on abortion pills and the D&C and get in touch with anyone who could understand the grief we felt. I crawled into bed and scrolled, grateful to know that I wasn't alone in my wild grief for someone who never existed, or in my sense of alienation at living in a body that had betrayed my deepest hopes. But almost every post prompted responses about trying again or anecdotes about subsequent healthy pregnancies. I just wasn't there: Believing that next time would be different seemed impossible to me. I was in emotional limbo, between pregnant and non-pregnant, still tired and sore and revolted by the smell of everything cooking, but waiting to miscarry the baby I had been talking about in my head for weeks.

That night I woke up crying. My husband held me. There were dirty clothes on the floor. I realized that like any deep loss, a miscarriage was a private drama that would play out in the daily context of my life. I sought companionship in art, seeking writing as raw and unforgiving as my experience. I didn't want to feel better, but I wanted to feel understood. Eventually I came across a feminist cartoonist named Diane Noomin, and on a whim I commissioned her work "Baby Talk: A Tale of 4 Miscarriages".

"Baby Talk" is a 12-page comic about the artist's repeated miscarriages. Published in 1994, it still strikes today with its straightforward account of pregnancy loss. In black-and-white drawings and irreverent dialogue, she captures everything from the high highs of the dizzying selection of baby names to the low lows of staring down the toilet bowl at an aborted fetus. ("What's that?" Noomin wonders. "It looks like liver.") The recently deceased Noomin was a pioneer of underground comics - she collaborated with Aline Kominsky-Crumb and was introduced to her husband, cartoonist Bill Griffith, by Art Spiegelman - but I didn't know any of that when I read "Baby Talk." I only knew that reading his story allowed me to feel the full range of my own grief.

As with Noomin, I wasn't just sad to have lost my pregnancy, I was also angry and deeply ashamed. Her story is confessional, but she writes that she felt too embarrassed to tell anyone she had had a miscarriage and felt like pretending everything was fine. I felt that too. When I broke the news to some friends and family, I was humbled. Without realizing it, I was redefining myself as a failure rather than someone going through something incredibly difficult. What's radical about "Baby Talk" is that it's not about the babies that Noomin lost; it's about her. Hiding in my bed with a copy of her work and a monster rug between my legs, I felt compassion for her, which was the entry point I needed to feel compassion for myself- same.

Part of what I had missed in miscarriage forums and support groups was an idea of ​​who we all were outside of this experience. While reading "Baby Talk", I could see the pattern printed on Noomin's sheets, what her hair looked like when she took a photo of Valium (messy), her dreams, her profession, her voice. She was anxious, obsessive and funny...