Hello fellow wanderers on this awful path,
I’m three weeks post-MVA after a missed miscarriage, and writing has been one of the ways I’ve been trying to make sense of the grief, the waiting, and the strange mix of emptiness and hope for future pregnancies. It was my first pregnancy and we were so excited before it all went wrong.
I wanted to share this poem I wrote, partly to get it out of my head, partly in case it resonates with anyone else going through something similar. There’s a lot about this whole thing that feels lonely and undignified, and this community has already helped me feel less alone.
No pressure to read or respond, but if it speaks to you, I’d really appreciate knowing I’m not the only one navigating this.
Thank you for being here. ❤️
Empty
I didn’t know
you could be full of something
that was never really there.
I didn’t know a body could be
occupied by absence,
or that an empty sac
could take up so much space.
They said
“non-viable”
“anembryonic”
but I heard
“the baby you pictured never even started.”
And I felt the floor of my future tilt.
Because I had already met them
in my mind.
Checked their due date.
Planned Christmas.
Imagined next autumn
with a pram and a passport.
They were a handful of cells
but somehow
they were also a whole life
I’d already learned by heart.
And then:
silence.
A waiting room.
A “maybe.”
A “come back in two weeks.”
A “still nothing.”
A “we’re sorry.”
A “surgical management.”
A whole vocabulary of heartbreak
I didn’t know I’d need.
It turns out grief can be
slow,
bureaucratic,
and unbelievably undignified.
Pads and paracetamol,
and trying to pretend at work
that my uterus isn’t staging
a small, sad rebellion.
And in all this:
my husband —
solid as a handrail,
even when his fear comes out sideways
and we misread each other
in the dark.
He holds me
like he’s trying to keep the pieces together.
Now it’s:
waiting.
For the bleeding to stop.
For bleeding to start.
For hormones to settle.
It feels like my whole life
is loading
very…
very…
slowly.
But somewhere between
the tiny twinges that remind me
what’s missing,
I feel little sparks
of myself returning.
Like:
The me who laughs.
The me who runs long distances
just to feel the wind argue with her lungs.
The me who survived
every hard thing before this one.
And this one.
And maybe
(maybe)
the me who still believes
that emptiness
is just a space
that something new
might grow into.
Hope is quiet now.
But it’s here,
tucked in my ribcage
like a secret.
Not a promise.
Not yet.
But a pulse.
A possibility.
A cautious, stubborn
maybe.
And for now
that’s enough to hold onto
as we wait
and we heal
and we breathe
in the space
between what was,
and what might
still
be.