You have to make decisions when you have a blog. You have to decide how much of yourself you want to expose, and how much you want to keep quiet and hidden. How personal you want things to get. Generally, "in real life," I am someone who is pretty frank with most personal things. But in the blogosphere, it can be different. If my husband and I are fighting, I don't post about that, probably mostly because I am kind of gross and crazy, and I want people to think our relationship is nearly perfect. If I am a little depressed, I don't really post, because have you ever read blogs by people who are depressed a lot, or only write when they are down? It's really boring. And a downer.

Inevitably, however, there come the things that you don't know how to say, but feel like you must anyway. Things like this: We went to the midwife on Tuesday, 6/16. The midwife couldn't find the heartbeat of the baby with the doppler. We decided to go to the ultrasound clinic. At the ultrasound clinic we found out that although I was 12 weeks pregnant, the baby had stopped growing at 8 weeks. We aren't pregnant anymore. We are just waiting for the inevitable to happen. The inevitable being the actual physical miscarriage.

This happens a lot, but, you know, it doesn't get talked about very much, unless you are involved in certain internet communities in which women congregate to spill their guts about their experiences with miscarriage, for the sake of catharsis, and sharing, and building a network of women who know exactly what it feels like and find commisseration helpful.

Does this seem very unemotional? I feel odd. We have both gone back and forth between feeling a lot and being very numb. It is hard to lose something you hardly had to begin with; it's easy to keep making yourself remember what you're not going to be experiencing. (This time around, anyway). In grief, I find that sometimes I seem to tend towards... emotionally torturing myself, a bit. Maybe that is an extreme characterization. After my father died, I kept reminding myself of all the weekends I had spent away from home, away from his sickness, getting drunk with my friends, wasting time satisfying myself, trying to have a good time while he was sick and suffering. The same thing happened Tuesday, back at the house that the midwives are using as their office; when we returned, there was a pregnant woman there with her five children, one of which was a baby girl who was maybe a year old. I kept looking at her little arms and hands, and reminding myself that it will be a long time before I have a baby to call me mama, and reach for me, and all that. It's pretty fucked, I guess. It is like sprinkling salt into a wound; when I'm upset I feel like I should make myself feel really really upset, or I'm not having an "authentic experience." Then when it starts it's gets out of control until I'm nearly sick with it.

So that's what happened to me on Tuesday. And I'm not pregnant anymore. And it feels pretty shitty.