Ashley Williams was picking up pizza at Whole Foods with her almost 2-year-old son Gus when she realized she was bleeding.
“A heavy, dark, and slow stream of blood made its way down my left inner thigh. Without thinking, I swiped it. My fingertips came up wet,” the The Jim Gaffigan Show recounts in an essay titled, I Need to Talk About My Miscarriage. “‘What’s that?’ Gus inquired, pointing to my hand. All day long he asked this question, which usually rendered the response: ‘That’s a fire truck.’ ‘That’s a doorknob.’ ‘That’s a storm drain.’ ‘That’s an emergency,’ I now said. I wiped my hand on my jean shorts, noticing they were already soaked through with blood. I stopped to text my husband: ‘I think I need you to come home from work.'”
Ashley was 8 weeks pregnant when she suffered a miscarriage.
As she struggled to make sense of the loss, what shocked the 37-year-old actress most of all was the realization that she had become part of a very large group.
“‘This happens to one in four pregnant women your age,’ my midwife said,” Ashley writes. “If 25 percent of my peers are currently experiencing miscarriages right alongside me, why wasn’t I prepared? Why don’t we talk about it? Why was I feeling embarrassed, broken, like a walking wound?… My surprise increased in the days that followed when I reached out to close friends and found out that most had miscarried at least once. My question to each friend: Did you talk freely about it? No. They answered, and sighed right along side me.”
Ashley sets out to break this silence in her essay, baring her own feelings of inadequacy and guilt as she was faced with the language that is so often used to describe and diagnose miscarriage: “Abnormality… Defect… Incapable… Incomplete… Not viable.”
“I gave birth to Gus on the living room floor, a planned home birth, with no medication,” writes Ashley, who is trained as a doula. “I am a badass woman. I am strong. My miscarriage, however, decimated my confidence.”
Speaking out about her loss has become part of Ashley’s healing process, and she is encouraging every women who has suffered a miscarriage to do the same. The first step to “normalizing” it, she writes, is to talk about it.
“[Maybe] tell your Starbucks barista that you need an extra shot because you just had a miscarriage. Tell someone to carry your bags for you, not because you’re weak, but because you recently had a miscarriage and you deserve a break…. I invite you to start, with me, a vocal army of the 25 percenters who can normalize miscarriage in the social sphere. You are not broken. You did nothing wrong. You are strong, you are brave, and there is hope. I was right there next to you at Whole Foods, bleeding out of my shorts. Now I’m well. I’m a survivor. Healed, I will try again.”
You can read Ashley’s full essay at The Human Development Project. It’s honest and raw and incredibly powerful, and I applaud her for putting a public face on something that so many women and families go through every single day.
(BabyCenter has many resources and Community support groups for mothers who have suffered a miscarriage. )
These celebrities have shared their stories of miscarriage and loss, too:
Photo: PR Photos
