Suffering from pregnancy loss often leaves you feeling devastated, traumatized, and isolated. After all, you were the only one carrying your child in your womb, so it’s natural to feel like no one understands the pain that you’re going through and how crushing it feels to lose a part of you.
Miscarriages are highly personal and no one experience is the same. But emotionally healing from the grief starts with acknowledging the pain. Rather than ignoring the pain and pretending that everything’s back to normal, it’s best to face the loss. Feeling through it is also a way of honoring what you’ve lost, acknowledging what happened as important and life-altering.
Know that there are support groups, both online and offline, that can give you a safe space to heal, and professionals who are trained to guide you through this difficult time.
While support groups and psychologists can’t be around 24/7 to help you out, there are other sources of comfort and succor, such as books about miscarriage that you can read from the comfort of your home. With books you can stay in bed, relax, and let the feelings out, with no fear of judgement — just you and these stories.
5 books about miscarriage to help you on your way to recovery
Lost but Found: Finding Hope After Recurrent Miscarriages
by Balot Del Rosario
Image source: Shopee
Written by a Filipina, Lost but Found tackles miscarriage through the eyes of the author, and how, after finding the possible causes of her miscarriage, she was able to conceive her “rainbow babies” through her faith in herself and a higher power.
I Love You Still
by Margaret Scofield
Image source: Amazon
When the author’s friend opened up about her miscarriage, she was hoping to gift the suffering mother with a book to help her through the tough time — but she didn’t find a suitable one. I Love You Still was written out of that need, and tackles the kinds of loss that a mother could undergo, such as miscarriage, still birth, or newborn loss. While it may be painful to face the loss head on, the prompts in the book might help mothers face it in a gentle way.
Saying Goodbye: A Personal Story of Baby Loss and 90 Days of Support to Walk You Through Grief
by Zoe Clark- Coates
Image source: Amazon
What’s reassuring about this book is it acknowledges your loss, and the truth that you don’t need to go through it on your own. The 90-day timeframe is just a suggestion, a way to give you structure, with reflections and activities to look forward to on a daily basis. These daily readings and things to do are also a great way to feel like you’re making progress in your healing journey. The author also draws from her own experience of her own miscarriages.
Becoming
by Michelle Obama
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The former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, wrote her own biography, which is both extensive and revealing. She tells the story of how she felt like a failure when she suffered a miscarriage of her first pregnancy with former President of the United States, Barack Obama. She also felt something that most women who suffer a miscarriage feel — being alone. While she went on to have two daughters via IVF (In Vitro Fertilization), it was during that point in her life that she realized how having a miscarriage can be so isolating, and that no woman should ever have to go through that grief alone. The book is comforting to read, telling the story of how a powerful, strong woman such as Michelle Obama feels the same way as you do — and just like her, you can overcome the pain, too.
The Light Between Oceans
by M.L. Stedman
Image source: Amazon
While a work of fiction, The Light Between Oceans is about a woman who has suffered two miscarriages and a stillbirth, and how her grief in losing her children changes a person. It shows the desperation of a mother to hold on to a child, even if the child isn’t hers, all because of her longing to be a mother. The New York Times bestseller is definitely not a light read, but mothers who have suffered a miscarriage may be able to relate to the heartache of the wife, Isabel, in the book, knowing how painful it is to long for a child, to be so close to motherhood, and how it feels for it to be taken away.
Processing grief after a miscarriage can be difficult. However, there isn’t one single way to do this. Reading books about miscarriage can help you on your road to recovery by hearing real stories from women who’ve been in your shoes, and how they managed to come out the other side.
ALSO READ: ‘My Body Couldn’t Even Lose Her Properly’