“I hated my husband after each miscarriage”, she resented her husband for mourning badly

Video by Clemence Chevallet

There are many causes that make a loving couple break up. Disagreement, distance, lack of confidence … miscarriage is also part of it. According to a study which followed for fifteen years 7,000 couples expecting a baby, couples who had experienced a miscarriage were 22% more likely to separate than others. But, the cause of the breakup is not necessarily the tragedy itself, it is more about how each one deals with their grief. They are sometimes very different, and build a distance between the two parties.

Kim Hooper, mother of a baby girl after having four miscarriages, tells in a column for Scary mommy that she hated her husband after each loss because she did not understand his way of reacting.

A different way to grieve

Kim has had four miscarriages. Two ectopic pregnancies, one miscarriage in the first trimester and one miscarriage in the second trimester. After these tragic losses, the young woman sought comfort from her husband Chris, but could not find any. The day after her operation after her first ectopic pregnancy, Chris went to a hockey game with his brother. Kim was furious because he left her alone.

“In the midst of my four losses, Chris distracted himself with various projects. He took to mountain biking, plotting different routes in the local hills, highlighting maps and leaving them all over the house. He did long races. He volunteered to collect signatures for local causes that had never preoccupied him before. He became obsessed with cleaning – one day I found him in the garden scouring the cement. At one point, he enrolled in a disaster preparedness course. He was doing research online like: “Can we drink the pool water in an emergency?” I wondered if this was a metaphor, if our losses had made him so vulnerable to tragedy that he was forced to do whatever he could to prepare for the worst.”, Delivers the mother.

What she regrets is that her husband found the time to do all of these things, but not to talk to her. “I needed to talk about our losses, and that need directly conflicted with her own need to “move on”. He wanted to avoid it altogether, to continue living as if nothing had happened. I didn’t like his stoicism”, She confides. Kim sincerely believed that Chris was not grieving because he was too busy for that. It is after a couple’s therapy and having had the opinion of his co-authors for his book All the Love: Healing Your Heart and Finding Meaning After Pregnancy Loss Kim understood: her husband was grieving, but not in the same way she did.

What you must remember

Kim decided to give some advice to couples going through the same experience, and to all those people who feel or will feel like them: a little abandoned.

• Whoever was not carrying the baby also lost their child : even if the baby did not grow in her womb, he · she was also preparing to be a parent. Sometimes we can downplay other people’s feelings by focusing too much on our own.

• He / she probably feels helpless : not knowing what to do can sometimes lead to doing nothing at all.

• He / she may be afraid : Chris told Kim a saying that says it all: “You are my rock. I don’t know what to do when you crumble“.

• It’s not that he · she doesn’t care, he · she just tries to “stay strong” : the other party knows that you are upset, he / she may be trying not to give in to allow you to be sad, believing that we cannot be together.

• Sometimes you need the support of others : If the other person is also grieving, he may not be able to help you cope with yours. Asking your friends and family for support is not giving up your marriage, according to Kim. It takes the pressure off each other’s shoulders. The young woman admits that after finding help elsewhere, her anger towards her husband dissipated.

• Don’t forget the big picture : if the mourning phase is very hard, life can still go on. Kim and Chris now have a three-year-old daughter. “I can say now that what we went through made us stronger as a couple. It might sound cliché, but it’s the truth. Our experiences have given us confidence in our capacity for resilience as a couple. I know there are so many things we can survive together ”.