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Blame Remains

Laura J. Schubert
A fundamental truth of pregnancy and infant loss is that a mother blames herself. It doesn’t matter what the doctors and nurses say to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault—that it was nobody’s fault—she believes at the deepest part of her being that she caused her baby’s death.

All around her she sees other women who have delivered their perfectly healthy babies with ease. Her awareness of having been singled out for the agonizing fate of loss is compounded every time she realizes that she is the only mom in the room who didn’t get to keep her baby.

The broken record of prenatal admonitions screeches in her head. If only she’d exercised more, or eaten better, or been able to keep those horse pill vitamins down, or prayed harder…She ponders what she could have done to deserve such disaster. She wonders if God hates her.  

Her shame is a secret so dark and deep, so powerful, that it drives her sorrow underground. To publicly display her grief would expose the magnitude of her failure.

Her sense of isolation grows with every baby shower, birth announcement, and baptism. It does not help that her presence makes such events awkward for happy new moms, some of whom misread her emotional bankruptcy as jealousy and behave as if her inability to muster sufficient joy at their good fortune is a friendship-ending personal flaw.

She sets her sights on closure—another if only—and obsesses over how to reach it. But closure will never come, not really. Whatever event or milestone she sets, even if she reaches it, will never undo the forever-after absence of the child she loved beyond measure. And she knows it.

She stumbles forward, day after day, month after month, year after year. She slowly regains her strength and equilibrium, eventually finds her way back to life. But even with the space and distance of time, shame and guilt remain.

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