Wife Tells Her Husband To 'Get Over' A Miscarriage They Went Through 9 Years Ago
“It broke my heart on so many levels.”
Cookie Studio | Shutterstock In a recent post to Reddit, a wife and mother revealed that her husband often talks about the son he lost nearly a decade ago, opening up her painful wound, as she’s now forced to “explain” the loss to their triplet daughters.
“On every single one of their birthdays, my husband talks and talks and talks about that baby and how much he would’ve loved him,” she wrote. “Our triplets are all girls. He talks about his boy all the time. He would be 9 now.”
The woman told her husband to ‘get over’ their miscarriage from 9 years ago, as she’s concerned it’s affecting their family dynamic.
“My husband and I have been together for nine years, married for five. We are now 29 and 30, but we started dating when we were 20 and 21,” she wrote. “Over these last nine years, he has been my best friend, my biggest supporter, and the best person I could’ve ever asked for. We have a beautiful marriage and three beautiful children.”
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However, a recent fight about their miscarriage 9 years ago has opened up some painful wounds and forced her to consider all the ways her husband has struggled to heal emotionally from their loss. “When we had only been dating for 6 months, I accidentally got pregnant… It was shocking and jarring and confusing.”
“We were both broke, young, inexperienced, and barely capable of raising a baby,” she explained. “We all eventually decided that we would have the baby… But [after 19 weeks], we lost the baby.”
After the loss, her life was altered forever. “He had to watch me sob every day for a year… I still can’t believe I did it at only 20 — I don’t think I could do it now at almost 30.”
After losing their ‘unexpected’ baby in their early twenties, this wife said they’ve since had triplets with the same birthday.
After getting married and “moving forward” with their lives, the woman said they made the decision to have children. By chance, their current triplets share the same birthday as their miscarried child — “I didn’t even realize it until my husband pointed it out.”
However, she said her husband has been talking about their loss openly on every passing birthday, despite her wishes to stop. “My husband does it in front of the girls even, and now they’ve started to ask questions. They’re too young to know or even understand, so I finally just asked my husband to stop.”
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Concerned for the well-being of her girls and the mental state of her husband, she was unsure how to handle the situation, admitting that telling him to “move on” probably wasn’t the best way.
“He’s allowed to grieve, but bringing it up in front of his little girls is completely inappropriate,” one person wrote under the post. “He can tell them the full story when they are old enough to understand without internalizing it… He cannot make it into his current children’s issue.”
Grief, however, is not something to just "get over." Regardless of her motives, the notion that her husband should just stop feeling the loss is unrealistic.
Julie Bindeman, PsyD, a reproductive psychologist, told the American Psychological Association, “The idea that continues to be pervasive to a degree is that the less time that you have spent with the [developing] baby, the less emotional attachment a person should have to it, and thus a shorter grieving period [is needed]. And yet what people tend not to understand is that oftentimes a pregnancy is a realization of a dream that might have started in a person’s childhood.”
While it’s clearly an uncomfortable and painful conversation for this woman to have with her husband, it’s essential to both of their healing journeys.
Everyone heals on their own terms — even from a shared experience like a miscarriage — and it’s unfair for this woman to assume he’s ready to heal on her timeline.
If they don't take the time to truly talk through it their relationship will only grow more resentful.
“It’s so painful for me to remember,” she wrote. “I don’t ever want my girls to think they’re a ‘replacement’ for the first baby we would’ve had because they aren’t. I don’t want them to think that daddy wants a boy more than them.”
Describing loss to children, especially at such a young age, can feel impossible to many parents, but there are helpful ways for this couple to communicate with their daughters while simultaneously giving this husband space to have his feelings validated.
“I think you could both use some therapy for this,” one commenter expressed. “I also had a second-trimester loss… My kids know about her. But our lives are not centered around the loss of her. We honor her during that time, and if they have questions, I answer them.”
It’s acceptable, healthy even, for their kids to understand their parent’s loss in their own terms, but at the end of the day, it shouldn’t “cloud” their own birthday celebrations.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a News & Entertainment Writer at YourTango who focuses on health & wellness, social policy, and human interest stories