If you're an expectant father and your wife has a miscarriage, how do you deal with it? Miscarriage is sad for everyone and you may be so busy helping your wife get through the bleeding, D & C (if she needs to have one), and disappointment, that you conveniently stay out of touch with your own feelings of sadness. It turns out there are a lot of articles on the Web written by dads for dads who are going through that kind of hurt.Here are some of the most popular links we found:
A Father's Perspective at Pregnancy and Baby: A sad, sweet article about the sadness one dad feels when he finds out his wife has lost their baby.Have you dealt with miscarriage? What helped you get through it? We'd love for you to share your story with us.
Miscarriage: A Father Speaks at the Fatherhood Institute: Another first-person account of losing a baby to miscarriage.
Dealing with Miscarriage at About.com About.com is not our favorite site for information (and tends to be a lot less accurate than Wikipedia, for instance) but this article by Wayne Parker is pretty helpful and thorough.
Miscarriages: Men Grieve Too at ask Mr. Dad: some practical advice for dads dealing with miscarriage.
4 comments:
we've definitely dealt with miscarriage but really early on and never confirmed. i think it is a LOT more common than people think, and is nature's way of making sure a non-viable fetus doesn't come into the world. so even though it's sad, it's not a bad thing. of course, if you've been trying really hard to get pregnant and then you miscarry, that can be really devastating. i don't think that has happened to us.
I was three months pregnant when the baby died in utero. I prayed for a miscarriage but my body didn't catch on. After waiting a week I couldn't bear it anymore and we ended up having and D & C. My husband was really supportive but I was so wrapped up in my own grief that I'm not sure I ever thought about his. Thank you for this post, it's good to think of things from the dad's eye view.
I have not had a miscarriage, but my brother's wife just did in the spring. She was almost 15-16 weeks. It was completely awful. They went for an ultrasound and got told that the baby had incredible defects and that the pregnancy was not viable. They told her she should have a d&c right away. EVERYONE was crying. I've never seen my brother so upset. It still makes me cry to think of it. They agonized over the choice, and saw all sorts of specialists, and finally decided they should, and were PRAYING for a miscarriage so they wouldn't feel like they murdered the baby they had tried so long to conceive. By the time she had the d&c there was no heartbeat and I think that helped a little bit. The blessing was that they have one little girl already and she was assured that there was no reason that she couldn't get pregnant again...
There's a really sweet article in the Modern Love section of the New York Times written by a dad whose baby was stillborn at 20 weeks: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/fashion/21love.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&sq&st=nyt&scp=7
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