11:35 on a Monday evening. The toddlers are in bed. My husband is fast asleep.
I wipe, and I see red. I keep wiping, and there is more red. No matter how much I wipe, it won’t stop. My brain is taking its time catching up to what my body already knows. I call loudly from the bathroom, “I think I’m having a miscarriage.”
A midnight run by my husband to buy supplies I needed after we got home from the hospital with our two babies – except this time, I don’t have a baby. I change my daughter’s diaper while I, too, wear one. Knowing I am also a daughter who just lost a baby.
I had no idea what the reality of miscarriage was because it feels like no one talks about it. Maybe because it feels shameful. And yet, inside your own mind, you are fighting with yourself, wondering why you should hide something so mentally distressing and physically painful.
I reached out to a woman I deeply admire in the Jewish community. For some reason, all my mind could chant was: Mikvah. Mikvah. Mikvah.
She graciously made time for me, helped create a space for spiritual healing, and arranged for a clergy member who could accompany us.
By then, the bleeding had stopped. Life had moved on. The routine was back. It almost felt like nothing had happened. But grief doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it gets folded into the laundry, the bedtime routine, and the workday. I was functioning, but I hadn’t really stopped to feel what had happened.
That was what brought me to the Mikvah.
When I stepped inside, the space became ours. We spoke seriously, we laughed, and beautiful prayers of healing were sung. For the first time, I allowed myself to acknowledge: I did, in fact, go through this.
Then, after my preparation, I knocked and stepped into the Mikvah with my trusted guide.
She spoke softly and permitted me to make the experience whatever I needed it to be. I counted the seven steps down. There was no pressure to perform, only to be present.
And when I submerged, it felt like rebirth.
I couldn’t fully process what was happening while I was there. But maybe that was the point. For the first time in weeks, I could stop thinking. I could simply float. The work had already been done. The water was giving me the hug I didn’t realize I so desperately needed.
When I returned to get dressed, I looked in the mirror. Bare as the day I was born. I don’t remember the last time I looked at myself without searching for something to fix. I just looked at myself and accepted what was there.
I’ve come to understand that maybe what I was grieving most was the loss of control. The timing we had imagined for the baby we planned. The feeling that my body had somehow failed me. And the apprehension of having to try all over again.
Miscarriage is still, in many ways, a taboo topic. You worry that talking about it might make someone uncomfortable. But am I doing a disservice by staying quiet? Am I not asking for help when I need it?
A friend once said to me, “In order to have a village, you must be a villager.”
What I have realized is that when I open up, others do too. The connections that have deepened through shared experience have been beautiful in their own way. We are part of a club nobody wants to join, and yet there is comfort in finding the women who are already there.
I went to the Mikvah looking for healing and left having learned something about myself: to be more compassionate, to have more patience, and to remember that every person we encounter may be carrying something they are not yet ready to speak about.
I don’t know what the future holds. I just know I am not driving the car. Sometimes the most painful experiences teach us that surrendering control is its own kind of healing.
I hope more women know this resource exists through Maayanot Community Mikveh of Minnesota. That they can ask for it. That they can make it their own. That they do not have to walk into it by themselves.
Thank you to the generations before me who may not have had the language, resources, or spaces to receive this kind of Mikvah support. But they carried the tradition forward anyway. And because they did, when I needed it, it was there for me.
It feels fitting that I found my way to the Mikvah just before the High Holidays, a season built around reflection, forgiveness, release, and beginning again.
I went into the water carrying grief I didn’t know how to put down.
I came out knowing I didn’t have to carry it alone.