On the night of my miscarriage, I made dinner from Hello Fresh, and Jeremy moved a stack of 159 bricks into the garage. I took solace in the measured portions, the controlled steps, and the predictable outcome. Jeremy liked the neat stacking.

Still, I burnt the dinner.

I found out I was definitively pregnant on September 30 (I’d suspected after hormone injections, medical procedures and IVF, a few barfing episodes, etc etc). On October 1, Instagram was inundated with stories of pregnancy loss-empowering stories that allowed women to reclaim their narratives, but that also, in a way, felt like grim foreshadowing.

I’d never really believed that I could be someone who could miscarry. Mainly because it was hard enough imagining myself to be someone who could get pregnant. It’s only happened once before now, and only under extreme duress.

I thought, maybe just maybe if I existed in a mostly never pregnant world, I wouldn’t also have to exist in a miscarriage world either. 

Grief at this point in 2020, quite frankly, is starting to feel like cliche. It feels like a meme or a hashtag or a collective sigh, where we’ve run out of words for the melee, and reduce it to the euphemistic phrase, “2020, ammiright?”

It’s easier than acknowledging the very specific ways it took the wind from your sails, or the dollars from your bank account… or ….the baby from your uterus.

And yet despite the fact that I feel like my own damn 2020 grief meme, the last few days have made me feel like my burned dinner. Didn’t know I could feel any crispier about this year. (Reminding myself that Donald Trump could still win the election).

And so, in moments where Hudson mentions that he doesn’t have a sister, I stop beating 2020 back with an evasive baton of “everything’s fine,” and let it wash over me instead.

At some point, I’ll tell myself that a collective experience is different than a cliche. Maybe I’ve just joined an army of woman whose bodies have been asked to do too much, but we do it anyway. Maybe there’s power in the collective.

Tonight, I’m another Instagram post in Pregnancy and Infant loss Awareness Month. And I hate feeling like a statistic, and a hashtag, but I’m also emboldened and strengthened by the power of our collective wail into the abyss that everything’s not ok.