Corregan Brown wants to be a father. When his wife had a miscarriage, he was devastated, and found that fathers are often forgotten, although they, too, grieve. He told his story to me:
We tied the knot when I was 37 and she was 33. Like many, we trudged on into wedded bliss and assumed that certain things would just fall into place. I wish they had.
About 18 months later, we were elated to discover that my wife appeared to be about five weeks pregnant. But as things didn’t develop as expected, we went back to the doctor and learnt an unfortunate medical term that I’ll never forget: blighted ovum.
Essentially, it means that the lights are on, but no one’s home. The body thinks it’s pregnant, but the embryo has stopped developing. All we could do was wait for her body to discover what we already knew.
She later had the awful experience of miscarrying. We told our church about what happened, and my wife received a few calls of sympathy. Because I am a man, though, no one really checked in on me.
After all, it wasn’t my body that had experienced the betrayal. Pregnancy and children are primarily women’s business, right? My aching and weary heart told me otherwise. And it’s not just my fellow congregants who felt that way.
In the larger society, we men are expected to be iron-willed warriors.
A range of complex emotions
And sadly, there was no place to go to help process the complex emotions that came with such a loss. Despite the widespread myth of manhood regarding such matters, the truth is we both suffered a massive loss that day. Years later, there are still moments that I find myself grieving. Father’s Day can be especially tough.
From June to June, each year I watch my friends’ and relatives’ kids grow. I smile and hold them and teach them. I do love them, and I am not jealous that so many others around me have been blessed with the gift of parenthood.
As my wife and I had been unexpectedly and unfortunately catapulted into the complexities of coping with infertility, it often felt as though we have to deal with our frustration, our anger and our sadness alone. Even as I write this, I can’t help but reflect on the emptiness at my shoulder, where a little boy should be peppering me with incessant questions while I type.
There’s a void at my knee, where a girl should be tapping my leg to ask if I want to hear her song again. I talk to my therapist and try to do my self-care. But there’s sometimes just nowhere for this grief to go.
Since that first loss, the odds were further stacked against our having a child who shares our genetics because of myriad health problems. Lower back issues, a recurrence of the fibroids she’d previously had surgery for, and a harrowing emergency surgery to remove them during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic that resulted in some gynaecological issues.
A part of me mourns so many things that I never expected to mourn. We do have a glimmer of hope to hold onto this year though. I won’t dare risk giving it a name or a gender, but I can’t help but wonder: Will this be the one?
Will the child have my wife’s smile and angelic singing voice and my bizarre sense of humour, all rolled up into one person? There have been difficult conversations since then, but we have resolved to move forward. And isn’t that cliché kind of true; that anything worth having is worth fighting for?
As we hope and pray that our dream of parenthood won’t once again become a nightmare, we’d appreciate if you would pray for us, too.
Chandra Thomas Whitfield recently completed a fellowship at the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting
Washington Post
