The Silent Mis-treatment

Can you keep a secret? Please don't.

All Art Copyright 2023 Mike Oppenheim

I don't know if you watched the Super Bowl last week, but the Internet did, and per usual, it went all Internet on the half-time guest, Rihanna, who I will forever now remember as, "The lady that got my culture talking about talking about pregnancy."

For once, I'm grateful to the Great Gossip Engine that normally whines about minutiae I don't understand, because I have a Super Bowl sponsored Tostito's chip on my shoulder about how my culture treats pregnancy and baby-making.

We have this stupid, hypocritical, unwritten ‘rule’ that says, "When a couple knows they're expecting, they must wait 3 months to tell anyone, thanks to the frequency of first-term miscarriages." Why you ask? "Because it's bad to talk about miscarriages."

I see many flaws in this 'policy,' with no hierarchy, so I'll start with the fact that we're letting a 25%ish failure rate prevent us from sharing joy. How silly! There's nothing wrong with rooting for good outcomes, and one can never get ‘too much support.’

In other scenarios, my culture tells people to, 'Shoot for the moon,' 'Go for the gold,' and 'Dance like no one's watching.' So why, in this one case, do we flip the switch and demand superstitious silence? We don't tell cancer patients to hide their diagnosis.

Additionally, we're signaling to ourselves and others that it's somehow bad to talk about sad events, in the same era in which we've banned fat-shaming, fetish-shaming, and other forms of guilt and shame. Why are we pressured to hide miscarriages?

Also, thanks to this rule, people like me grow up thinking miscarriages are rare, when they’re not. And if they happen to us, we think have bad luck and thanks to this ironic stigma, we don’t report them, so we don’t have accurate statistics for them!

Since when is good mental health based on feeling shame and having a stigma, and not talking about it unless you're super secretive and you make the person you tell promise to keep it a secret? I'm not making this up. I've heard many people say this.

Another insane part of this senseless policy is that after you don't tell people you were pregnant, for fear of miscarriage, if you do have one, only now are you permitted to tell people, to get support. We’ve banned support for hope! How cynical can we get?

I hate to bum you out (too late!) but my wife has had a few miscarriages, including one this week, and I've had it with this silent hypocrisy. I'm all about trying to remove this self-defeating stigma and providing more 'how-life-can-go' transparency to my peers.

I'm frustrated. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone my wife was pregnant. I stifled so much joy! But now that the worst possible case has emerged, it's okay to privately seek support. All this does is add compound interest to the idea that miscarriages are rare.

I'm tired of my culture's feigned consistency. We're not better or worse than others, but it would be refreshing if all of us could admit that our social policies are, at best, to put it scientifically, "a jumbly-mumbly bag of random rules that don't connect."

The author and his wife celebrating their 3rd wedding anniversary, two days after a miscarriage. Why not? Life is short and we all deserve some sweetness!

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This week on Coffin Talk we talk to someone who should have and could have died, but didn’t, and now she’s making it her life mission to educate women, and the world, on the best strategies for getting out of bad domestic situations. Listen here.