When I asked my mum whether she had ever experienced a miscarriage, she said no. When I asked her a second time, she said yes. I spent the next four months trying to find out how a taboo can be so strong that even a doctor wouldn’t want to share the experience with her daughter. You can listen to what I discovered in the first episode of a new Guardian audio series, Strange Bird.

Before I spoke to people about pregnancy loss, I had only the vaguest sense of the experience – a stock image of a woman looking sad. The reality is so much more complex than that. There are females who, like me, think they haven’t experienced a miscarriage but could be mistaken. There are those who knew about the miscarriage and felt a profound trauma and there are those who felt relief.

For most people, miscarriage is a loss and it’s one that society is not great at talking about. To get concrete advice about how to change that conversation, I spoke to Ruth Bender Atik, the National Director of the Miscarriage Association. While emphasizing that everyone is different, Atik mentioned some of the things that are often unhelpful to say to someone who has experienced a pregnancy loss. Things like:

“Well, there was something probably the matter with it anyway.”

“At least it wasn’t later in the pregnancy.”

“I know somebody who had 11 miscarriages, but she went on to have a baby, so you’ll be OK.”

“You’re young. You can always try again.”

“At least you’ve got a child already.”

As Atik listed these responses, I thought about how, in a moment of panic, I could have said any one of these to my mum or a friend who has experienced pregnancy loss. So I asked what a more helpful response might be. Atik replied, “How are you feeling?”

I called my mum and tried to have a new conversation with her about something that one in five females will experience in their lifetimes. You can hear what she said here, in the first episode of Strange Bird.

If you have an experience you would like to share or want to suggest future topics for me to cover, please write to strangebird@theguardian.com. Or you can text me or leave a voicemail at +1 503 832 7563