“Oh my goodness, you still look pregnant!” my mother said as she looked me up and down. “My miscarriage was two days ago, mom. What do you expect?” I instantly regretted letting her visit while the trauma was still palpable.

This wasn’t the first time I had been besieged by one of my mother’s off-handed comments. This interaction, however, marked a turning point. For years, I made excuses for these kinds of exchanges. I tried to protect myself from admitting that my mother was not able to mother me in the way I needed. But this time, I expected – I needed – more.

I was 16 weeks along with my second child when I began to bleed. Though everything seemed healthy throughout my pregnancy, a daughter I will never know emerged while I was home alone. I called the doctor in a panic from my bathroom floor and she guided me through how to cut the umbilical cord. She told me to wrap the baby up and instructed me to get to her office immediately. While hemorrhaging, I underwent an unmedicated dilation and curettage – physical pain that rivaled the emotional pain pulsating through my body.

My mom stayed for a couple of hours but the toxicity she spewed further darkened my porous state of mind. By evening, I was so upset, I was spun out by our interaction. I needed to be frank with her.

“What you said today really hurt my feelings,” I said trenchantly over the phone. I knew that my openness would likely be met with anger, or at the very least, surprise.

“Oh, you are so sensitive,” she replied flatly, a mantra she had bestowed upon me throughout my childhood. “I never know how to get things right with you.”

“Commenting on my body days after a miscarriage is completely inappropriate. I just lost a baby. At home, alone! I saw a dead baby! My dead baby.”

She hung up.

I called back. She refused to speak to me. With my anxiety spiking, I persisted. I called again.

“You are always finding fault with me,” she said with an adolescent defensiveness. “I just can’t do anything right.”

“Of course I still look pregnant! I wish I were still pregnant. How can you not see the cruelty in what you said?”

Click.

And with the sound of that dial tone, my grief swelled. I couldn’t un-know the decades of mother-daughter disappointment, just like I couldn’t un-know the devastation of seeing my dead baby dangling from me.

Months later, during my subsequent pregnancy, my mother and I revisited what happened between us. What I came to learn was that my mother had not known anyone who had miscarried – or put more accurately, because of the silence around miscarriage, she wasn’t aware that she knew anyone.

She hadn’t been confronted with having to find the “right” words, until now. Though her comments were unfathomable, it opened my eyes to a larger cultural issue: our lack of conversation surrounding miscarriage and stillbirth.

Though approximately one in four pregnancies end in loss, we are surprisingly silent about these traumas. Shame, stigma and fear – fear of somehow conjuring the loss in future pregnancies; that this was our fault; that something might be wrong with our bodies – keep us quiet. What if we handled this topic differently?

I can’t help but wonder if my mother – and others who have floundered in the face of this kind of trauma – would know what to say if we refused the current state of silence. I am not minimizing my mother’s transgressions. Instead, I am calling for a cultural framework that aims to normalize, destigmatize and provide tools for mothers and daughters (and others) to empathize more wholly.

We might, for example, witness a sea change if we rebelled against the notion that we should keep pregnancies “secret” until the second trimester, when we are “out of the woods”. Those who have lived through later losses might argue that we are never completely “out of the woods” anyway. That way we would begin to see loss as “normal” (or at least sadly common) and in doing so, break down commonly reported feelings of alienation and isolation.

When a grandparent dies, we typically know what to say. But because pregnancy loss is not something we see or hear much about, we barely know it exists until it happens to us, or to someone we love. As in any loss, we honor a woman’s experience best by listening to her, by simply saying: “I’m sorry for your loss. I’m here for you.” We don’t have to “fix” the pain. In fact, we can’t, and when people try – with all-too-oft repeated phrases like: “At least you know you can get pregnant!” or “It’ll be different next time!” – it often minimizes the situation.

I wish my mother had supported me differently after my miscarriage. My hope is that by attending to our cultural patterns of communication with regard to pregnancy loss, we will all have access to more loving, less fraught interchanges. By the time my own daughter is considering pregnancy (if she so chooses), as a culture we will be better equipped emotionally to deal with the possibilities that come along with endeavoring to create life.