Needing To Tell And Not Being Able To

I’m a person who tells, the kind of girl who overshares everything. It’s why I have a blog. It’s why my husband sometimes wishes that he owned a muzzle. I’m famously bad at keeping my own secrets. (My friends’ will go to the grave with me.) I share news, good and bad, the moment that I know it to be true.

Except for the time that I didn’t.

This time I listened to the quiet request of my husband and kept something private. I was pregnant and told no one. The test was positive, and in his soft voice he pleaded with me to keep our joy between us. “In a few weeks, the whole world will tell us that we’re crazy, and make jokes out of their own discomfort with our ever-growing family size. Please let them wait a while. Let this baby be our secret joy until the end of the first trimester, or until we can’t hide it any longer. Until then, let this secret happiness be ours.”

And as much as I ached to shout it from the mountaintops…I was silent.

It was the easiest pregnancy I’d ever had. The morning sickness I normally struggle with was a mild haze of ignore-able nausea. My extreme fatigue was easily covered with an afternoon nap with our then-three year old. We smiled secret smiles at each other every time we saw a pregnant belly or a fresh newborn snuggled in her daddy’s arms. We knew that those days were still ahead for us, and for the first time, we felt free to rejoice at the idea of them.

I went to the gym and took grief for suddenly lifting way less than I normally did, and I simply smiled. I sat on the playground with the other homeschool moms listening to their good-natured teasing about the size of our family, and laughed in my mind because it was bigger than they knew. It was our sweet and perfect secret.

And then it wasn’t.

It was our sad and lonely tragedy.

When the image on the 8 week ultrasound didn’t move, and there was no one to call. I texted the news to my husband, not trusting my voice to work. He sat in a meeting and read of the death of our sweet secret, and put a mask of normality over the face of his grief. I went home to children who had no idea where I’d been. My heart broke even as they made all of the normal demands of childhood, and my day continued to look like any other.

I wanted nothing more than to have a friend come to my house and cry with me, but I hadn’t shared my joy with them so it felt selfish to ask them to share my grief. When my husband asked me to continue to maintain our privacy, I reluctantly agree.

And then we waited. Alone. For the miscarriage to begin.

When it finally did, I sat in the bathroom and fought back tears and ached to call my mom. Instead, I curled up in bed, and waited for my husband to come home from work. He thanked me for the silence and space in which we could mourn. My mind rebelled against it.

When that tiny body was finally free from my own, my husband drove it to Oklahoma and quietly buried it on top of our daughter’s grave, so that our kids could be together. He saw family for lunch, and never told them the real nature of his trip. We began to heal quietly, hidden away from other people’s notice.

Utterly and completely alone.

It has been one of the greatest challenges of our marriage – the way that we invite or don’t invite other people to share our lives with us. He craves the time and space alone to help him process change and deal with the emotions. I crave the support of community, and rely on the sharing my experiences of joy and grief with the people I love. It is a disparity that I don’t know how to solve. How do we reconcile the social and emotional needs of an extreme introvert with those of an extreme extrovert, and still make both of us feel loved and respected?

How do we make sure that our needs are met when they are so opposite from each other?

I have told him simply that I will never again not tell my people. He is free to share news in his own time, but I cannot live in silence. I think he understands, but what do we do about the overlap? What about his cousin who is also my friend? What about his co-workers who also read my blog? When two lives are so deeply intertwined, how do you keep them separate? Because sometimes even lives which are lived together need some time apart.

Photo Credits:

Man in Tunnel By freeside510 from USA (Silence) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Bird in Flight By Carlos Pinto from Porto, Portugal (Foz do Douro, Porto Uploaded by tm) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons