Overcoming miscarriage by Maud

Reading time: 5 minutes

My name is Maud Bonnet, I’m 34 years old, I’m from Paris, and I live in the 18th arrondissement. I’ve been married for 3 years, and I have a little boy named Achille who is almost 19 months old. I started my business with my friend Audrey, Athletic Agency, an agency specialized in sports and wellness.

For me, the desire for motherhood was a logical step. I’ve never been overly drawn to children, but I’ve always wanted to have them. I really wanted to get married first and enjoy my couple’s life: travel, weekends away, dining out, going to events… enjoying my life as a woman, with my friends, and my time for sports. After the wedding, I was in my thirties, and I felt like it was the right time; I just knew it, and it came naturally.

"The miscarriage, I never really imagined it..." Then, and you don’t realize it, when you're young, the only thing you fear is getting pregnant. But when you actually want a child, you realize it’s not as easy as it seems, and it’s not magical. It took a bit of time for me because I had a miscarriage, even though I got pregnant very quickly. I never really imagined a miscarriage... For me, it was something that was supposed to happen to other people. No one around me had really talked about it, and it felt like a concept from the Middle Ages. It traumatized me. I didn’t expect it.

I had a gynecologist in Versailles, but I decided I wouldn’t travel all the way there for my check-ups. I thought I’d find a doctor near my work to get my blood test prescriptions and go to various clinics for my ultrasounds. In retrospect, I regret this decision deeply, and I wouldn’t do it again (fortunately, I’m now being well taken care of). The doctor I first consulted was very kind but not professional enough. I had my ultrasounds in specialized clinics, but there was no human touch; I honestly felt like just a piece of flesh. It was awful."

Photograph by Anais Ramos for talm

The dating ultrasound, where everything was fine, wasn’t pleasant at all. My husband was shocked, and they were almost opening the door to chat during my exam.

But it was during the first trimester ultrasound that I was suddenly told: "Anyway, I can't hear the heart, the heart isn’t beating, let me do this." I didn’t understand what they were saying, "The heart’s not beating, this happens all the time, you need to go to the emergency room now." I was in shock, I almost fainted. I was sitting on the street with my husband, devastated, 3 days before Christmas... It took me a long time to recover and think, okay, I’ll start over. I had to grieve properly. I felt a lot of resentment toward the medical staff because the news was delivered so brutally, and I wasn’t well taken care of. In fact, this first pregnancy just happened like that...

"There’s a kind of universality in the relationships between mothers, and even if no one offers you help, you feel support, empathy."

I had shared the news at work the day before because we had our Christmas dinner, and I was the only one not drinking champagne. I had announced it happily, and then... well, it’s very personal, but I decided that for my second pregnancy, I would tell the people who needed to know right away: like at work, for example, I wanted to take care of myself. There were a lot of things I didn’t want to do the same the second time around. In any case, the announcement of the miscarriage was incredibly harsh, I couldn’t believe it. No one explained anything to me, and I was practically thrown out on the sidewalk...

Afterward, I went to the emergency room at Port Royal, I didn’t know what to do anymore, except that over there, the unfortunate thing is that you wait with a lot of other women. You see everything, you see women who are coming to give birth, and that made me completely collapse. The medical staff were great, I was very well taken care of. But the problem was that at the time, the pill I needed to take to induce the miscarriage was no longer on the market, so I had to visit a lot of pharmacies to find it. Everyone was refusing it... I struggled! At the hospital, they told me that if I didn’t find the medication by the eighth pharmacy, I would have to come back for an operation. I was thinking, what is going on? Luckily, we found it, and I was even able to give one of my packs to a friend who had a miscarriage a few days later.

Photograph by Anais Ramos for talm

"Once I said it, it opened up the conversation, and people said ‘me too,’ and that’s when I understood."

What’s certain is that I was really supported by my friends, family, and my husband. After the miscarriage, we told everyone and received a lot of support. And once I said it, it opened up the conversation, and people said, "Me too," and that’s when I understood... I made a post on Instagram to talk about it, and I received so many reactions... I talked about the miscarriage but also about the difficulty of getting pregnant, the challenges that all women face, the difficulty of being a woman in general. I received testimonies from women I knew very well, others I didn’t know at all, or had just crossed paths with. A thousand different stories. Just knowing that we are all going through the same struggle made me feel better. Supporting each other, I found that really important. I later found that same sense of solidarity during my breastfeeding journey, by the way, because I had a lot of struggles, and the support I received in that process was so powerful.

Photograph by Anais Ramos for talm

There’s a kind of universality in the relationships between mothers, and even if no one offers you help, you feel support, empathy. Indeed, my miscarriage was a trauma. I really had to grieve. I went through two months of depression, I couldn’t talk about it, my partner didn’t understand, he supported me a lot, but after a while, he had moved on. The people around me didn’t understand either.

It was also the time when all the women around me were getting pregnant, everyone was showing up with their announcement, their growing belly... I went to gatherings with lots of people, where I felt completely alone, I would go to the bathroom, collapse on the floor, then go home crying. I thought I would never get over it. So, my husband and I decided to take a little trip to Colombia; I really needed a real break. I also threw myself into work. I went to Morocco for yoga with a friend... I did a lot of little things to feel ready again.

And one day, I felt ready. After six months, we said, “Let’s go, let’s try again!” I thought that if it happened a second time, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. But in the end, we did it.

See you next week for the continuation of the talk with Maud Bonnet.