357Magnum

My wife and I had three losses over the past year. Our first pregnancy ended up being ectopic, and she had to have two surgeries and lose one of her fallopian tubes. She almost bled to death. The whole thing was a terrifying ordeal which forever took the magic and excitement out of the idea of pregnancy and replaced it with terror. This was in September 2017.

Once she had recovered fully and was cleared to try again, we conceived again sometime around late February/early March 2018. This time everything seemed ok. Scans were good. A hearbeat. A normal looking fetus formed. We started to relax and buy baby stuff after we were told "after you see scans like this the chances of things going wrong are really small." Then, at our 17 week scan, nothing. The fetus had died somewhere between 14 and 17 weeks. This was also the scan that we had invited several family members to come see, since we were now less anxious about it all. But then we got the terrible news. It took them about a month for all the pathology to be completed, and it turned out to be a partial molar pregnancy with triploidy syndrome, which normally doesn't form a fetus/results in early miscarriage. But fuck us, right? My wife had to have a D&C last June and recover from yet another surgical procedure.

Icing on the cake is that we were told two weeks after the loss (once the tests on her had come back from pathology, but not the tests on the fetus) that they couldn't think of anything which would prevent us trying again, as there was nothing wrong with us. So for two weeks we resumed normal activities. Then we were told that with a partial molar pregnancy there is a chance that it could develop into cancer - cancer which mimics early pregnancy. So you are supposed to not get pregnant for 6 months so they can screen for the cancer by testing HCG. Only it turns out, in the two weeks before we knew this, we conceived again. Even though the odds were incredibly low. Now we were terrified that my wife could have cancer, but we couldn't do anything to treat it or detect it early because of the pregnancy.

But then, as it turns out, this pregnancy turned out to be a blighted ovum, one of the more common causes of early miscarriage (often not diagnosed as this specifically because normal pregnancies aren't having all the extra scans and tests we were). So my wife had to take pills to make her miscarry. She just got over that physically about a month ago, pretty much a year exactly from the first loss.

Now we have to wait the 6 months to screen for the cancer before we can try again, and we really don't even know what we think about anything anymore. Our friends and family members are all having babies just fine. Babies that were supposed to grow up alongside ours. We have to be happy for them - want to be happy for them - but have to pretty much force it. I never noticed how ubiquitous baby stuff is until it became a trigger for us, either.

So, I'm very aware of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Week. For better or for worse, this is a part of our life now. A permanent scan across the normal human experience. It is most upsetting, especially to my wife, because we didn't do anything wrong. She followed all the advice for a healthy pregnancy to a T. Including getting into shape before we even decided to start trying. Everything we ate was pregnancy safe. Meanwhile, people are having babies all around us while frequently eating pregnancy unsafe foods, or smoking during their pregnancy, or not even having intended to get pregnant in the first place. This makes her pretty bitter, and has strained a lot of relationships.

And there is nothing that can really be done to make anyone feel better. Everything that everyone says doesn't help. I'm sure you, OP, have heard all of it. No one wants to be told that this is part of a grand plan. No one wants to be told that it could have been worse. No one wants to be told that it will all work out fine next time. No one wants to be asked what the plan is. No one wants to be asked if we have looked into adopting yet (we have - we've done and read literally anything that anyone can think of.) No one is going to tell us anything new or useful, so they just need to stop trying. The only thing that has ever felt good for us to hear is for people just to say "that sucks." Just to acknowledge that it is terrible, and that it is ok to feel terrible about it. Because it just fucking sucks.

So to you, OP, that fucking sucks what you had to go through. I've been there. I'm also coming up on 10 years with my wife this November, and we've been married for 5.5 years. Good luck to you, man.

A friend of mine called the cops after his wife hit him. After they came, they ended up arresting him. As an attorney (though I don't practice in this area of law much), I hear a lot about arrests for domestic violence that seem a bit less than valid. The DA in my area is cracking down on domestic violence, because, as I'm sure you know, it is a major precursor to a huge number of homicides. The problem with that, of course, is that any crackdown is necessarily going to catch a few innocent guys, especially when the "man beating a woman" stereotype is so strongly ingrained in our culture and law enforcement training/experience.

So my questions are:

1. How many instances of female-on-male violence do you encounter? What are the proportions compared to male-on-female violence? And are there lots of instances of "mutual combat" among intimate partners, where both parties are culpable?

2. Do you perceive false allegations as a major issue in dealing with this problem? I'm sure that most situations involve legitimate abuse (I'm not trying to cast doubt on the very real social problem of domestic violence), but I'd be interested to know what effects false allegations have in terms of the problem as a whole. We've seen lots of controversy over false rape accusations over the years, which not only harm the accused but also diminish the credibility of some real victims in the public eye.

But if you're looking for the silver lining, you can't see the dark cloud.

Thank you for that. You've described my wife's experience pretty well. She has to do more of it than I do. She goes to the baby showers, and it is her siblings and cousins who keep having kids. We would have been the first couple on my side of the family to start having kids, so my family events have still remained adults-only. However, my mom has been a huge point of stress, too, since she always has to bring it up. Being a grandmother is pretty much the only thing she looks forward to in life, but constantly having her pry into all of our plans is taxing. She says all kinds of shit that is hurtful and doesn't even realize it.

After our first loss, two of our best friends (a married couple) conceived. At first they were hesitant to tell us, but eventually they did. That was just before we found out we were pregnant with our second. Our kids were supposed to be born one month apart. It was perfect. Here we had close friends to go through all of the early parenthood stuff with. It actually took a bit of the sting off of the first loss, for me at least. Then, her brother's girlfriend got pregnant with their second, which is due one month after ours was supposed to be due. So we were going to have two other babies around the exact same age as ours.

Then ours died. The other two pregnancies are fine. Our friends are due any day now. My wife calls these her "bookends." Now she has to live with the fact that these two kids which will be in her life forever will forever remind her of the one we lost.

And like I said before, the double whammy of it all is that it puts strain on these relationships. My wife doesn't enjoy hanging out with our friends as much anymore, because our friend is not super diligent about food safety, routinely eating underdone stuff or soft ripened cheeses or other well-known pregnancy no-nos. Then she, like any pregnant woman, will say things like "Oh I hope everything turns out ok, I get so worried that I won't have a healthy baby" or stuff like that. This drives my wife fucking nuts, because here is someone who is being generally aloof and everything is fine, whereas she was doing everything exactly by the book only to be stricken by unpreventable things.

Meanwhile, her brother's girlfriends pregnancy bothers her in other ways. They are together probably primarily because of the first pregnancy (beautiful, sweet kid, too). They were going to get married but ended up calling it off. Then they broke up, then they started seeing each other again. This pregnancy is apparently one of those accidental pregnancies mixed with a lot of "having another baby will solve our relationship problems" type things. It is probably all doomed to failure. Again, this pisses my wife off because we tried to do everything right. We waited until we were financially comfortable and owned a home we could see ourselves raising kids in (while still not being too old for safe pregnancy - my wife is only 30). Our relationship is the most stable of anyone we know. We communicate incredibly well. Other friends of ours almost hold our relationship up on some kind of idealistic pedestal and come to us for advice. But again, this is the result of hard work and dedicated effort, like everything my wife does. At least our marriage is still really strong, despite everything that has happened. But my wife, who grew up poor and in a trailer and ultimately put herself through school and became a very successful CPA, is just really tired of feeling "tested" by life.

Men are in a precarious position with domestic violence. The culture is against them, as many men are hesitant to admit that a woman has hit them. They are also hesitant to defend themselves against an intimate partner attack because, if the cops show up and both parties have bruises, the man gets arrested. Hell, they are hesitant to report the abuse to police at all, even if they are not ashamed of being attacked by a woman, just because they could still be arrested if she just says that he hit her first. In my experience talking to other lawyers about this, about the best case scenario a man has is that both of them get arrested.