Brandon and I had been trying for a baby for almost a year when I got pregnant. The faint pink line appeared on the pregnancy test on a sunny Saturday in September, three weeks after we moved to Maryland.

By Tuesday, I was peeing blood.

The miscarriage took months. I bled a lot in the days after the spotting began and thought that would be the extent of it, but subsequent blood tests continued to show elevated levels of the pregnancy hormone—dropping, slowly, but never reaching zero. I was still technically pregnant, but only by virtue of tissue and cells clinging stubbornly to my uterine walls long after my body understood they would never become a baby. After weeks of this my doctor prescribed medication to “complete” the miscarriage. I inserted four pills into my body and spent four hours throwing up and shivering violently under two electric blankets, clutching a pillow to my abdomen while my insides clenched painfully, as if being squeezed repeatedly by an enormous, angry fist. Brandon, worried, phoned the on-call doctor at the practice, who listened to my symptoms and said I was having a normal, if severe, reaction to the drug. The nausea and cramping trailed off late that night, leaving me sweaty and exhausted. The bleeding came later and lasted for days. A final blood test a week later showed my hormone levels finally back at zero. By that point, it was November.

I know this retelling seems detached and that’s because that is, honestly, kind of how I experienced it. This all happened right after we moved to Maryland, a process that did not go well or easily for me. I didn’t have a job, or a doctor, or any friends who lived here or were available to come be with me, and Brandon was at work all day, so I experienced most of this completely by myself. It dragged on and it took forever, but the initial onset happened so quickly that I never had a chance to get attached to the pregnancy before I had to come to terms with losing it. I didn’t really talk about it or tell anyone it was happening, so it exists in a bit of a vacuum for me, wrapped up in the overall crappiness of our first few months in Maryland.

Miscarriage is extremely common but rarely discussed. It is heartbreakingly normal, but still wrapped up in shame and secrecy. I understand this, even if I can’t relate to it personally. My miscarriage was never a secret and I do not hold it close to my heart. I never felt ashamed about or responsible for it, and I never feared being judged for it. I just, for the most part, didn’t want to talk about it. At the time I felt like I was failing at so much—at being happy, at making friends, at filling my days, at finding a job—so failing to stay pregnant was just another thing to add to the list, one more shortcoming that I didn’t need to disclose or dissect in detail. Even now when I mention it (offhand, usually), I feel weird when people express sympathy. Because it was awful and it was hard, but it was one of a thousand things at the time that were awful and felt hard, and it happened before I ever felt happy about being pregnant or started to process it in terms of a potential child. My first pregnancy was a brief moment of possibility and then literal months of loss.

Up to that point, I had been tracking my ovulation using an app and at-home tests, but we had not been particularly diligent about timing things to take advantage of those conditions. (Trying for a baby is, in the end, not that much fun after the first few months.) After the miscarriage and a month of prescribed waiting, I was determined to do better, and by the end of February I was pregnant again. The pink line this time came early, before my period was officially late. It was blazing and bright and appeared on the test strip within seconds. Quietly, I took this as a good sign.

Until I started spotting again. It came this time on a Saturday night while we were hanging out at home. Brandon took Maisy outside and I went to the bathroom, and when I stood, there it was: A splatter of bright red blood. I walked back to our bedroom, dazed. Brandon came in a few minutes later, laughing about something. He saw my face and stopped short. “What?” he asked.

“I’m spotting,” I said quietly, and then burst into tears.

I called my doctor’s office, but the thing about a potential miscarriage is that there’s nothing anyone can do to intervene. Doctors can’t even tell you for sure if what you’re experiencing is intermittent spotting (terrifying, but normal and common in up to 20 percent of healthy pregnancies) or the beginning of the end of viability. The bleeding will either stop or it will increase, and the only way to know is to wait.

The on-call doctor told me as much. “Make an appointment for Monday,” she said sympathetically. I heard noise in the background, like she was at a party, and I winced. “We can try then to confirm the pregnancy.”

So I made the appointment. Then I took another pregnancy test, knowing that the result wouldn’t really mean anything. It said I was still pregnant, and I seemed to stay that way, the spotting tapering off that night. By Monday, it hadn’t resumed.

Early that morning, I went into the office to get tested. How it works is this: They take a sample to determine the level of pregnancy hormone in your blood, then retest you 48 hours later. The level should roughly double every 72 hours, so if your numbers are increasing, then chances are the pregnancy is proceeding as it should. After I left the lab the on-call doctor did a quick pelvic exam. He shrugged as he took off the rubber gloves. “Your uterus is growing,” he said, “so something’s in there.” I was roughly six weeks pregnant, which was very early but just far enough along to potentially detect a heartbeat via ultrasound, so he decided that they would do that in addition to my follow-up blood test on Wednesday. It wouldn’t necessarily mean anything if they couldn’t find a heartbeat, he warned me. It was early.

But. Maybe.

Because it was so unclear whether anything would happen at that appointment, and because I still wasn’t spotting, I told Brandon he didn’t need to come with me. When he left for work I climbed the stairs to our bedroom and put on one of his worn flannel shirts, the softness steadying me later that morning when I locked the door and walked out to my car.

The nurses drew my blood and then led me to the ultrasound room. I traded my clothes for a scratchy paper robe and then climbed onto the table and tried to relax. I would not freak out if there was no heartbeat, I told myself. I would wait for the blood test results. Maybe the pregnancy would continue and maybe it wouldn’t, and I might not know for a few days, and that would be fine. I would not drive myself crazy. If the pregnancy wasn’t viable, I had decided, I would probably be done with this particular experiment. Two miscarriages in a row in less than four months when everything else still felt so hard seemed like a clear sign that this wouldn’t work out for me. It seemed like too much to take on. We would be okay, I told myself.

But.

Maybe.

The tech came back in and prepped the machine and then gently inserted the ultrasound wand. A grainy grey-and-white image popped up on the screen in front of me, an abstract landscape of wavy circles and black space. She was quiet and I stared at the image, trying to decipher it but having no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t see anything moving or flickering, but maybe that was fine? I didn’t know. The silence continued. And then she took a breath.

“Well,” she said gently. “It’s twins.”

when everything and nothing goes according to plan