So Much Pain

All women are sisters. If you don’t believe me, write about a miscarriage and see what happens. A week ago I described my own experience, now more than 30 years old — memories made fresh by a private newsletter conversation.

Two amazing (but not surprising) realities emerged: 1) This is one pain that stays right there – buried under daily events and worries and happy times — but not gone. Never gone. 2) It is a gift to have a place to discuss or describe the things that wound us, change us, leave silent but permanent marks. Offering that space is one particular gift women give to one another. Here are three who shared my “place:”

Nobody ever talks about it but the reality is that many people have been through it (multiple times even) and I think there is comfort in shared grief.

I like to be tidy with emotions (I never am – HA!), but the grief I feel about these losses have a layer of guilt around them – as if I shouldn’t be so upset. But I am.

I am in tears! I was on Facebook, saw your post on miscarriage and just oh my goodness. I have had 2 miscarriages in the past year. It been hard, but it’s made so much harder that the whole subject has a weird taboo around it. It’s not like people won’t ask me when I’m planning to have kids. I’ve heard a thousand times “when are you going to have children?” and had to make light of a situation that I was still really sad about.

That’s all.

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Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons. View all posts by Cynthia Samuels

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Cynthia Samuels

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