One Miscarriage, One Man, One Woman

An expecting father who suffers loss can feel like a failure for not being able to provide the "perfect" conditions necessary to produce a healthy baby. Perhaps it was the time you yelled at your partner, simply because you were aggravated by some external event. Or, maybe you should have simply made your partner stay in bed for the first nine months of pregnancy. If only you could have had some sense of control, you would have known exactly what to do. Maybe it was bad genetic material — those blue jeans were indeed much too tight! If only the older siblings could have stayed under your control and miraculously found it in themselves to behave for the sake of their mother's pregnancy. The sense of ineffectiveness can simply be overwhelming.

After a loss, a man can try to comfort his partner. But, how many hugs, how many words of love and comfort will it take to fill such a great emotional chasm? Nothing seems to quite make up for the loss of a potential child. What might they have been like? What greatness might the future have held for you and your baby? The overwhelming sense of loss of the unknown can eat away at your psyche, as easily as termites eat through wood, leaving behind a fragile shell, with all of your future plans taken away, leaving nothing but a vacuous void. The loss of what might have been can be as great as any pain you have ever felt. In the shadow of such pain and loss, how can anything you say or do possibly make you partner's grief any less?

Sex can seem rather unappetizing, too. After all, that is what started the whole fiasco in the first place. Your partner may seem just as pretty and beautiful, but she might not seem as tantalizingly sexy right now. Why ravish her if you will only hurt the both of you? Why suffer needlessly again? Maybe your partner thinks you are a big loser for not being able to reproduce properly. Heck, everybody else is having babies and you can't. Why would your partner want to try again with a loser? If only the pregnancy had made it, you would have a baby, and you and your partner could still be just as lustful as ever!

Now all you might have is a sense of loss that only time can heal. Another baby won't be able to replace the one you just lost. Something unique is gone forever.