What We Can Talk About
I found this a very moving essay about miscarriage, especially the note in the title: “The out-of-office message I struggled to send.”
After she takes some time off following her third miscarriage, she feels she needs to explain her out-of-office time to people, but she doesn’t want to say too much. She writes,
I simultaneously explain and obfuscate the reasons for my absence: Some unnamed “matters” did not “resolve” on “quite the timeline we expected.” Almost everyone responds the same way to that line, perfectly polite and mechanical: “I hope your situation has resolved.” Thank you. It hasn’t at all!
Though I love the simplicity of what she writes at the end, which maybe should have been the out-of-office message: “Thanks for your patience with my delayed response. I’ve been dealing with a difficult miscarriage.”
Because if we can talk about birth, we should also be able to talk about loss or infertility. If we can figure out how to give people medical leave for delivery, we should be able to figure out how to give people medical leave for a miscarriage.
2 comments
Yes. Yes. A million times yes. Leave for a miscarriage would be amazing.
I feel like when I had my ectopic with emergency surgery, I didn’t want to tell people why I was out for a week at the beginning of the school year because I couldn’t quite believe it myself. And, I didn’t want all of the intrusive questions and “advice” that was sure to come my way. I feel like the downside of sharing something so painful with a greater audience is that you will get more a-holes than usual chiming in. Is that cynical?
I was just telling my coworker the other day that, the way our leave policies work, he has no need to justify his time off. Just don’t want to come in? Call in and say “I can’t make it in today.”
I think you should be able to share whatever you want to share. So however you frame your absence to coworkers can be the same as you frame it to clients or casual contacts. Or not.
Maybe it helps that in one of my summer jobs during college, the day I started the coworkers told me that my boss was returning from leave after a miscarriage. I was a little uncomfortable receiving personal info about someone I hadn’t even met, but…OK, cool. Thanks for the heads-up surrounding topics I was unlikely to talk about – but you never know who you’ll be dealing with. I understood and thought it was nice that they were protective of her.