The Real Housewives of Potomac Helped Me Cope With Miscarriage

Coping with miscarriage is hard. I found solace in The Real Housewives.

The Real Housewives of Potomac Helped Me Cope With Miscarriage 

Before I had a miscarriage the only person I knew who had one was my mother. Her miscarriage is one of the earliest memories I have because she was relatively far along, and I was old enough to understand that suddenly, a baby wasn’t coming. 

My own miscarriage sent me into the most cavernous depths of depression I have ever experienced. I drank, I slept, I cried for weeks, I gazed off thinking about how I must have caused my body to betray me and my Eleanor. I was devastated. It was dark, and I never want to be in that dark place again. 

Time went on and many months later I was five months pregnant, and the COVID-19 pandemic had just shut down my office and the world. I was still really struggling with anxiety and feared that I would lose another pregnancy. While my friends were taking up Peloton, baking bread and tie dying outside of work, I was laying on my couch trying to keep myself together by soaking in podcasts about Bravo television. I kept hearing over and over, “if you’re not watching The Real Housewives of Potomac, you need to be.”

One morning I decided to give an episode of RHOP a try and was instantly hooked. I immediately binged and what I didn’t know was that this show was exactly what I needed to start healing the pieces of myself left wounded by pregnancy loss. 

Two Things can be True

During the fourth season of the show, two of the wives were reeling from their own miscarriages - something I had certainly never seen on TV. Their pain was palpable, but so was their hope. 

The wives opened up to viewers about the hard and ugly parts of loss, such as people saying the wrong things and making assumptions as to what caused their loss. It showed the toll that pregnancy loss can take on a marriage as well as their partners’ struggle to help them cope. Most importantly, it showed me that two things can be true: you can be devastated by loss AND ecstatic about life with a new baby.

Watching Ashley and Monique honor their losses, their following pregnancies, the strength of their bodies and their growing families - inclusive of the children they would never get to meet - led a little bit of me to heal. One little piece of me that was hateful, scared and pessimistic, accepted that it was ok to be excited for my new pregnancy and to believe my body was capable of nurturing a life. 

Accepting that two things can be true and that grieving my miscarriage didn’t mean I couldn’t also revel in my pregnancy has been one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn in motherhood. I can feel strongly about baby led weaning AND be scared of choking. I can be so tired AND not sleep train. I can let my toddler take deliberate risks running and climbing AND be terrified he’ll get hurt. I can worry and worry AND live in the moment. I can grieve Eleanor AND find joy in absolutely everything about Henry. 

Watching that season of RHOP was the first time I realized that I was seeing the dichotomous nature of motherhood play out. Of course, it had always been around me in practice, but I don’t think I really understood it. 

Finding My Village 

Since, RHOP has shown me so much more about motherhood. I think we all should watch the show to learn from mothers, and further normalize common experiences of modern motherhood. Ashley met with her lactation consultant on camera before I knew what a lactation consultant was, which in a way prepared me for the day that I would work with one myself. She happily brought her pump along on trips and pumped on camera. She took her second son for body work with a massage therapist while struggling with a tongue and lip tie. My son is now 15 months old and I could sing the praises of infant chiropractic care and tongue tie releases all day. 

Coping with miscarriage is hard. In the days following my D&C I naively thought I would just power through to get to the next pregnancy and it would all be behind me. I didn’t know my miscarriage would be with me forever; while the grief would always be there, its intensity would change over time. 

I tune in to The Real Housewives for vapid fights, fashion, and the occasional dip into financial troubles. Seeing miscarriage in real life, in a place as unexpected as The Real Housewives was something I could’ve never known I needed. It helped me to feel seen. It gave me a little burst of empowerment to acknowledge that I was experiencing something hard and made it clear that I was not alone. This confidence led me to therapy, which led me to openly talking about my miscarriage. 

Not hiding from my miscarriage has led me to find my own community of women who have had similar experiences - and that community, abolishing that loneliness from the experience of miscarriage, has been the biggest gift. 

They say it takes a village to raise a child, and that may be true, but it also takes a village to usher people into parenthood, to tell us we’re not alone and that we’re doing a good job. The community of people touched by miscarriage has been immeasurable in making my village complete.