Thoughts: Manga about miscarriage on Mother’s Day

Editor’s note: Roy Schwartz is a pop culture historian and critic.follow him twitter, Instagramand Facebook And then royschwartz.com.His wife, Kimberly Rae Miller, is the editor-in-chief of a parenting magazine. mask He is also the best-selling author of “.become clean” and “beautiful body” The views expressed here are their own.See more opinion On CNN.

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On Mother’s Day, millions of families around the world celebrate their living mothers by sending them cards, flowers, gifts, or taking them out to a prix fixe brunch. It’s a happy occasion and, like most holidays, a good opportunity to be grateful for what we have. But to truly honor your mother, it’s not enough to appreciate the happy parts. Motherhood comes with struggles, sacrifices, and sometimes sadness. They should also be evaluated.

Miscarriage in particular is an often untold chapter in many women’s motherhood stories, and Mother’s Day can be a painful or bittersweet memory. This is one of the reasons cartoonist Shari Pele chose Mother’s Day to release her autobiographical animated short, “Miscarriage”.

“Miscarriage” is based on Pele’s 2017 webcomic of the same name, making it perhaps the first comic about miscarriage. The incident had received some press coverage, but went viral after actress Mayim Bialik shared it on her show. socializing media. This inspired Mr. Pelle, a veteran illustrator and storyboard artist known for his “Red Bull Gives Me Wings” commercials, to create more comics about taboo themes. She is producing a “manga” series titled “Unspoken”.

Kim: I had my first miscarriage as I was nearing the deadline for my second book, Beautiful Bodies, a memoir and social history about our relationship with our bodies and the pursuit of perfection. .

I remember calling my agent and telling her I couldn’t write it. I couldn’t access the emotions I needed to write about other moments in my life. At the time, I couldn’t exist in anything other than my current state of grieving my pregnancy. She shared with me her own experience of miscarriage. But she wasn’t alone. The more I shared, the more people shared with me.

And when I was finally ready to finish talking about my relationship with my body, my miscarriage became part of it.

Roy: When Kim miscarried, I felt shame and guilt, but not about the miscarriage itself. I felt I was disqualifying her as her husband. My job was to keep her safe and happy, and I was completely powerless to do either of those things. She wanted to be alone, like a dying animal in the wild, and I didn’t know how to respect her wishes yet completely ignore them.

To make matters worse, I felt guilty and ashamed and said, “I don’t know.we I had a miscarriage. ” She was the one who had to go through the experience of holding her dead baby inside her and expelling it.

She was someone who had to face the irrational but inevitable internalized stigma of having failed to fulfill her biological and social purpose. And I myself felt a sense of loss and sadness.

It felt selfish and floundering. Worse, it felt like a form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, as if I was sucking her pain away, but it wasn’t something I could share.

Fortunately, I had male friends who were more or less sympathetic and understanding. From my research, several had experienced miscarriages or medically necessary abortions.

One of my friends, a good person but a blunt force, told me that her mother, who had suffered a stillbirth in the 1980s and had carried the trauma with her for years, said to me, “She won’t recover until you stand over her.” told. It was primitive advice, but it turns out he had a point, at least in our case.

Kim: Over the next few months, my perspective on the world was colored by my loss. In between bouts of self-pity and irrational anger, Roy and I began trying to conceive again. And when the second pink line appeared, everything felt better.

During my first pregnancy, I felt something was wrong early on. But the second time around, that same instinct reassured me that everything would be okay, despite all the warnings I encountered online. And it was. We had a beautiful and healthy baby boy.

After our son was born, Roy and I had five more miscarriages before finally conceiving our daughter. The fact that I already had a child to care for changed the way I dealt with subsequent loss. We couldn’t afford to shut down like we did the first time. In fact, we talked about it further.

I’ve been on a sort of ongoing quest to make miscarriage something I can talk about openly, so I don’t feel so alone when it happens.

Pele said he coped with his art and faith. She is a Modern Orthodox Jew who finds some solace in the struggles of the biblical matriarchs with infertility, which she discusses in “Miscarriage.” Sharing her own experiences through her art has allowed her to recover from trauma. “Honestly, the process of putting my story into comic book form was very cathartic,” she said. It “removed all traces of my anger, emotions, and physical pain.”

Art has powerful therapeutic effects for both artist and audience. Manga in particular can make difficult or taboo subjects easier to handle. It’s often easier to understand than prose that feels thick and heavy, or movies that feel all too real and visceral.

Through the combination of words and images, comics can seamlessly switch between the conceptual and the material, between the abstract language of the narrative captions and the expressive emotions of the characters, creating a balance between thought and emotion. We create an outstanding experience.

In “Miscarried”, Paire effectively utilizes her simple, cartoonish style to contrast the seriousness of the story, making it more disturbing and moving. The fact that this animation lacks the polish of higher-end productions (produced through a fellowship grant with the Jewish Writers Initiative’s Digital She Storytellers She Lab) also makes it feel more personal and authentic.

“I wanted to know how many people have experienced miscarriage, infertility, or other miscarriages during my pregnancy,” Pelle said. “I was relieved to learn how common miscarriages are. It wasn’t ‘my fault’ that something went wrong.”

When it went viral, her comic became the source of information she wanted. “I still get emails and messages from all over the world,” she says. “[It] I now want to support further content development in the future. ”

Miscarriage is traumatic and must be acknowledged before the trauma can be healed. It shouldn’t be a taboo topic.

Also, this is much more common than most people think. Up to one in five known pregnancies end in miscarriage (defined as a sudden miscarriage before the 20th week of pregnancy), but the real number may be higher as many occur early. . (More information about miscarriage is available here and through most health care providers.)

This is a very personal experience, but it doesn’t mean women should go through it alone. Love, support and patience from family, friends and community makes all the difference.

Pelle’s next two comics are “Michael’s Miscarriage,” an adaptation of a 2018 comic about miscarriage from the husband’s perspective, and “The Diagnosis,” an adaptation of a 2019 comic about having a child with Down syndrome. ” and both are based on stories people have shared with her. After that, she hopes to focus on other challenges of parenting, especially those involving disabilities and disabilities.

“I just want to use my comics and storytelling ‘power’ to do good,” she told us. “It’s about making sure people don’t feel alone when they’re on their personal journey.”

“Miscarriage” reminded us of a difficult chapter in our parenting journey. And it reminded me of how talking about it with each other and others helped us get through it. It’s as much a part of our story as the happy ending of two perfect children. This Mother’s Day, we celebrate that too.