I had the miscarriage on a Thursday. By Friday morning I had told two people: my husband, and my doctor. I was not ready to tell anyone else. I was not ready to say the words out loud again. I was lying on the couch under a blanket and I needed a few days before I could be a person again.
On Saturday morning my phone started buzzing. Friends texting. Cousins I hadn’t spoken to in months. My college roommate. All saying some version of the same thing: they had seen, they were so sorry, they were thinking of us.
My mother-in-law had posted on Facebook. She had written a paragraph about how we had lost a pregnancy and how the family was grieving and how she was asking for prayers. She had tagged my husband. She had tagged me.
I found out from a text before I had even opened the app. My own mother saw it on Facebook before I called her. My mother found out her daughter had a miscarriage from a social media post.
My husband called his mother. She cried. She said she thought it would help us to have support. She said she was sorry if she overstepped.
I got on the phone after he finished. I told her — calmly, clearly, without raising my voice — that what she had done was not overstepping. Overstepping is showing up uninvited. What she had done was take the worst moment of my year and post it online for her own emotional processing, without asking me, without considering what I needed, and that it had caused my mother to find out in the worst possible way.
I told her that if she ever shared anything about my life, my body, or my family again without my explicit permission, she would not be part of that family’s life going forward.
She has never done it again.
There is a version of this story where I feel guilty for being so direct. I have looked for that version. I cannot find it.