Marie Kriedman is a Dayton mother of two. When she lost a daughter, Olivia, 14 weeks into her pregnancy, she was overwhelmed with grief.
Though Olivia had been diagnosed with a life-threatening gene mutation, the ultrasound tech reported her development was progressing perfectly. So, after two healthy pregnancies, Kreidman said the loss was unexpected.
“I literally transitioned into survival mode, ‘How do I get through the next hour and make breakfast for my kids? How do get through next hour without breaking down and scaring them?” Kreidman said. “My kids were pretty young and I joke, I couldn't just, you know, like hand over the credit card and say 'order a pizza.'”
Hospital staff gave her a few pamphlets and a remembrance stone. But, though supportive, she said they seemed ill-prepared to help her explain the loss to her family or connect her with mental health resources.
“I felt alone because I didn't know where to go or where to turn or what to do,” Kriedman said.
A new local nonprofit, Marriage Support Dayton is hoping to change that experience by building awareness of the possibilities of miscarriage and resources for finding mental health support.
Meagan Pant founded the nonprofit after experiencing her own pregnancy losses.
“When people hear other people's experiences it helps them to feel like they're not alone.”
“I have had four losses,” Pant said. “Especially that first one just hit me really hard because we don't talk a lot about miscarriage in society. It's just not something that I was thinking about as I started to try to start a family. I wasn't prepared for the emotional impact of that.”
Around 10 to 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, or pregnancy loss before 20 weeks, according to the Cleveland Clinic. That’s around three in every 20 expecting mothers. And, stillbirths, or loss after 20 weeks, effect one in every 175 pregnancies, according to the CDC.
The nonprofit
- identifies local counselors on their website experienced in pregnancy loss,
- has a grant to cover the cost of a counseling session
- and also hopes to fill doctor’s offices with educational pamphlets connecting families to its resources.
“When you're experiencing that grief, it's really hard to take care of yourself in that way, to sit down and find the right person and navigate your insurance,” Pant said.
Megan Lobsinger is a Cincinnati therapist who specializes in counseling during and after pregnancy.
“A lot of time it's just normalizing for people [that] this is a hard thing to go through and it's a grief process,” Lobsinger said. “It's a physical process that's often much more intense than people are expecting it to be. And, it's a hormonal process to recover that is really similar to the postpartum period.”
She said many of her clients have to pay out of pocket for sessions that their insurance companies don’t recognize as necessary care.
“I think people are very blindsided by how often it happens,” Lobsinger said. “And how to make sense of the fact that it feels heartbreaking, even though what the information they're receiving from providers is like, ‘It's okay, this is fine,’ you know, ‘You're okay. Just try again, hop back on that horse.”
When doctors told Marie Kreidman that Olivia had passed, she was alone in the hospital. Her husband was home with their kids, unable to get a babysitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. She said, at first, the loss felt so overwhelming that she lost her breath.
They’d already shopped for Olivia, and had a crib, high chair, car seat, and stroller waiting. Kriedman, beginning her second trimester, was in maternity clothes.
Kreidman continues to process her grief through writing and sharing about her experience.
“There are times, there are some days I can tell my story and I'm good and there are some days that I tell the story and, I don't quite make it through without crying,” Kriedman said. “But, every time I talk about our experience, I hopefully am doing good and spreading her name in my effort to help other families and women who are having a loss.”
Pant said she hopes the community built through Marriage Support Dayton will mean less grieving families have to go it alone.
“When you're kind of just dealing with it in silence, that makes it harder," Pant said. “When people hear other people's experiences it helps them to feel like they're not alone.”