Joanne Gallant - A Womb in the Shape of a Heart: My Story of Miscarriage and Motherhood

Beautiful, brave, and heartbreaking, A Womb in the Shape of a Heart illuminates both the joys of motherhood and the grief of miscarriage in equal measure. With suspenseful storytelling and honest revelation, this is a compelling read.

Beth Powning, author of Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss

This book is a love letter: to the cherished babies the author has lost, to her cherished son who stayed, to her loving husband, to the health-care professionals who guided them through with kindness, and also to herselfthe person she was before, during, and after her miscarriages. It is also a love letter to anyone who has ever experienced the everlasting ache of pregnancy loss. Gallant has opened up a space for us where grief and joy can exist together. Her tender words burrowed into me and found a home, and Im so grateful she wrote them.

- Jessica Westhead, author of Worry

Gallants exquisite chronicle of loss transforms the private anguish of so many women into revelatory beauty. Candid, fierce, and embracing, this is a lyric testimony to the ways hope can both betray and redeem usan elegy filled with wisdom and grace.

- Lorri Neilsen Glenn, award-winning author of Following the River: Traces of Red River Women

Becoming a mother is emotional and uncharted territory no matter what our outcomes. Gallants deeply resonant memoir is both raw and gentle, a kindness for those of us who have found grief and tumult as well as hope, resilience, and renewal along that journey.

Kate Inglis, award-winning author of Notes for the Everlost: A Field Guide to Grief

Many motherspeople with children as well as those who long for themwill be grateful that Joanne Gallant has shared her story. I know I am. Her debut memoir contains so many of the paradoxes of life: how the greatest joys can be underscored with the deepest terrors, how hope can be so tightly woven into grief, but ultimately, it is the love in this book that will stay with me. Her love for her child, for her husband, for the babies she lost, but also for the vulnerability she reveals in this moving book, which, in another one of those paradoxes, she shows us can also be an act of love.

Harriet Alida Lye, author of The Honey Farm and Natural Killer

A Womb in the Shape of a Heart is a must-read for anyone who knows the heartache of pregnancy loss. I wish this book existed when I w

as going through my own experience with infertility and multiple miscarriages. Joannes candid memoir is honest, hopeful, and soothing.

Ariel Ng Bourbonnais, author of Through, Not Around

Copyright Joanne Gallant, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

Printed and bound in Canada
nb1563

Cover artwork Briana Corr Scott

Editor: Whitney Moran
Design: Rudi Tusek

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: A womb in the shape of a heart : my story of miscarriage and
motherhood / Joanne Gallant.

Names: Gallant, Joanne, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210215100 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210215275 | ISBN 9781771089760 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771089838 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Gallant, Joanne. | LCSH: Gallant, JoanneHealth. | LCSH: MiscarriagePatientsCanadaBiography. | LCSH: Infertility, FemalePatientsCanadaBiography. | LCSH: Motherhood. | LCSH: Postpartum depressionPatientsCanadaBiography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC RG648 .G35 2021 | DDC 618.3/920092dc23

Nimbus Publishing acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of Nova Scotia. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.

For Teddy and Joey

Im a mother.
Im a mother tossed in the wave of my love;
helpless, vulnerable.
Im a mother, whether my son is here or not,
whether my son is alive or not.

Beth Powning, Shadow Child

This is a work of non-fiction. However, in some cases, names of individuals have been altered to protect their privacy. Some characters have been amalgamated into singular entities for the purpose of narrative.

1

Before I even take the test, I know it is going to be positive.

I am standing in my bathroom, waiting impatiently for the three minutes to pass so I can hold tangible proof of what I already know: I am pregnant. I look at my reflection in the mirror above the sink and I run my hands over my stomach, convinced I see a slight bulge that wasnt there before. I feel as changed now as the time I lost my virginity to my high school boyfriend and I was certain everyone could read it on my face.

The alarm dings on my phone, which is sitting precariously on the edge of the bathroom sink, and I pick up the test I peed on. Its unmistakable: two pink lines. I clutch the test tightly, giving myself a brief moment alone with the child I already love.

Joey looks up when I walk into the next room, his brown eyes so familiar, and hope fills the space between us.

Im pregnant, I say, smiling. And just like that, our first baby is born into reality.

This pregnancy will result in the birth of a baby after nine months, a fact I learned in the earliest of sexual-health classes as a child. The days when we all giggled at the words penis and vulva, and our teacher allowed us a moment of laughter before clapping her hands together and saying sharply, Enough! Infertility was not taught in school. As a newly pregnant woman, and even as a nurse, I would not have been able to explain all the ways in which a pregnancy can go wrong. My own fertility was an assumption that had never before been challenged, and I was following the script of a life I had always believed would be mine.

I do what most women do when they are newly pregnant. I keep my early condition a secret, knowing you wait twelve weeks before you deliver the news in the rare case your pregnancy ends before then. Even the word miscarriage would have felt foreign leaving my mouthlike the time I tried to learn Mandarin during a brief trip to Hong Kong in my twenties and I asked the waiter for more rice but was shown the door to the bathroom instead.

I learn an entirely new language during my path to motherhood, and I spend those early days of pregnancy searching and re-searching the symptoms I am experiencing. I am exhausted, falling asleep before nine each night, and my bloated abdomen ripples with pains reminding me of menstrual cramps. I create a Pinterest board of nursery-theme ideas and I buy a tiny onesie that I cradle whenever I am alone, imagining the baby that will one day wear it. Those three weeks of pregnancy are filled with the nave certainty that this child will be born.