• The algorithms don’t know what to think. It takes them a while to catch on when you’re newly pregnant and start serving you ads for maternity clothes, but then when your web searches turn darker and more desperate, the algorithms get confused and serve you ads for baby stuff and period panties at the same time. Your feed gets really weird for a few days as the bots try to suss out what you can best be sold.
• Is this underwear stain period blood or miscarriage blood?
• I googled a lot of things about miscarriages as the event was happening, and one thing I saw over and over in people’s personal accounts is that they were surprised by the people who never acknowledged their miscarriage or said anything to them about it. I thought to myself, I won’t care about that — people have their own lives and aren’t worried about mine. But it turns out there are people who know who have not said anything about it to me, and it feels so strange. On the other hand, I have been overwhelmed with love and support from other people, so it balances out. The whole exercise has led me to wonder whether there were times in my life when I missed the opportunity to reach out to someone in my orbit who was going through this very thing, and I was just oblivious.
• We had picked out a girl name (we were still spitballing boy names) and every now and again the name in its entirety wafts into my head and I think about how lovely and meaningful it would be to give our child this name. That name will have to wait. That name may never be, at least not because of us.