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About this episode

Grief can strike when we least expect it, turning our world upside down and reshaping the very foundation of our relationships. When couples encounter loss—whether through miscarriage, infertility, or unexpected life changes—the path to healing can feel lonely, uncharted, and overwhelming. Even the closest partnerships can struggle to find the words, understanding, or comfort needed to move forward together. How do we navigate personal pain while remaining present for each other? Can couples truly heal side by side, even when their experiences of grief are so different?

In this episode, listeners are invited into a heartfelt conversation exploring the realities of grief and healing within intimate relationships. Through personal storytelling and expert insight, the discussion dives deep into the complexity of navigating loss as a couple—highlighting the differences in individual grief experiences, the power of mutual support, and the importance of holding both sorrow and hope. Practical wisdom and lived experiences shed light on how couples can create space for each other’s emotions, foster resilience, and slowly rebuild a sense of connection and possibility. Whether you have faced loss yourself or support someone who has, this episode offers guidance and reassurance that, together, healing is possible.

Madeleine Garner is a New York-based writer. Her play, I Ragazzi, cowritten with her father, Broadway writer David Goldsmith, was published in 2023 by the Dramatists Play Service and is now available for licensing. She is the Head of Creative Services Operations, Americas at Sotheby’s Auction House, and she received her B.A. in Art History and Italian Studies from Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She resides in Queens with her husband, daughter, and cat. Recently, published “Your Baby Will Find You: A Story About Grief, Loss, and Healing.”

Episode Highlights

05:17 Madeleine recounts the shock and heartbreak of her miscarriage, revealing the profound emotional and physical challenges she faced in its aftermath.

09:52 The clinical steps following miscarriage, unhelpful care, and the early stages of coming to terms with profound grief.

12:01 From shared struggles to connection—turning grief into creativity.

23:16 The value of surrendering to the unpredictable process of grief, healing, and hope.

29:16 Madeleine reflects on “Your Baby” as a symbol of destiny, fulfillment, or creativity for anyone navigating loss or uncertainty.

31:10 The balance between striving and surrendering.

36:10 Grieving as a couple: Different paces, shared support.

40:02 How returning to one another after rupture and repair builds a secure partnership and deepens intimacy after loss.

43:58 Resources and ways to connect with Madeleine.

Your Check List of Actions to Take

• Create space for both partners’ grief by acknowledging everyone processes loss differently.
• Communicate openly about your feelings, fears, and experiences to build understanding.
• Offer practical support by taking on responsibilities or small tasks to ease your partner’s burden.
• Practice attunement by checking in with each other regularly and noticing signs of emotional distance or tension.
• Set boundaries when needed and be honest about your emotional capacity, trusting you can revisit when ready.
• Seek tools for expression, such as writing or creative outlets, to process and share your emotions.
• Honor both the joy and the grief, allowing them to coexist without guilt or pressure to “move on.”
• Reach out for professional or community support, like counseling or support groups, to help navigate the journey together.

Mentioned

Your Baby Will Find You: A Story About Grief, Loss, and Healing (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

This is Me and Only Me (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

The Missing Piece (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

ERP 453: How To Navigate Grief In Long Term Relationship – An Interview With Christina Rasmussen

Relationship Map To Happy, Lasting Love

Connect with Madeleine Garner

Websites: maddydaragarner.com

Instagram: instagram.com/maddydaragarner

Connect with Dr. Jessica Higgins

Facebook: facebook.com/EmpoweredRelationship 

Instagram: instagram.com/drjessicahiggins 

Podcast: drjessicahiggins.com/podcasts/

Pinterest: pinterest.com/EmpowerRelation 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drjessicahiggins 

Twitter: @DrJessHiggins 

Website: drjessicahiggins.com  

Email: [email protected]

If you have a topic you would like it to be discussed, please contact us by clicking on the “Ask Dr. Jessica Higgins” button here. 

Thank you so much for your interest in improving your relationship. 

Also, I would so appreciate your honest rating and review. Please leave a review by clicking here. 

Thank you!  

*With Amazon Affiliate Links, I may earn a few cents from Amazon, if you purchase the book from this link.

Episode Transcript

Maddy, thank you for joining us. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Me too, Jessica. I'm really looking forward to it.

Yeah. Just in our brief interacting here, I can just appreciate how much life you bring to the work you do in the world, and also, our topic perhaps has more tenderness to it. So I know we're enjoying relating in the joy of just being able to do this together, and also, it's a tender topic, speaking about grief and miscarriage. Where would you like to start around, maybe for people getting to know you—where you're coming from, how this became of interest?

Yes. Well, I have always loved children's books, so that is sort of a thread that I can follow throughout my entire life—from being a child, being read to every night, through being a young adult, collecting children's books, and then starting to write my own. Just always being so interested in how adults speak to children through literature, and how I felt so seen and so understood and so held by my favorite books, as a child, and then even more as I got older. It feels like such a through-line and such a connection to just my whole history.

So when in 2022, I had this experience where my husband and I got married the year before, we were ready. I had wanted to be a mom my whole life. It was one of those things where I knew I was going to be a mom. I wanted to not only be a mom, I wanted to be pregnant. I have had this feeling since just very early, and it was just like I had waited my whole life. I just waited my whole life to have these things, to have the person in my life that I really wanted to do this with, and to be in a home and to have everything. I was all ready.

So we get pregnant, and then I spent four weeks pregnant. I found out at four weeks, I got to be pregnant knowingly for four weeks. I go in for that first appointment, and I happen to go to a place in a hospital here in New York where it's like a whole corridor of many, many rooms and everyone's getting an ultrasound at the same time.

So you're walking through this hallway, and there's just heartbeats emanating from all the rooms. Just the symphony of heartbeats amplified. I mean, they're just so loud, and they're coming through, and it's so amazing. Then you get in the room and they turn on the lights, and it's just this nightmare scenario where you're in that chair. It's already so vulnerable. They start by doing the ultrasound just on my stomach. They have to go to do the transvaginal ultrasound after that. It's just like searching. The ultrasound tech can't tell you anything, they have to wait for the doctor.

I mean, there's this minutia of this experience that just is now ingrained in me. It's just such a funny thing. It's just such a weird thing. Getting an ultrasound in general is crazy, and then to have it just not go right. You're sitting there, you're lying there, your partner's there. The ultrasound tech starts asking you these questions. Are you sure about your dates? Are you sure about the first day of your last period? And you just start to think they shouldn't be asking that, this shouldn't be happening. It just changed everything.

The four weeks that I had been pregnant, you planned your life. It was happening. It was happening, we were having a baby. Our whole lives were different. Everything was changing.

Was your husband with you at the appointment?

Yes.

So you both probably were picking up on the vibe that it typically maybe is not supposed to go this way.

Exactly, and we didn't know what to do. I mean, we'd never been in this. 

I think it happens to so many more people than we even know, just in different ways and at different stages, and everyone handles this differently. But that was the moment.

So then of course, the doctor comes in. Very unhelpful. Male doctor, didn't know what to say to me, couldn't look me in the face. Then the minutia of, then you have to go get blood tests to really track the HCG and make sure it's really not doubling every 48 hours, and then you have to wait a week. So wait a week and go back again, and do it again, and do the whole ultrasound again. Only once you do it a second time, will they allow you to schedule the DNC. Because my body was holding on real tight to this unviable pregnancy where there was no heartbeat, the baby had stopped growing at six weeks, and I had to then go through the whole DNC process, which is also just traumatic.

So it was about a month of just finding out, going back, getting the DNC, physically recovering, staying away from work, couldn't work. I mean, just emotionally destroyed, calling my boss weeping. We were not close at the time. We're close now, but it wasn't like that then, and I just didn't know. I mean, I was just like an open wound, literally and emotionally, just a full open wound. I knew in the moment that it was going to be my life before, and my life after, that experience, early on, early-ish.

So that was December of 2022, early December. Then, I think it was January, or maybe it was a little bit later, where I just wrote it down, and it came out in this way. This is you. This is you and your baby. When it was just you, you thought about the future a lot. Because it was just like, the concept of time and how your before and your after, the things that are different, the way that you've imagined your life. The fantasies you've gone on and then gone: Wait, wait, wait, I'm getting too far out, let's go back. Where are we? Let's ground ourselves. It just came out like that, this whole story.

My boss at the time was this incredible data visualization designer, Giorgia Lupi. We had gotten close by me being forced to let her into my life in that moment, and it opened up this channel between us. She was going through some very, very severe long COVID, like lifestyle annihilation. Like, her life was over. She was horizontal at home a lot, and was dealing with a lot of that anger at your own body. I was going through anger at my body of: what was it doing to me, why wasn't it protecting me, why wasn't it supporting me and doing what it was “supposed” to do? So we really connected. I asked her, would you do the visuals for this book? She read my story and cried, and looked at me and was like, of course.

She is maybe 10 years older than me. Doesn't have kids, doesn't really want kids. So it was not about the kid thing, it wasn't about wanting to be pregnant. It was the grief around things you cannot control. Then we make this beautiful thing. I'm so proud of this book, Your Baby Will Find You. I'm so proud of it. It's this beautiful object. It's like a thing I want to hold, and it's a hug in words and visuals. It's this beautiful thing. It came out this week, and so I'm celebrating it in all these different ways. Honestly, it feels very strange to be like, I'm celebrating the outcome of this truly horrendous experience. But it's then like, I have to hold two truths. I have to hold the grief and the joy at the same time, which then of course is what the book is about. So I was like, read your own book.

But I'll say, this week when I've been talking about the book a lot, it's been pinging the nerve more. Because it's on my mind more. So the grief feels bigger this week, but still so paired with the joy of, this beautiful thing is out in the world, and I'm so proud of it, and I hope it will help so many people. It's helped me and it's helped Georgia, and I've just been getting the most amazing feedback. So I'm hopeful that it really will do what I set out for it to do. Then on top of that, I have a daughter. I got pregnant again six months later, and she's now 14 months old. I wouldn't want it any other way. She was always my baby who was going to find me, always. I just didn't know, couldn't know, had to wait. That's where we are.

Well, thank you for sharing. It sounds as though, if I'm hearing you, Maddy, that there's something that came to you or from you, in this experience that was quite devastating, that allowed you some way to be with it. Not that it didn't change the pain and the grief and the devastation, but gave you perhaps hope, as you're referring to. Or this north star around, this doesn't have to be the whole story. It's deeply painful and devastating, and also, there's something maybe else happening here too. Is that right?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay. So do you want to say a little bit more about Your Baby Will Find You, like what that meant to you? I know you're hoping people will be able to be benefited and maybe read the book and experience what you've put together with Giorgia Lupi. But would you like to say a little bit more about what that means to you?

Absolutely. This is my first book that's a story that came so much from who I am and from me, and it's autobiographical. Giorgia and I did another book together that came out a year ago, which I still did the story and she did the visuals, but it's much more in her wheelhouse. It's about teaching children about data without ever saying that word, which is wonderful. But this is really like my baby. So I at least have two. I have the book and my actual baby, and I hope that it will be a tool. So it was a tool for me. I had to write the story. It came compulsively out of me, and I couldn't stop it.

So I needed to get it out, get it on paper, talk about it. I also think it became a tool for conversation, and when people would ask me: Oh, what do you do? I'd be like: Well, I write children's books, but I'm writing one that's for adults. It's a children's book for adults about my miscarriage, about pregnancy loss. And there's always that moment of terror. Then I would go, but it's great. So I could talk about it because the story gives a vocabulary and a way in to this topic, where I think it's scary for people to sit there with you and hold that. But it's been a great tool for me and my husband to really process the whole experience, which we didn't do exactly together. It was like, he was on his grief journey, and I was on mine. But I think the book helped me, which helped him, and the book itself helped him. I mean, he reads it and feels his feelings about it.

It was so clear, dads should read it too, and couples should read it. It's not just for moms or the human who had the loss happen in their body. It's for a couple to read and open that conversation together. It's for people like Giorgia who don't have kids, but are dealing with different types of grief. So it has been an incredible gift for me to write. It's been a gift for me to see how this gift I'm giving is helping. It's just been an incredible experience altogether. It's making me very nervous for my next book. Because I don't know what it is yet, and there's a lot of pressure that I'm putting on myself. Because I feel like this went really well, and I don't know, fingers crossed for the future, but for right now, this is just a dream come true, in every sense of the word.

I love it. Well, the creativity, and as you are in this phase of celebrating the release and all of the feedback you're getting and just talking here with us now. And also, it's unknown, what creativity and what's going to come and just to be right here. I can appreciate it's uncertain, and also, this feels really good. It can probably feel like it's hard to top this. Like, what's going to compare to this?

But I assume that will pass.

Yeah, that's part of the development. You'll grow, and this will always be super special to you. The beautiful thing, if I'm hearing you correctly, Maddy, is that you did what you set out to do. It is what you had hoped it to be, and that it resonates and it's a reflection of your intention and your process and the sentiment of what was so profoundly supportive for you in this deeply devastating experience.

Yes, absolutely. Very true.

I mean, that's the art form in itself even for yourself to be like, yes! I feel good about this.

Well, to add to the oeuvre of books, hopefully, that do this, that really do make people feel less alone. I think this isn't necessarily going to make a child feel less alone, but it will make a person feel less alone if they have to talk to a child about it, or if they have to talk to anyone or be with themselves with it. It will hopefully make them feel less alone.

Yeah, for sure. That's part of the beauty of expressing one's story, and also the courage and taking the risk to share it. The hope is that it will offer support, that someone could feel less alone, feel themselves in this collective, and also maybe some hope that maybe we're at different junctures. You also mentioned two things, that the fertility journey can look very, very different for couples.

Yes, you just never know. You look at any family, and you never know what they went through to get those kids. You just never know, and you can't assume anything. I used to, and sometimes I still catch myself doing it. Then I go, hang on a second, you don't know. Like, I'll meet someone, I'll have an assumption. They'll tell me it took this number of years, I went through IVF, but then actually I got pregnant naturally, then I did the surrogacy. It's a winding, winding road. It's incredible what we go through for our beautiful babies.

No kidding. I have a couple that comes to mind. They wanted to get pregnant and had tried, and had great difficulty. Went through IVF, got pregnant, miscarriage. I mean, the amount of miscarriage, it's just heart-wrenching.

I know, absolutely devastating.

Then they were fostering, and then fostering is difficult because you're not adopting, and that was heart-wrenching. Then, thank goodness they have a child, they were able to get pregnant. But I don't know that everybody can endure the level of this.

Well, that's the thing. You look at yourself like, could I endure that? I don't know. But when this happened to me, I was like, I will do everything. I will do whatever it takes. You become single-minded. I don't know, you then endure so much more than you thought you could. This was already more than I thought I could handle, and I did it because I had to. There was no Plan B, literally. There's just no other way, I was going to do it. I was scared. I mean, my whole pregnancy, I was scared. I didn't spend one day not terrified, because you just learn that nothing is guaranteed.

Even now I'm thinking, I want to have another baby eventually. But you start on the journey and go, I don't know what's going to happen, can't know. Could get pregnant, could have another miscarriage, could have multiple miscarriages. You just don't know, but it's just the desire to have another baby is stronger than the fear of what could happen. That's all you get.

Is that part of the relationship of Your Baby Will Find You? Because I can appreciate some people will be like, well, maybe I might not get pregnant, even with all the efforts. That is a potential possibility.

So the end of the book is not: It will happen for sure, everyone gets pregnant eventually. It's not that. Because when people would say that to me and they would say: Well, at least you know you can get pregnant. It was not helpful. It did not give me the solace that maybe they thought it was giving me. So I realized that the actual “end” of the story is, we don't know what's going to happen. But what we do know is that we have built this beautiful life. All I knew was, I had married the right person, I had established a beautiful home. I had a cat. I had done these things that I wanted. I did have a beautiful life, and I didn't want to discount that. I had this beautiful life to live.

That's universal. I don't know one person that doesn't have to face holding very disparate grief and joy, and how those fit or how they can exist together, two very different expressions.

So I was hoping, that's the goal. I do want the book to have this sort of universal ending. Because we don't know what will happen. I'm the luckiest person ever that I did get to get pregnant again and have this baby. But if that hadn't happened, I would have to be happy. I'd have to find joy somehow. I want to live. I want to be happy in my life regardless of what happens to me. So that was one of the last things that changed in the book. I had worked with a grief counselor on an earlier draft, Dr. Dan Wolfson, this wonderful local grief counselor. I reached out to him and I shared with him the book, because I didn't want the book to do any harm to anyone. So I shared it with him, and so he gave me some really helpful notes, and almost sort of inadvertent counseling. So part of those conversations were I tried to percolate, the ending, maybe we need to rethink. So it got locked in there at the end, and I'm really happy with where we landed and where the book is now. This open-ended: we don't know, and we'll see.

Yeah. I don't know if you would agree, but it seems as though your commitment and conviction to wanting to be a mother, it was so incredibly strong. I don't know if you would've been open to other forms of having a child in your life.

I would've gone through all of them. I would've figured it out. I think I always knew I wanted to be a mom. I didn't know how it was going to happen. I was going to figure it out though.

Yeah. Well, so that right there is something to be really, I think, acknowledging of. That again, there's probably a continuum of people who are that committed, or some that are pretty ambivalent, and the grief still can be a part of anyone's journey and how that all fits. I do think the commitment has a part of like, this is high priority. This is one of my highest values, and I really want to experience this. There may be many forms of being able to experience this, but I really want to prioritize this.

Yes, absolutely. My husband says to me, because I was like, were you scared when you met me and I told you that I really want to be a mom? He was like, I knew the moment that I met you that you wanted to be a mom. If anyone who would meet you and not know that wasn't looking, couldn't see. It was so apparently obvious.

You didn't even have to say it.

No, I didn't even have to say it, he knew. It's like, so many people go through this experience and have the miscarriage, and it's still devastating. Maybe it wasn't ever that big of a priority to begin with, but they'll have to still contend with the grief. So I'm so glad that the book can speak to those people too, and not the people necessarily who're like me and are like, this is my purpose in life kind of thing.

Yeah. Well, I want to pivot towards grief and how to navigate that in relationship, and I just also want to ask the question. It might be stretching the sentiment of Your Baby Will Find You. But is it even possible that people might experience baby in a different way? That it might not be a physical human infant, but there could be other versions.

Yes, absolutely. That's so true. It's sort of like your destiny will find you. I'm not a religious person, but I guess it does get a little bit woo-woo spiritual. Because it just feels like, we only have control over so much, and this is the experience that truly taught me that. I had been trying to learn the lesson many times, but this one really got it through. Almost like being a children's book author and writing these books was a thing that found me too. That was destined to me, I felt. Because I've been writing books for so long, and it was always a thing and I always pursued it. It did come to me.

You must participate in both types of creative output, baby or book or whatever it may be. I think, for the human baby element, it felt like I had this image in my mind of just my baby literally existing in space. I was like, my baby is existing in space and will come to me, and I don't have to go find them. I don't have to run. I don't have to strain. I don't have to know, because you can't really. You cannot know that. You cannot know what that's going to be like and who's going to come to you. So that gave me peace in a time when nothing gave me peace. So even though the end of the book is not the words Your Baby Will Find You, that's not the final phrase, it still felt like an apt title for this feeling. I hope that it would also give peace to people too, to just feel like: I can slow down, I can stay calm, I can be still. I don't have to race after this all the time, the manic feeling that I felt a lot.

Well, I think it is such an important message, particularly in this day and time when we're inundated with information, and how to uplevel and develop ourselves, and all the things that we can do to optimize. We can fall into this illusion that we are in control, or that we have more power. I think what you're speaking to is this commitment, this intention, but also not forcing and being in a place of, I don't know if you would quite say surrender, but allowing and participating. But also not making it happen on your terms, which can run the other side. There's just two sides of the spectrums here.

Yes. I would think a lot about this one moment in The Missing Piece by Shell Silverstein, which is one of my favorite books. I think you look at it, and you can tell I'm inspired by it. I love it so much. There's this moment where the piece finds all these different missing pieces, and they're all not right in different ways. But there's one piece that they don't hold tight enough to, and so they lose them. Then there's one piece that they hold so tight that it breaks. I think about that all the time. Because I'm the type of person where I'll hold on so tight, and I'll be like, this is the way I can get it and keep it. But I'll break it, and I have. I've done that in relationships and with friendships. I mean, I've held on too tight. I've been too intense and I've been too needy, and I just haven't been comfortable sitting with myself in those moments. I think about that just all the time.

I don't know, I thought about it a lot when I was writing the book, and also when this experience was happening. It's just such a good life lesson, I think.

Totally. I'm also thinking as a parent, what a beautiful thing to just really have experiential learning around. I mean, that took you to a deep place, but that you can find that. I think it's a practice. It's not something we typically arrive and forever have. It's something we continually find the adjustment in.

Well, I know we're talking a lot here, so I'd love to pivot towards relationship. So you spoke about, and I think it's absolutely so entirely validating, that everybody's grief experience and journey will look very, very different, especially in an intimate partnership. Where would you like to start around just what felt important through what you experienced, to comment around how to navigate maybe the exact same experience, but perhaps very differently?

Yes. It was very interesting to learn and see in real-time how my husband changed his shape to accommodate me, and what that looked like was, he became caretaker. Taking care of me, his emotions can come later, compartmentalizing me and my physical wellbeing. Like, this did not happen to him, it happened to me. But it's his baby, he was there. So he was just trying so hard to support, buying me all my soups, and watching my shows with me, and talking when I wanted to talk and not talking when I didn't want to talk. I went through just such an intense, full-throttle grief at the start. It was very interesting because my grief started to change size and recede a little bit, and then it's like he could feel that, and then his grief became much bigger. It was like, you're now about to go through the real deal.

But it was great because then I had the bandwidth to support him, and I had already learned a little bit, and then I was able to support him. So we just were never on this exact same page, which sounds bad, but it wasn't. Because we were on complimentary pages, naturally, where the ebb and flow of our grief rollercoasters were just matching like a little puzzle.

It really came to a head when we were like, okay. My cycle returned after quite a long time, which was very frustrating. But we had to be patient, we had to wait. We had to do these things, and it allowed us eight weeks of time to go through varying levels. I mean, anger, denial, all of it. We would fight, then we would not fight, and we would cry together then. I would cry and he would hold me, and vice versa and. Every sort of level, and then we had to really be back on the same page again for trying to conceive. Then that was its own journey, because that didn't go perfectly either and didn't happen immediately. Months and months had to go by, and we had to reach a level of pain and frustration where then we were like, we have to stop. That was devastating. But then of course, right when we stopped, we got pregnant, without thinking about it. Which is like, what are you going to do? You can't get there unless you really get there, which is unfortunate, because really getting there is painful.

But yes, that was an incredible experience. I mean, trying to conceive another baby while you're processing the grief of your first baby. Also, he's really on deck for conception, and that's a lot of pressure. I was like, get it together, and I was not empathetic. I mean, there were so many just layers of ever-changing dynamics. But we've been together for almost eight years and we've grown, significantly changed, gone through so many things together. I think we are not the same as we were when we met, but we cannot go more than, I don't know, a few hours, knowing there's something between us—knowing there's some texture, some tension, some rifts. We just cannot move on. We can't do anything else. It's helped us immensely as we've tried to, and I think done a good job, at navigating just how many changes we had to go through between November and May. So November when we found out we were miscarrying, and May when we got pregnant again.

So I think a miscarriage and the loss and the isolation you feel can so easily split two people up and keep them apart, and I feel really lucky that this 100% brought us even closer together as such necessary supports for each other. It set us on a really good path to being parents together, and also navigating pregnancy, which was its own incredible rollercoaster of him becoming my caretaker and my chef and the cleaner of the house and the caretaker of the cat and everything. I could not do any of that. We wouldn't have even known how to navigate that if we hadn't come through the miscarriage first.

Well, thank you for sharing. There's so much here, and I know it probably is difficult to tease out every layer. But something that strikes me just as, again, more universal themes, and maybe you can help me if this fits. That the way in which you and your husband intend, or the care of your connection, that there's a real desire to support and show up and help. That might look different in different phases and seasons. 

Secondly, that there's space that you offer one another to have your experience, that it doesn't need to be same-same, and that there's an ability to allow some room. Then thirdly, that there's some attunement here, that you're noticing each other. If you notice the tension or something in between that's interfering and it's hard to do anything else, yet there's a great capacity to offer that space. So it sounds as though if we can attune to one another and we have a sense of where one another are, and we can hold empathy or regard for that. We don't need to force each other to be at a space, but just to have some of that attunement so we know where each other are and we know how to be together in a way that we can have that understanding. Am I hearing you, does this fit?

Yes, absolutely. I agree that there is a little bit of contradiction in that. There is a difference, I think, between him having a grief experience that doesn't feel the same to me as that little problematic rift. That I can tell that we are fine, but he's not fine, and that's okay. In those moments, I would look within and be like, can I handle it? I was like, I can do it, I can be there for him. There were some difficult times in pregnancy where I would look inside and say, I don't have it. That was hard. That was like a different layer where I'd be like, I actually can't, I'm so sorry. I would tell him that.

You would tell him, which is a really clear signal. It's less about I don't love you and I don't want to show up. It's more around, I don't have the capacity.

Yeah, that was hard. 

It was good to be like, I know that I don't have it right now for you, can't. But I'm not scared because I know, in five to seven days, I'll be a different person, and we'll be moved on and you'll be okay, and we'll all have survived, and it'll be fine.

Well, in psychology, we might call that more secure functioning, that there's a real trust that you will be there for each other, that you will find each other, even when maybe you are out of sync or you're on different pages and whatever experience, that you will come back together. This is, I think, offering the space to develop and grow, but also the trust that we will nurture our bond and we will find each other. It might look different or the dance might be different. But what beautiful sensation around, we will get through this, and we will grow together.

Yeah. We did, I think, do it enough times, that then we became confident that we could keep doing it. This grief experience, into the trying to conceive experience, into the pregnancy experience, was sort of a crash course in over and over again coming back and coming back, and being there and figuring it out. That's why I wouldn't change a thing.

Maddy, this is backed by research, that if one didn't grow up with feeling that consistency relationally in their early childhood, that being in a relationship where we experience this coming back—the rupture-repair, rupture-repair, the repair, the repair, the repair—we get to develop this trust and this earned feeling that we will get through it, we will grow together, we will find each other. That is so stabilizing, even in the most difficult experiences. This is how we feel resilient and resourced when we find that connection or we feel bonded with another, that we can do hard things. I mean, this isn't grief, this is just life sometimes.

That's true. Well, now you also have learned something about both of our childhoods.

Well, I didn't put that on you. I was saying, just in general.

I think it resonates very deeply, and that's very true. I think part of what makes us a good match is that thing that sustains us and gives us all those good feelings and all that trust, and it is coming out of that childhood trauma and things like that, normal things.

I was thinking you probably had a really relatively stable, and you both experienced how you trusted and could reach to one another. I did not have the optimal secure upbringing, but I've definitely been with my husband, we've been at the rupture-repair, rupture-repair. I do feel so, so grateful for that lived experience. Not everybody has that. I think it's really hard when we don't, and that's why it's encouraging that the research really shows we can develop this when we choose someone that's willing to participate in practice with us for safe functioning.

Yes, that's really beautiful.

Well, Maddy, thank you so much. Tell people where people can get your book.

Yes. So you can find Your Baby Will Find You: A Story of Loss, Grief, and Healing anywhere. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all over. It's everywhere. It's out. Then, I'm on Instagram at @MaddyDaraGarner, and that's also my website. That's it, that's where I am. That's all the things.

Awesome. On your website, is it your publications?

Yeah, this book, my previous book with Giorgia, which is called This Is Me and Only Me, which is in English and Italian. It will hold anything that happens in the future.

Nice, I love it. Wonderful! Are you doing readings anywhere? I'm sure maybe locally.

Oh my gosh, not at the moment. I hope so. If we do, yes, all of that stuff will be on Instagram and on the website. Giorgia and I did do one reading once at Rizzoli, the Italian bookshop in Manhattan, which was so wonderful. So you never know what might happen, we might just take the book on the road.

There you go! Well, follow if you're wanting to be connected and informed. I will put all the links on today's show notes. Maddy, thank you so much for sharing, and just what you're giving to the world and the distillation of all of this.

Thank you so much, Jessica. This was really, really wonderful.