Complicating “Good” Grief: A Collaborative Motherwriting of Pregnancy Loss

This essay navigates the tensions of grief surrounding pregnancy loss, specifically miscarriage, by employing collaborative motherwriting as both methodological and epistemological inquiry. We disrupt dominant discourses of “good grief” as dry, private, and contained through layered collaborative motherwriting autoethnographic vignettes. Our assemblage of vignettes and cultural critiques foreground the radical specificity of our pregnancy loss experiences and reveal the complex textures of grief—private yet public, leaky yet contained, and linear yet erratic. We complicate the cultural scripting of miscarriage as a private and isolated experience. As academic mothers negotiating cultural differences and academic expectations, we resist linearity and predictability; instead, we embrace the messy and fragmented temporality and emotional leakage that grief demands. Our hope is that this essay might evoke more ways to communicate about pregnancy loss in everyday conversations and to unpack the complex, nonlinear realities of grief for bereaved mothers and for those in their support network.