Dads Hurt Too: Miscarriage, Masculinity & the Gospel with Eric Schumacher

Transcript

Welcome to the Shameless Podcast, where I help Christian men kill shame, stand strong, and live on mission. I'm your host, Ken P, and I'm bringing you real stories, practical insights, and biblical truths that equip you to break free from your sin, shame, and live a life of purpose. Let's step out of the shadows together and into the light of Christ. Welcome back to another episode of the Shameless Podcast. Today I have a returning guest, Eric Shoemaker. Eric, man, how are you doing, man? Yeah, it's great to be here with you, Ken.

I'm doing okay. So, yes, it's glad just glad to be back on the podcast. Yeah, man. We were just talking right before you started hitting record how we were talking about the first time you came on was the the good gift of weakness. That was your latest book, right? And it I told you this was probably my top still. It's 2025 October. Still probably my top book of 2025 when I announce it to people. I've read a lot of books. I was just like I keep going back to it actually.

I just like oo cuz there's just certain parts that I've highlighted that that have really hit home for me in this season. So really have enjoyed that book. But today we're talking about your newest book that depending on when this podcast gets released, you'll be talking about and it's Dad's Hurt Too, a father's memoir of miscarriage. M and Eric, what made you decide to write this book? Yeah, so my wife Jenny and I went through four miscarriages. And growing up, I hardly ever heard miscarriage talked about.

And uh I think the first time I ever heard of miscarriage was probably sometime in high school when I heard that a relative had had a miscarriage. And then I heard very little about it until [gasps] I think when I was in seminary. and Russell Moore was my theology professor and he shared about their miscarriages as the first time I really heard someone talk about the impact that miscarriage had. And then you know Jenny and I went on to have three children healthy births and we knew of other friends who'd had miscarriages but it hadn't happened to us yet and then it happened.

you know, we went through four miscarriages and I can talk about some of those different experiences as we go through the conversation if that'd be helpful. But as as we walked through that, it was kind of a confusing and bewildering journey, not knowing how to think about it, how to process it, and there was nothing that I found that was written and available for men that were grieving miscarriage. And it was probably [sighs and gasps] 7 8 years ago now that my friend Emily Jensen at the Risen Motherhood podcast, she co-authored that book Risen Motherhood.

And she asked if I would write an article for their website about my experience as a father with miscarriage so that moms could understand, you know, uh what their husbands or partners are were going through during a miscarriage. And I'm just so grateful for Emily's foresight and thought to even make that request and provide space to to write and think about it. And I I went away and just really started just going in deep into what that experience was like for me as a dad and wrote this piece for the Risen Motherhood website which was the same title, Dads Hurt, a father's memoir of miscarriage.

and we published it and just started hearing from all these moms who were so thankful that someone was speaking about the father's experience and uh and then started hearing from dads who were who were saying wow there's no one around that I've been able to talk to it doesn't seem like anybody understands what I'm going through and dads reaching out who wanted to talk and that led to me sharing Abby Wedworth's book uh held uh a devotional for moms grieving miscarriage. And when that came out uh with the the good book company, I contacted them and said, "Hey, you need to publish something for men." Which led to my uh devotional hours uh biblical comfort for men grieving miscarriage.

That's a 31-day devotional for men. It's a you know, it's a [gasps and sighs] it's a it's an accessible book, but it's a longer book, and it's had a lot of good response. Uh but it's a lot of you know it's uh 31 chapters where I'm taking common questions that men face as they go through miscarriage and finding answers from who Christ is. But that could be a lot to put in a man's hands the first day after miscarriage. And uh in God's timing, Risen Motherhood has uh ended their ministry and they're archiving their website.

And so they said, "Hey, your content is yours to do with what you want." And I thought [gasps] I want to put this into a little book that's simple that we can put into the hands of men uh who are walking through miscarriage in the early days. And this is just a very narratival uh first person just me telling my story of these four different miscarriages. What was going on in my heart, in my mind, the emotions I was facing, the challenges I was facing, and then how Jesus met me there in the middle of it.

And my hope is I just want to tell dads that first of all, you're a dad. When you've lost a child to miscarriage, you've lost a child and that's a real loss. That it's right to grieve and it's okay to be sad and you should be able to talk about it. And so, uh, that's why I'm out here trying to just tell my story to help guys be able to to open up and tell theirs. Yeah. Well, why do you feel like men have such a hard time talking about it?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. [gasps] You know, I think there's some obvious reasons and the first is just that the mother's the one who's carrying the baby and she's the one who's physically going through miscarriage. And we often think about for obvious reasons pregnancy as a woman's uh experience. But it takes two to conceive this child, father and a mother. And when a child's born, we want to have, if at all possible, there's unfort unfortunate circumstances, but we want to have a father and mother that are celebrating this child and raising this child.

And so we understand that [gasps] uh it's good for a child to have a father and mother. And for some reason though, when it comes to miscarriage, we think, well, this is a woman's experience, and we forget that a father's grieving, too. And so I think that's one reason she's going through the physical experience and all the discomfort and pain and everything that can come with it. Another is I think that that dad's husbands will often when the miscarriage strikes, she's having a a medical crisis here, a medical event that's painful and challenging and it requires doctor's visit and she might be in bed resting and [snorts] prescriptions need to be picked up and there might be duties uh that she normally takes care of in the household that suddenly someone else has to take care of.

if there's other children, someone has to get them to school and prepare meals and and I think dads can quickly move into the fix it mode and they busy themselves with uh a lot of tasks that need to get done around the house and they neglect their own grief and neglect to think about the fact that they're losing a child uh in this experience as well. And and then I think fathers can also men can also think too uh if I talk about my own grief and this experience I'm somehow diminishing the mother's experience because I'm shifting away from the pain that she's going through my own which is really I a wrong way of thinking though it's understandable because like I just said this child is a father and a mother and often what what can happen is he moves into fix it mode, running and picking up prescriptions, you know, fixing meals, you know, all the things that need to be done.

And she can begin to feel like she's grieving this miscarriage alone. Like, does he even care? Is he thinking about it? Does he hurt? How's he doing? And and I often remind fathers that the you know the you typically have not always but often you have a friend group or a church group or family who can do all the other things uh around the house and in your life uh during this miscarriage. But the one thing that nobody else can be is um the husband to your wife and the grieving father.

And so there's a unique opportunity to actually grieve with your wife, uh, to grieve with the mother as she's as she's in her sorrow and she doesn't have to walk through it alone. And that's actually a way of loving her, dealing with your own grief well is a way of loving her and her grief. Yeah. You know, um, Eric, one of the things that I always think about when it comes to reasons why men don't talk about it. I'm just thinking about general suffering overall, right?

We tend to, like you said, we want to fix it or I'll just use myself as an example. I will want to compartmentalize. I'm like, I don't have time to deal with this situation. I don't want to feel these emotions right now because if I do, I'm going to break down and if I break down, this whole thing, this whole ship is going down. Yeah. Right. So, you almost kind of like you feel like you have to be strong. I feel like I'm about to do a little ad for your other book.

Yeah. Go for it. But but like it's where in weakness we see God's power, right? It's where he can actually move in us. But why is it that we so much don't want to feel those feelings or why is it that we don't want to grieve? Yeah. I I think it's exactly what you just said that we're afraid to be weak. And this this really does dovetail so much with the weakness book because I was just out at a at a multi-day retreat that I was teaching on the good gift of weakness with a group of men, a men's retreat, and and commenting on how it's such a strange topic for a men's retreat to talk about embracing and celebrating weakness and mentioned at that retreat that we had gone through four miscarriages in my introduction and how painful that was.

And I had a approach me later on, pull me aside and share with me that I want to say it was 25, 30 years ago, something like that, their first child was miscarried late in the pregnancy. And so he was telling me, sharing that with me and he said, I don't share that with very many people. And then he started tearing up and he said, but he said, you know, sometimes I still cry about it. and and it just struck me that he was here was this guy that wasn't able to share with many people.

And and part of it was part of it is as I as I talked to multiple men, not just this guy, but multiple men about miscarriage is um I think because miscarriage is so hidden. No, no one's seen this child. No one's held this child apart from the mother's womb. That we can feel there can be a sense of wrong shame over grieving someone that in some sense you never met. And there can be this sense of well we never held this baby or this life didn't last that long.

And so is my grief legitimate? And I think there can be a sense of shame, especially if we don't hear other men talk about it. If we don't hear other men grieve about it, then we start to think there must be something wrong with me. If no other men are being public about this, I must be the only one. And that must mean that I'm somehow a failure. Somehow a failure at manhood. And there's also the sense of I remember feeling this sense of shame. It it sounds ridiculous to even name it, but I want to because I wonder if there's other men who feel it, too.

I felt this sense of failure as a man that I couldn't protect my wife and my unborn child from this child's death. you know, you feel this sense of obligation to be a protector of your family and of course there's nothing you could do to prevent the miscarriage, but it just made me feel so vulnerable that this is entirely out of my hands. There was nothing I could do to protect my wife, nothing I could do to protect my child, and really nothing I can do to fix it.

And that's just total weakness. Yeah. Because it's outside of our power. And that's a hard thing for men to admit. Yeah. And I think the the guilt and the shame compounds when all the whatifs come up, right? They're like, "What if we would have just been eating healthier?" Or, "What if we didn't do this?" Right? You start playing all these things in your mind of like, "What could we have done to save this child?" Yeah. And sometimes in God's providence, right, we're in the fall of man.

Like those things that the child did not survive. But I know for me, I struggle a lot with that in just general life. I can imagine. And we did have a miscarriage early on. I think was right when we're getting ready to have our second child. We miscarried and then we had my now son, Alex, where I remember my wife and I just both being like, "What just happened?" Yeah. And it was so early on in the pregnancy. So, it was that [clears throat] feeling that I was like, "Well, I had I I haven't been able to feel the baby.

I haven't heard the heartbeat, but I know it was real. I know that when we get to heaven, we're going to have six children. Like, but it just felt like this moment of just pause and just like the life is gone. Yeah. Yeah. And we never had a chance to cherish this child. We never had a chance to see this child grow up. And I think for me and then for people who might have lost it and you can speak into this Eric is that like there's also certain dreams that you have, right?

Especially if it's like your first child or your second like that you're like, "Oh man, we're finally going to have a child." You miscarry. It's like all these dreams that you thought you were going to have. Yeah. Are all of a sudden just gone. Yeah. And you don't know what to do with that. So, how do you speak to a father who's kind of struggling in that season right now? Just like the confusion. Mhm. It might not even be guilt, but just like what just happened?

Yeah, you rais a really good point there. And I think this is actually one aspect of I I think there's a dynamic that happens between how husbands and wives grieve miscarriage sometime sometimes where she I think because she's been carrying the baby. She's often a little more attuned to the pregnancy and when the miscarriage happens she's grieving that loss right away. the father kind of moves into this fix it mode, take care of her mode. And then as she's re-engaging the normal rhythms of life in a week or two as she's been recovering, I think that's sometimes where it settles on the father, the loss of this baby and he's starting to to realize, you know, I'm not going to go hiking with this son.

I'm not going to, you know, dance with this daughter. And you start realizing that you've lost [snorts] lost a life. And and that really is what you've lost is is sometimes I think we think of miscarriage as a moment in time event as opposed to the loss of a whole life. And [gasps] especially I think as you move out from that miscarriage and you move towards the due date then it can strike you we would have been having a baby at this time and 5 years down the road when your friends are posting first day of school pictures with their kids in the front steps of the house and you're thinking oh we would have been posting those pictures now if we hadn't lost this much this baby.

Sometimes you don't realize the fullness of what you've lost the life, you know, the whole life until you hit those milestones. And sometimes, like you mentioned, it can come on so sudden and so fast. Like our first miscarriage was so early in the pregnancy that if Jenny hadn't taken a pregnancy test the day she did and she started bleeding the next day, we might have thought it was a late period. [gasps] And so it was sort of like what what just happened? We we just found out we were pregnant as soon as we found out we miscarried this baby.

And it can be, you know, I think I just want to encourage dads to be be honest about all the confusion. Like we we weren't meant to live in a world where anyone dies. You know, this is like you said, this is part of the fall. This is part of the pain that comes now with childbearing. Infertility and pregnancy loss is part of what it means to live in a world that's decaying and our bodies are returning to dust. And we're not doing things necessarily to cause these miscarriages.

It's part of living in this broken world that we need Jesus to make new. And so like any loss, it can be just very confusing. I what I would really encourage men to say is say those things like even if you can't put it into words just say to your wife I'm just feeling very confused about all this or I'm sad and I don't even know how to express and I think and saying those things to your friend or to a pastor like tell people even if you have to say hey it's okay if you don't know what to say to me because I don't even know how to think about this, but I need somebody else to know.

I feel like that's really important because [sighs and gasps] I I don't know if this is changing, but I know for a long time there's been sort of like this practical wisdom that sometimes couples will be told like don't don't share that you're pregnant until this many weeks into the pregnancy. And the reason is often in case something happens. Well, what do what do we mean by that? What we mean by that is like we I think we communicate it's somehow shameful to share if you lose a pregnancy or a miscarriage because man it would be awkward.

You wouldn't have to do the awkward thing of telling these people that you were pregnant that now you've lost the baby but in keep keeping it a secret which every couple needs to decide what's right or wrong for them. There's not a right or wrong for when you share, but sometimes I I fear what we do. We we subtly communicate it's a shameful thing to share about losing a pregnancy. And and now if you've been waiting until 20 weeks or 12 weeks or or whatever to share about the pregnancy and then you lose the baby, now nobody knows you were pregnant.

and now you either don't share about the miscarriage and you have to suffer in silence and God said it's not good for the man to be alone like we're not supposed to we're supposed to live in community and or then if we do share about the miscarriage we're now sharing with people who are learning about the pregnancy and the miscarriage at the same time and so they didn't have the opportunity to rejoice with us in the good news of the which I think actually affects their ability to grieve with us in the sadness of the miscarriage.

And so I I just want to encourage, you know, that's part of what this book is about again is just encouraging dads and moms to talk. And we're called to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. And um we can't do that unless we know each other. Yeah. You know, Eric, you bring up such a en enlightening statement cuz even my wife and, you know, we have we have four kids at the time of this recording and she's pregnant with baby number five.

And with all of our kids, we've always been pretty quiet about it except for our close friends. Like our close friends knew right away, but we always wrestled with like, well, do we tell the people around us or do we post it on social media? Do we not? like, you know, cuz it you didn't want to deal with the, hey, I posted about this beautiful thing, but now I'm going to have to post about this sad thing. Mhm. But the inverse is that if you don't post about it, no one knows why you're sad.

No one knows why you're grieving. And it's something that I have wrestled with. You know, thankfully, I've always told my close friends, my guy friends, I'm like, "Hey, we're having another baby." Yeah. And they were always very kind like, "Okay, let us know." So, I remember when we lost that the the first miscarriage, I remember just telling one of my close friends at the time, I was like, he knew I was super excited cuz we're like I just had my first daughter, my first child was a daughter.

Then we're getting ready to have the second one. And I'm like, "Oh man, I hope it's a boy. I don't like you know, like I'm just like a young dad." And uh when I told him that, I remember him texting him and saying, "I will never know if I would have had a son or a daughter." And it's like it's these weird things, right? Where it's like now I have other kids. I like would would my second my my second now be this one that miscarried?

Like you know, all these weird metaphysical existential conver questions come up like how does that change the order of everything? So you could almost feel guilty of like, well, if I grieve this child, what am I saying about all my other children that I have now? And it's this weird dilemma that I find sometimes in my own heart and then in men's hearts that they're just like, well, the best thing to do is just shove it and just move on. But like you said, we can't shove it.

We got to name it. We got to process. We got to allow ourselves to grieve. Where do now people find hope? And how does the gospel speak into this? Because I think for a lot of men, like I just said, we would want to just shove it, but that's not what the gospel says to do. Yeah. Yeah. I think Well, thank you for bringing up just that element of the weird like what if thing because that is a real difficult aspect of this. You know, we had two of our miscarriages were back and first three we had children after them and then our last pregnancy was miscarried.

And you do do that. Like we have these children, living children now that we love. And if these other pregnancies hadn't miscarried, we we wouldn't have these children because of the way the births happened. we would have been when when Jenny got pregnant with one, we she would have been pregnant or just had this other baby. And so the [gasps] there's the I wish this would never happen, but if it hadn't happened, then this other child wouldn't have happened. And it's it's so confusing in your head.

And and we are tempted to shove it down. And I I think there's there's several ways in which the gospel gives us hope. I think one of those is that we have a savior. Jesus was, again, we talked about this in the good gift of weakness. Jesus was fully human. He had a full human nature beset with all the same weaknesses as us. And he had a full range of human emotions. He stood outside of Lazarus's tomb and that was his friend and he wept. He wept hard over the death of his friend.

He was sad. And then also that same passage says that he was deeply moved in his spirit which is the the Greek word behind that is for like a waror that's snorting when it's about ready to charge. It's a word for deep anger. And so Jesus was I think he was angry at death and he was ready to charge the tomb and he raises Lazarus from the dead. Jesus was he wasn't a stoic when he faced death. Jesus faced death with deep sadness, with anger at the enemy of death.

He went to his own death, deeply sorrowful and anxious as he faced the cup of the father's wrath. And he's going to go die for our sins. And he says to his disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, "I'm um I'm I'm sorrowful to the point of death. I'm so sad that I could die." And so we don't have to be afraid to face our emotions in facing the loss of a child in the womb because we have a savior who's experienced all those same emotions. And it's not sinful to grieve.

It's not sinful to be sad. It's not sinful to be angry with death. And if Jesus experienced all those things, who do we think we are that we can get through life without [snorts] experiencing them? And so even if we go to our buddies with this loss and they don't know what to do with us and they don't know how to respond, we have a brother in Christ who's proved his love for us by walking through similar experiences of loss and pain and understands what it's like to want help from friends who in the garden fall asleep on him.

his friends fail him. He knows what it's like to deal with that, you know, and um Hebrews says he's not ashamed to call us his brothers and he went through died for us and he rose from the dead for for us and he he dwells within us through his Holy Spirit and he's promised he'll never leave us or forsake us. And so we have a savior who knows what it's like to walk a path like this and so he knows what it's like. He knows what kind of help that we need in the middle of it.

So, we can trust him. We can trust him with that. [gasps] And even in the areas where we feel deep sense of shame and failure, there were areas where I felt like I really failed my wife and failed as a man. And just to know that Jesus isn't ashamed of me and Satan wants me to feel shame, but Jesus reassures me with his love and his presence. And um he's such a good friend, a good friend to sufferers as well as sinners. Yeah, you I think you hit it the nail on the head when you talked about failure just now because so many men and women feel failure, right?

You talked about that earlier. Failure that they could have done something better, but then failure afterwards like how do manage my wife and how do I manage this process? How do I tell my friends? How do I like it's just the constant feeling of failure and then the shame and the condemnation that could come. Yeah. Uh is huge. You know, for for me, one thing that I I felt helped me is uh I remember sitting there and being really confused like what do I do with this emotion like I don't know what to do.

And I just remember sensing like God the Father was like I understand I lost the child too. Yes. And I just thought about that like, "Oh my gosh, he knows way more than I knew know about loss." And anytime I hear about someone losing a child, whether early pregnancy, late pregnancy, or even like when the child is on this side of earth, you know, outside of the womb, and they lose a child, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, God knows exactly what they're feeling." Yeah. Cuz he lost a child.

And that brings me to tears and be like, "God, you're so merciful. And even in this broken world, you've made a plan to restore all things. And like I'm going to hope in you, God. Like I'm going to hope and trust in you because you you are the one that could truly change everything in our world in an instant. Yeah. And that's what I hold on to in those moments of despair that I think sometimes men can feel in this situation or just even sadness or grief or anguish of just like I'm always the thing that attacks me all the time is like I'm always going to keep failing, you know, or I won't be able this way.

And it's like, well, I'm going to hope in God cuz I am going to fail. Like I'm human. I'm going to mess up, but God's not going to fail and God's not going to fail me. Eric, w with all that being said, man, any last words of encouragement for men as they're listening to this, maybe we haven't touched on it yet that you're like, "Hey, don't forget about this part of the grief process or just as you're walking through this, what they should be thinking about." Yeah.

I think one thing I'd encourage men is as a way of loving your wife, come back to it from time to time. And and what I mean by that is a few weeks after the miscarriage, just ask her how she's doing and share how you're doing. when you think of it two months down the road, definitely I would say write down the due date and write down the anniversary of the miscarriage in your calendar and have a reminder pop up. Uh she's going to be remembering that.

Uh even if you don't [gasps] and it's important to remember those dates, more important for some people than for others. But even then, whether it's two months or two years or 20 years down the road, when that comes to mind, say to her, you know, acknowledge it. You know, sometimes I'm still sad that we went through that miscarriage and I'm sorry that that happened. It's a it's a loss that you carry with you for for life. And uh and it's different for different people. Uh but um and I and I would also say in the immediate aftermath of a miscarriage, do what you need to do to grieve as a couple.

If we were able to bury one of our miscarried child children because Jenny was induced and labored in the hospital. And if you want to do that, do that. If you want to name the baby, name the baby. If you want to, you know, don't be afraid to ask a pastor or or just a friend to say, "Would you do a little service with us to, you know, like a mini funeral service or just memorial service for this child?" You don't have to do any of those things, but if they would help you, don't be ashamed to do those things.

Often those things are private and they're unseen. And so you wonder, "Am I making too big of a deal about this?" But I want to do this. We did that. We had a little cere at a cemetery for one of our miscarried children, the one whose body we were able to hold and then bury. But that wasn't possible with the other three and we didn't do it. But don't be afraid to honor and to celebrate the value of this little life uh in whatever ways you feel would be helpful to you because this baby at the end of the day was child.

No matter how small, no matter how brief their life, this was the image of God. And and this child's existence brought God glory. And so it's good to love this child. And grief is a way of loving. Uh it's loving what's lost. And so don't be afraid to do what you need to do to grieve. Eric, thank you so much for for that work. And you know even I'm sitting here just thinking about the profound statement like you don't have to do this right but just like man hold a little ceremony have closure right cuz even how many people miscarriage like okay let's move on but then it's like how do you move on from that you know so that was super helpful Eric if there are people who are listening to this men specifically and are like I need to talk to someone obviously like let's go talk to your pastor if you can but if you can't you want to talk to someone who understands this process, what's the best way to reach out to you and just say, "Hey, let's have a conversation together." Yeah, you could reach out to me through uh social media.

I'm also starting to do some counseling with Gospel Care Collective and so I'm starting to take clients there. And so if there's a man who needs some counseling, to work through grief, I'd be glad to work with him there. But yeah, through my social media channels, I think most of my direct messages are mostly open or you can comment or post and I'll get back in touch with you. Awesome, [snorts] Eric. I'll put all the social media channels on the show notes, too, for those of you guys who are listening.

Men, as always, as you are walking this life, this journey, don't do it alone. Do it together and focus on killing shame, standing strong in Christ, and being on mission. Hope you guys have a great day, and God bless. Thanks for joining us today. If you found this episode helpful, make sure to subscribe and leave a review. Remember, killing shame isn't just about breaking free from the past. It's about walking boldly into the future God has for you.