“Take the person you want to speak with out of the room rather than asking the other person to leave”
I am a mother of five children kein ayin hara. My two oldest are both girls, just two years apart in age. The older one got married eight months ago, and found out she was expecting good news soon afterward. Sadly, she suffered a second-trimester loss. It was a complex, painful ordeal, and the experience has been very trying for her.
Since then, my daughter and son-in-law have been coming for Shabbos often. My married daughter wants to spend time talking to me, and the conversation inevitably turns painful and private. But my next daughter, who has always been so close to her older sister, now feels left out and rejected. Is it unfair to her that we tell her to leave the living room couch and go read somewhere else? It is her home too, after all. But on the other hand, my oldest daughter is going through a tzarah, and genuinely needs me. Is there a way to properly address both daughters’ needs?
The answer to this question needs to be prefaced by an acknowledgment of the difficulty your older daughter is experiencing. A woman who suffers a loss like this will very likely feel a tsunami of emotions; her hopes have been crushed, and a sense of loss and emptiness, as well as fear for the future, are all very common and understandable, even when a woman already has other children.
When a young woman experiences the loss of her first pregnancy, the fear is often intensified. She worries if she will ever be able to bear a child; will ever be a mother? The knowledge that statistically every one out of seven pregnancies end in miscarriage (some say it may even be one out of every five) will not necessarily alleviate her very real fear and concern.
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