Seven weeks into my second pregnancy, I found out I was going to miscarry. I was alone when I received the news via phone. The midwife asked if I had any support. I found this a strange question and just said ‘Yes’. I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t see the need for ‘support’ because there was nothing anyone could do to save my baby or make me feel better in any way. I was alone. And that was fine.
I told my partner when he returned home from work that evening. He was visibly upset and we had a little cry together.
Throughout the following weeks as I opened up to people about our pregnancy loss, I noticed those who have experienced it themselves all said the exact same thing to me: ‘You don’t understand it until it’s happened to you’ which I thought ridiculous and futile the first couple of times I heard it. I mean, that’s true of anything, isn’t it? I’ve never been to war or been struck by lightning or had a triple heart bypass so of course I don’t fully understand any of those things. But once several more people said that exact sentence, I had to give it more consideration. Did they mean people underestimate the gravity and the impact of a pregnancy loss unless it happens to them? I think so. I honestly thought it was nothing until it happened to me. This is because I didn’t understand how someone could feel they’d lost someone they’d never met. I thought it impossible.
Because of this, I struggled enormously with the hurt I was harbouring. It felt misplaced, fraudulent even. How could I be experiencing actual heartache over someone I had never met? This confusion blocked me from grieving in any way. I refused to call my pain grief. How could it be grief? I know grief. Well. To me, it is missing someone’s voice, their smell, their laugh, times you’ve shared and knowing that you’ll never get to make more memories with them.
So I thought that by this logic / definition, I could not possibly be experiencing grief. I didn’t know this baby, I hadn’t seen their face, their smile, shared any memorable experiences with them…so if it wasn’t grief, what was I feeling? How did it feel like a loss, how did it feel like grief?
The answer came a few days later when I spoke to my cousin – she told me that she had had a miscarriage between two of her children and explained how it is possible to feel the loss of someone you’ve not had in your life. This is because you have grown excited about their arrival and you’ve made plans for them, for all of you together, and suddenly all of that is gone. I pondered this for several days and eventually understood that it’s the future that we’d lost. The plans we’d made. We’d made space in our lives and in our hearts for a new baby that wasn’t coming anymore. And never would be. That’s what we’d lost. That’s what we were missing. That’s what we were grieving for.
I also struggled initially with allowing myself to grieve over such an early miscarriage because I felt it would be a disservice to those who’d lost babies much later on or even after they were born. I felt that out of respect for those people and their unimaginable agony, I should not allow myself to cry because in doing so I would be taking away from them in some way. This was nonsense, obviously. Grief is personal and not something you can ease or intensify for someone else by feeling a certain way about your own loss.
Something else I learned during this experience, as with any trauma, is that you can feel ok for a while, happy even while it’s ongoing and then in an instant, something triggers it and your heart gets shredded all over again. You might be having a productive day until you open a cupboard or drawer and suddenly, your pregnancy vitamins / supplements are right in front of you. You might be sat on a train when your Baby On Board Badge falls out of your pocket a week after you tearfully removed it from your jacket. You might be sat in a restaurant, about to say ‘I can’t eat that’ or ‘I can’t drink wine (Oh… Actually, I can…)’. So you order your wine because, well, why not? And you sip it and taste what it’s like to drink from the emptiest glass in the world. You’re suddenly lonely while surrounded by people. You’re not part of the room, the crowd, the scene anymore. You’re in pain and this separates you from the rest because it’s personal. It’s happening inside of you. The hormones. The chemical changes. The baby that isn’t coming. The child that will never be. And just like that, you’re taken back to the lost place, where nobody hears you, nobody sees you, nobody feels what you feel. But this is temporary. It is not a step back by any means; it is an important part of the process. How can you overcome anything without such challenges? You simply cannot.
For anyone who has been told they are miscarrying or should prepare to miscarry, brace yourself to observe and accept something very important over the coming weeks / months: Everyone is pregnant.
You’ll notice that the streets are awash with heavily pregnant women, every shop seems to suddenly sell new baby clothes and nothing else and mums pushing new-borns will be everywhere you turn. Prepare to breakdown in the supermarket, the coffee house, the queue at the post office… this made me relieved that I did not follow advice to keep my pregnancy a secret for the first 12 weeks, in case of miscarriage. Had I done this, I would have found the already impossibly lonely experience even more isolating.
Four weeks after being told my pregnancy was not going to progress, I became pregnant again but miscarried within two weeks. Doctors suspected an ectopic pregnancy so I was monitored every 48 hours at hospital. Several months on, tests remain positive which has made the experience difficult to process because it is ongoing. It also means I take regular trips to the Early Pregnancy Unit, surrounded by pregnant women and excited couples. The lingering pregnancy hormones make it impossible to move forward or even look forward and wanting to do so overwhelms me with guilt. But every time I receive positive pregnancy results, I know more uncertainty lies ahead and I can’t heal until the results are negative.
Hoping for a negative test is an unsettling and mind bending experience. A few months ago you were making plans for this new baby in your life, a child in your future. Now you find yourself regularly testing and looking at that magic window, willing it to tell you that you are not pregnant. That your baby is not coming. That you won’t ever meet them. That he or she is completely in the past already.
If you have children already, you may well take solace from him or her being living proof that your body is compatible with successful pregnancy. If you have not, you may well wonder whether it will ever happen for you and be of the opinion that those with children are fortunate in comparison to you. I agree of course. However, I do find it comes with its own unique strand of pain because when I look at my son, I know exactly what I’m losing and am heartbroken at the prospect of letting go of them. I want them to live so badly because my two year old son is so amazing and he would make a wonderful big brother. I close my eyes and wish that love alone could be enough for this baby to miraculously survive because if it was, he or she would live forever. But that’s not how it works, we all know that. So I open my teary eyes. I look at my son and hold his stare a second longer and I squeeze him a little bit tighter. I take every opportunity to appreciate everything about him. The smell of his hair. The feel of his hands in mine. The noises he makes as he sleeps. The miracle he is. The little friend he’s become….and that’s a comfort I know many do not have, a comfort for which I am unreservedly thankful.