My Journey From Miscarriage To Birth

posted on : May 6, 2018 posted by : Tara 0 Comment

I had always dreamed of having a baby. Growing up, I was never shy to admit that I was the “mother” type of girl – dreaming of carrying and giving birth to at least one precious child in my life. To be even more specific, I dreamed of having a little girl; a blonde haired, blue eyed, cheeky little thing.

Much like other realities of life, I did not grow up thinking about losing a baby. The dream was ideal in its makeup. Even once I got married and the prospect of having children became more immediate and likely, I still never considered the possibility of loss.

The second I got that positive test result, however, the possibility became glaringly forefront in my mind. It is almost as if our mom-genes click on and we cannot help but want, no not want, need to protect this tiny human in any way we can.

Our first pregnancy

Derek and I hadn’t planned our first pregnancy – it was one of those “oh, we’ll be ok”, spontaneous moments that is typically accompanied by wine – and, being newlyweds who had just moved across the world, you can imagine the shock. It didn’t last long, though. Once the tide of shock retreated, we were left with immeasurable joy and excitement in its place.

The first gift we got for our precious Sprout

We could not hold in our news and, along with the gifts that started arriving on our door, so came the fantasies. Who is this little person? Will it be a girl or a boy? What will he/she look like? With each hope-filled question, a stronger narrative for our future began to unfold. Its impossible not to start mapping out your new life.

The loss

In retrospect, I think I always knew that something was “wrong”. In an intuitive, hard to explain way I could see the fantasy, but I could not feel it. There was something about my dreams for this child that were just not destined to come true.

At the time I put it down to first-pregnancy ignorance and anxiety – reasoning that was further strengthened when we heard and saw a perfectly healthy, strong heartbeat at 7 weeks and 3 days.

At 10 weeks we went in for our first check up with our new midwives. We checked the heartbeat with this dinosaur of a machine and, seeing as the baby was still so little, the student midwife was having a hard time finding it. At one point during the exam, however, she told us that she saw the flicker of the heart and, even though I didn’t see it, she assured me it was there.

Again, mom intuition kicked in. No, I cannot leave until I see for myself. We need a better machine.

And so we moved down the hall to the big, fancy machine to ease my “irrational” mom brain.

I cannot remember all of what the midwife said to me. The only thing I do remember were the words “this is one of those cases”. After hearing the heartbeat at 7 weeks and 3 days, our baby was dated at 7 weeks and 4 days. For reasons that only the god of your believing can explain, our tiny angel had died the very next day.

With only one word, “no”, I fell back on the bed and sobbed.

In the moments afterward, I remember being told that miscarrying in the first trimester is very common and that it does not mean that I will not go on to carry a perfectly healthy baby in the future. In between bursts of uncontrollable tears, I was also given my options for how I could proceed.

I think we stayed in the midwifery office for at least an hour, being consoled and cared for. I am so grateful for being in such a loving, supportive and patient environment during that time.

What came next

We decided to complete the miscarriage naturally. It took about 5 days from when I got the news to when the process began.

It was excruciating in more ways than one. The contractions I felt had no break to them, were unbearably painful, and were drenched in heartache. As I wished for the pain to be over, I also knew what that meant – there would be no baby for me to hold. No dream for me to fulfil. I would be left with an empty womb and a loss that the world would not know about.

Our little Sprout dedication and ceremony

You are not alone

As was expected, the physical pain came to an end. I was somewhat relieved from the sense that now I could get my body back to “normal” and begin trying again. I needed to cleanse in order to renew.

What I could not shake, however, was this feeling of loneliness. Here I was, at home, suffering from a surprising degree of sadness and yet, for some strange reason, I felt as if I needed to suffer in silence. Culture had quietly dictated that, because miscarriages are so common, they needn’t be mourned. It didn’t feel right to me. Not only was I trying to subdue my incredibly strong feelings into non-existence, but I was also, as a result, denying my baby the right to be mourned.

Why does my baby deserve not to be mourned? Why should he/she just be forgotten?

No. If other women were feeling even half of what I was feeling, then we all deserve and need a community of support. This experience of loss is not meant to be silenced.

And so I decided to share my story publicly. I wrote about what I was feeling, how I didn’t want to do it alone and how women who have shared this experience need to be there for one another. There is no shame. We have not done anything wrong. And our babies, no matter how tiny, deserve to have tears shed for them.

The support and response I got was more than I ever could have imagined. The amount of women who came out and “admitted” to their own story of loss was astounding. I also found my story becoming a source of comfort to other women when they needed it. To this day, 3 years later, I am still getting emails from women going through their own loss and feeling comforted by the knowledge that they do not have to feel alone.

(if you would like to read my story from 3 years ago, click here – it will open in a separate page).

Miscarriage residue

Over the subsequent months, my desire to fall pregnant again became nothing short of desperate. I thought of nothing else. I wanted nothing else. I needed to replace this baby who I had lost. In my mind, when I fell pregnant again, the baby I lost would come back to me, only this time in a stronger, healthier body. I was convinced that the soul of the lost baby was simply waiting for me to conceive.

Painfully, it took us months and months to conceive again and this was awful in its own way. You begin to live your life in 2 weeks cycles: counting the days until ovulation and counting the days until pee-on-a-stick time. And with each negative result comes heart plummeting, defeated, hope destroying disappointment. You have no choice but to pick yourself and get back “on the horse”, but the repeated loss severely challenges your ability to believe.

The positive test

Derek asked me once if I knew which time was the “successful time”. And yes I did. I knew because, despite not being hugely religious, I prayed the whole way through. In the absence of control, one often turns to prayer.

Over the 10 months or so of us trying, I peed on too many sticks to count. I had gotten so used to seeing a negative result by this point that, instead of my usual eyes-glued-to-the-stick approach, I simply placed the test on the side of the bath and left the room to finish some chores. It was my last test and I had decided to take it early – not sure why. I was convinced it would be negative, but just wanted to get it out the house and out of my mind.

With next to zero hope, I strolled back into the bathroom, all ready to toss yet another negative test in the trash.

Positive! I literally fell to my knees and sobbed. This time with sobs of joy.

Miscarriage residue continues

I wish I could say that it was all happiness and smooth sailing from there… it wasn’t.

In terms of pregnancies, mine was a dream. In terms of miscarriage anxiety, it was a nightmare.

One particularly hormonal and stressful Friday, I got myself so worked up about the possibility of another miscarriage, that I drove 30 minutes to my doctor-friend’s office, sat on the exam bed and cried until he offered to do a blood test.

Over the following weeks, I repeatedly messaged a friend of mine (who was also pregnant with her post-miscarriage baby) asking her endless, panic-filled questions, in an attempt to draw some degree of comfort.

Every time I went to the loo, I nervously checked to make sure there was no bleeding. Every day that I had no morning sickness, I panicked. I even sat at my midwifery, after going in for a blood draw, refusing to leave until they checked my baby’s heartbeat.

At around 16 weeks, I began to feel a bit more relaxed, but I still refused to buy anything for our precious Sprout 2.0 until after our 20 week scan. I did not want to give fate even the slightest of temptations.

I am currently pregnant with my second baby – an, as of right now, unspecified gender who we have nicknamed Nugget. With the current pregnancy as comparison, I can say that, with Maya, I do not think I completely let go of the possibility of loss until about 2 days after she was born. No matter how far along I got, I could always imagine lists of potential tragic scenarios, which, if allowed, could send me into an irrational freak out.

Be kind to yourself. What you went through was hard.

Going through a miscarriage is hard; a struggle that is made harder by the feeling that we need to keep it to ourselves – that it is so common that it is not worth mentioning or feeling.

What you have gone through is something that should not be ignored, overlooked or trivialised. You have a right to feel whatever comes naturally to you – after all, these are the feelings of a parent, which is what you are now. What’s more, your precious angel has the right to be felt too; has the right to be mourned.

We may not have held our baby, but we dreamed of it. We may not have kissed our baby, but we imagined it. We may not have watched our baby grow up, but we longed for it. The physical size of our lost child may have been tiny, but the fantasies we had for who he or she would be were enormous. With the silence of the doppler, came the silencing of those dreams.

Be kind to yourself. Allow yourself time to grieve. Seek comfort from those you trust. This is a huge part of your journey through parenthood. Let it become part of the parent you become.

Sending my fellow parents so much love. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in contact with me. I am a part of your community and we need to be there for one another.

Tara

To read the original story “My miscarriage is no secret and our baby deserves to be mourned”, click here.