Before the miscarriage, the stats didn’t apply to me

It wouldn’t happen to me

I have a child, I’m pregnant with my second child and I have a beautiful family and a happy home. But, 3 years ago, in my first pregnancy, I lost a baby.  

There was one who got away, one we’ll never know, and I remember them still. I remember how it felt to lose them and that has haunted me during the first trimesters of both my other pregnancies.  

Before the miscarriage, the stats didn’t apply to me. They were just a number, yes with a high probability, but it wasn’t going to happen to me.”  

That kind of thing wouldn’t happen to me, and I didn’t know how people who went through it survived it. 

A heartbreaking scan  

During my first pregnancy, we went to a first scan and both sat there in a staggering silence while the midwife just kept looking and looking for a heartbeat and not finding one. Our baby was tiny on the screen and completely still, but still very much a baby.

I’d had no other symptoms, I didn’t understand. We’d both walked into the scan absolutely buzzing to see that little baby on the screen.

We had the ‘diagnosis’ confirmed a week later. I’m not sure when we lost them. I’m not sure if they had a heartbeat that then stopped, or if it never started in the first place.  

I’ll never know what went wrong or when my baby slipped away, but either way, at that moment, I knew I was still carrying a child I would never get to hold.”  

My grief as a stone

I tried to distract myself and did a lot of cleaning and running in the weeks following the miscarriage.  

A couple months after that, I got a kitten. We did already have a cat, but I just really needed a baby of some kind to hold. This cat to this day still likes to be held like a wee baby because that was how I held him when he was little.  

A couple of years ago, my counsellor used a metaphor for grief that stayed with me. I'm pretty sure it’s from a book or theory. She said my grief was like a stone and over time, that stone remains unchanged, but the jar it’s in might change.  

The stones that are around it change as I add more memories, more relationships, more people I love. Those new stones and new jars don’t take away from my grief stone. It remains part of me even as I change.  

Even on the days I don’t want to look at that stone, even as it gets a bit buried under other stones, even on the days I’m busy admiring my happy stones, it remains, and that is ok. That is grief.  

Talking to others

I talked to my friends and family about the loss, but I also found it hard to. I knew my family were struggling to watch me go through the loss and I felt awkward bringing up the baby I had lost.

It's such an uncomfortable topic for so many, particularly those who have never suffered the loss.”

I talked about it mostly with a friend of mine who had recently lost her dad. We would discuss grief and it was helpful to have someone who knew the rawness and unpredictability of what you were going through.  

Why Tommy’s is important

Tommy's is important to me because so much of miscarriage is dismissed as 'not meant to be'. But there has to be a reason.  

The fact that research is being done into why this happens and support being given to families who have lost is such a light.