After the initial blow of your loss, you face an array of mismatched emotions, in varying orders, flows and intensities. Anger, jealousy, deep sadness, pride and even bittersweet happiness – you are tossed from one to the next with little respite. And alongside this new emotional tornado you discover that life goes on, that the dishwasher still needs emptying, the food shop still need doing, the bills still need paying. You feel grief settle into your bones; you become accustomed to the daily grind of life with the stagnant feeling that something is missing, that your life should be so different to the experience now laid out in front of you. That your bump should be growing, your baby should be breathing.
You exist simultaneously within two worlds; the world of your loss and the ‘real’ world.
And now you are left feeling fragile with uncertainty, and a blank chapter you are yet to embrace. Your life has always and forever been divided into a before and after, before your baby existed where you felt anchored and in control, and the after where your peace has been sabotaged. In the beginning you may have been carried by the deep love you hold for your baby, the pride and the bereft excitement to meet them regardless of circumstance. The early days may have been numbing for you, your situation changed so hastily that it takes time for your heart to catch up with the truth.
After our son died, I distinctly remember a feeling of ‘still waiting’. Nine long months for his arrival, here and gone in a single day. The drawn-out lead-up of pregnancy offset the shutter speed of his lifetime. His life in the outside world was always meant to be longer than his life spent in my womb; the balance had become so topsy-turvy that half of me remained convinced we were still awaiting his arrival and at times doubting if I ever really met him at all.
When I miscarried there was a similar feeling. Continuing through life and passively accepting its daily offerings, but always the lost pregnancy playing out in the background. Living through a reflection and at the mercy of our own imagination, the pregnancy does not physically continue but we silently hit the milestones: I would be six months pregnant now, I would be having my scan now, I would be due now, the baby would be two months old now … An invisible child carried with us through our whole life.
We want to stay forever connected to our baby, we always wish to hold them just once, or once more, and our deep desire to stay close to them can leave us with a strong aversion to the passing of time. Occasions that will never be fulfilled, monthly anniversaries rolling by, and as the first year passes time seems to gather speed – like string rolling down a hill that we are left chasing – and we are desperate to catch it and pause long enough to breathe and reflect. Even two-and-a-half years after my son died, and two years on from my first miscarriage, I still look back at those days with only foggy reflection and wonder if it all really happened. I’ve never managed to catch the string.
When you lose a baby it is so difficult to be present in the here and now. Whether a miscarriage, stillbirth or a baby that lives briefly out of womb, the enormity of the situation and the abruptness of the loss can understandably take time to truly sink in. We go through the motions, we continue to live, the memory of our baby is forever present, but every now and then we are struck with the brutal reality. A pregnant lady at the petrol station, a baby in a pram at the park, tiny booties in the shop window, nappies at the supermarket. These are the moments when you are thrown back into your grief, when you are confronted with all that you have lost.
Be gentle, be patient with your heart. Allow yourself the moments of pain. There is no way you should feel at any time in this journey, only how you do feel.
Those around you may be continually supportive, or they may not. As time rolls on, you may find that for others around you the ‘novelty’ (for want of a better word) wears thin. The weight of misled Western expectation leaves us feeling as though we should be moving on, we should be healing by now. People we have held close may peel themselves away from the scene of devastation, frightened or too inept to face dealing with the ongoing nature of grief. Even those who are devoting their time and energy to you may struggle to understand the scope of loss you face and its everlasting impact.
Your baby may have existed physically only very briefly, but you have lost a lifetime of memories with them, and it can feel so difficult to communicate your loss with the impact it deserves. What we want to say is that we didn’t just lose our baby in that instant, but we lost them as part of our life forever. Other people who are not experienced in the loss of a baby may accuse the grieving of living in the past or clinging on to something long gone, but while the loss of your baby may be several months or years ago to them, to you it is every day. You lost the first smile, first giggle, first steps. You lost the sticky handprints on the glass window, the tears at a grazed knee and the Mother’s Day gift made from yogurt pots. You lost the graduation, the wedding, the grandchildren.
Your loss is not a flash in the pan, it is not a short-lived event, it is continuous and never-ending.
You watch as the world moves on around you and you are frozen in a moment. You wonder how others dare to find joy when you feel so swamped in suffering. The past continues to be present. Bereaved families wake up every single morning and go to bed every night with the memory of their baby and the hole their loss has left behind.
If anyone wonders why I still talk about my son, my question to them is, ‘When do you plan to stop talking about your children?’ Living or not, no matter how brief their life, your baby remains part of your life forever. You can always be kind to yourself, safe in the knowledge that feeling as though you are stuck in the moments with your baby is OK – it’s normal, it’s natural. It is no different from holding on to the memory of a family celebration or a fond childhood moment. Revisiting that memory over and over is our way of keeping it fresh. Your mind is so powerful, so much of your baby’s life exists only within your own memory, within a little glass box that is equal parts fragile and sturdy. Your memory is your most precious keepsake.
There are many instances within the world of baby loss where the bereaved are kept at such arm’s length that they are left feeling as though their loss is contagious. There are so many stories of old friends crossing the road to avoid an awkward conversation, or simply failing to call or text. We can be left feeling as though people wouldn’t want to spend time with us simply due to our loss, as though we are a black cloud or that our ‘bad luck’ will rub off onto them. It’s important to remember that you are in charge of your own thoughts and actions, but not of others’. At a time when we are left so desolate in the aftermath of baby loss, relieve yourself of the pressures of others’ actions and expectations. Seek out those who understand and make effort to alleviate your pain. Keep the better experiences at the forefront of your mind and use bad experiences as motivation to gently educate and change the unrealistic expectations of baby loss.
Hold close those who reach out, those who try. Perhaps their words may not always be the comfort you were hoping for, but when heartfelt effort is made, we can dismiss the delivery and focus on the intention.
You may begin to develop some rituals and find new connections to your baby. Maybe a bird, a symbol, a colour or a flower that brings you close to them. Snowflakes and wolves remind me of my son Winter, and coconuts remind me of a baby I miscarried. It can be as obscure as you want, and no doubt there will be something you have in mind already. Sharing this image with loved ones and saying ‘this is how I remember my baby’ gives them an opportunity to join in your remembrance. When they see that plant or animal or letter or fruit, your baby will be projected to the forefront of their mind. If you are happily willing, they may share those moments with you, and you will be reminded that your baby lives on in the memory of others too.
Returning to work can be a huge hurdle post loss. It’s difficult to explain to those without the experience of losing their baby the magnitude of such a milestone. Returning to work signifies the end of your time off, time that should have been continuing your pregnancy or raising a baby. It is as though you are faced with the reality that life must return to how it was before your loss, a reality that we do not want to accept. Returning feels like another defeat. Your job can suddenly become incredibly difficult, your mind still muddled and not at all able to focus on much else other than the trauma you have experienced.
The nature of your work can suddenly become a challenge. Working with babies or young children, or within a workplace with pregnant colleagues, can transform what was once a job we loved to something much more complex. Working in a place which ticked both of these boxes, I had to re-evaluate my emotional approach. I decided early on that while being surrounded by young ones could easily inject a plethora of negative triggers, I would instead focus on caring for them how I wished I could care for my own child. In this sense I felt as though I was continuing to honour my son, offering up the love I had for him to others who needed it.
With an early loss, pre-bump and pre-announcement, taking time off and allowing yourself space to reflect can feel daunting, but don’t forget that you are entitled to grieve regardless of how early on you lose your baby, and you are hurting just as anyone hurts when they miscarry. When the pregnancy is not yet public knowledge and you would like to keep the loss discreet, then seek out a colleague you have connection with and can confide in privately, someone who can ‘have your back’ in moments when you need headspace at work. Invite them over for tea or coffee and talk to them, not only about what has happened, but the magnitude of pain it causes, early days or not.
With any loss it is almost impossible to put all your thoughts and emotions to one side and centre yourself entirely in work. I know that I felt constantly fatigued yet unable to sleep, and while I chose to return and wanted desperately to be out of the house and busy around familiar friends, I spent much of my time there with a churning stomach and an absent mind. It is impossible to say how each person who reads this will feel about their return to work, but there is a universal feeling in the baby loss world of it being a significant marker along the loss journey, and your employer’s response can either encourage your healing or send you plummeting. If it is possible, I suggest you arrange a meeting at your workplace where you can vocalise your worries and direct your colleagues to sites and information that could help them to understand how you are feeling.
While there are sadly many contributing factors to the time we take off – financial, family commitments, etc. – where possible take as much time as you need with the mindset of no deadlines or expectations. We all set our own calendars of grief. Time off to reflect can absolutely either be what our heart requires or leave us feeling lost further – you can make the decision for your own personal requirements. And if any employer is reading this, I beg you to please consider your employee’s workload, to be patient with them and gentle on their delicate heart.
Losing a baby is a trauma that extends beyond home. It is carried with us wherever we travel and that includes our work space.
You are faced with the task of finding your new place in the world. Our very identity is altered once we lose a child. I was once the small girl with colourful hair, now I’m the girl whose baby died. We all label others, it’s really just a part of our human nature, but you have the power to redesign your label over time, to own it and wear it with pride. You do not just have to be the girl whose baby died, you can be the girl who continued to celebrate her baby long after you lost them, the girl who raised money in memory, the girl who shared her experience with others and helped others to understand. Choose your label and run with it. It doesn’t have to be a big public label, it can be whatever you want, it can simply be ‘mother’ and ‘memory keeper’.
Losing our baby rattles us, it jolts us from one imagined future and forces us to realise a new one. It is a future that we want to reject but we will, with time, come to accept. In the meantime we may feel ourselves floundering, or panicked. From the moment that test read positive, we had envisioned ourselves as mothers, and mothers still we are, but our new life is not the one of our dreams. Death of any kind can encourage us to confront the reality of life, its fragility and uncertainty. We find ourselves questioning our beliefs, and wondering how and why this trauma came into our lives. Soul-searching becomes engrained in the bereaved.
While we may never really come to understand the nature of life and death, there is one thing we can be certain of – that life goes on, and it goes on with your baby forever a part of it.
As you step out into the world with your loss heavy in your heart you can:
Expect that there will be times within your day when you will be confronted with your loss – allow yourself to grieve at these times.
Keep your support circle close. There is no need to forever dismiss those who don’t understand or ‘step up’ to comfort, but for now just focus on those who do.
Find some routines and rituals that help you feel close to your baby.
If possible, only return to work when you feel you are ready. Talk to your employer beforehand and lean on friends within your workspace.
Find something that reminds you of your baby, such as a colour, animal or flower, and share this reminder with loved ones, giving them opportunities to embrace your baby’s memory alongside you.