After the debilitating trauma of baby loss, the endless slog of grief and the psychological torture of trying to conceive, a positive test could feel like a welcome relief. But pregnancy after loss, although worth celebrating, brings with it its own challenges. So here are some survival tips and food for thought to help you navigate the next colossal hurdle in your journey to take home a living baby.
The very first thing you can do is to accept that the pregnancy you are embarking on is going to be a different experience to your previous pre-loss pregnancy. Although you may have been aware that some pregnancies end in loss, until we experience loss ourselves we can remain incredibly naive to it, believing that as we are healthy and living in a wealthy country with abundant healthcare, there is very little reason to worry. If we have been fortunate enough to have a smooth and gentle pregnancy prior to loss, full of happy memories and excited preparations, then these are moments we can hold in our heart and keep in our bank of precious memories, but these moments are unlikely to be replicated so easily in any future pregnancies.
Pregnancy after loss is a vastly different experience; it is a NEW experience. Take some time to sit with that thought, then let go of expectations and embrace the new journey that lies before you.
Regular pregnancy experiences such as scans and baby preparation take on a whole new surreal edge. I remember being nothing but excited to see my baby on a screen during my first pregnancy, but once pregnant with my daughter I would sit in the waiting room with a stomach full of knots and a lingering sense of doomsday dread. For days leading up to a scan, my anxiety would slowly rise as my racing mind imagined a long line of catastrophic outcomes. By the time the scan came I was terrified, each hospital check-up felt make or break. When all went well I imagined I was in a computer game and hitting the save button at every visit, Baby is safe up until now, you may enter the next level.
What was once full of joyful anticipation is now much more serious and anxiety driven. To help you navigate such immensely poignant milestones such as hospital check-ups, buying rompers, decorating the nursery and baby showers, reach out to those around you and say, ‘This isn’t an easy moment for me. This is hard, I’m scared.’
You can give yourself time to take stock of how far you have come. You can give yourself time to breathe, eyes closed, hand on belly, ‘Today my baby is alive and healthy.’
From my own experience I recognise that there is little that we can do to relieve our racing mind. Words of comfort and strength are greatly received, yet often float in one ear and out the other. When we are so tightly bound to the realisation that everything could end, it is incredibly difficult to move ourselves away from that mindset. By simply allowing yourself to feel frightened you can remove some pressure. If you don’t want a baby shower then that’s OK. If you can’t decorate a nursery then that’s OK. If you can’t bear to buy a romper in case it is left forever unfilled, then that’s OK. In this pregnancy you can live day to day, quite literally taking baby steps. And the moment you feel as though you can indulge in a little preparation, when you make your own decision to purchase a tiny pair of socks – and you feel so full of brazen courage, as though you have just leapt over a raging river – you can absolutely allow yourself to celebrate that.
In those moments that are so thieved of naive joy, it is easy to slip into a mindset bitter at those around us who are breezing through a carefree pregnancy. But focusing on what we feel cheated out of is only going to harvest resentment and steal any personal happiness. When scrolling through online sites or preparing ourselves for a scan, we imagine the nonchalant vibe of those fellow pregnant families around us, all revelling in sheer excitement. It’s as though we are surrounded by women celebrating so flamboyantly and carefree, sitting with wombs that had never yet betrayed them. And we can feel incredibly alone.
But to those around you, you too are a mother embarking gleefully on the next phase of your life – our painful past like an invisible cloak. And it is the same wherever you go about in your day-to-day life. No one could tell from a glance that you are grieving the loss of your baby; we can never know someone’s past – and certainly not their destined future – just by their appearance. As we sit in that waiting room, or read the posts on social sites, we can remember that others are likely to be suffering in other ways, or have experienced suffering in the past. We know now that one in four pregnancies end in loss and those around us are just as vulnerable.
We can wish for those who are about to receive good news for them to immerse themselves vibrantly in their pregnancy, and for those who will receive bad news – either now or later on – to have the most gentlest of journeys possible.
Rather than fester in any bitterness, we can instead recall previous carefree journeys of our own and remember just how special it was. We never wanted to be robbed of that, and therefore we would not want to rob others of it. Instead of thinking, It’s easy for you for, you haven’t lost a baby, it brings us much more peace to accept that other people’s experiences are entirely separate to our own, and to instead think, I wish for you to have a long and healthy pregnancy.
When carrying your new baby, inevitably there is the ongoing fear that the pregnancy will end. It is a fear that can stop us from celebrating the pregnancy altogether. In the beginning I had this nagging sense that the moment I celebrated, that would be when my baby died. Of course, this whole idea may seem unreasonable to someone free from such devastation, but, for me, after my son dying so cruelly and unexpectedly, suffering miscarriages just as we had allowed hope to creep in, I worried that if I dared to celebrate then this would give rise to another cruel repercussion. In some ways I felt undeserving. It’s a feeling that is difficult to explain to others, but it was like a little voice saying, Don’t be stupid, this baby won’t live, don’t be foolish enough to celebrate. It felt as though I was always going to run out of luck at some point and I would be an idiot to not prepare myself for that moment.
But over time I realised that this way of thinking was stealing any positive experience from the pregnancy. What began as a feeling of self-protection, quickly moved more towards self-punishment, and I ultimately came to understand is that there no such thing as jinxing a pregnancy. Whether you celebrate or not, this will not decide your baby’s fate.
I can give the example of my own experiences to cement this point. Three pregnancies that all ended in loss. The first, a smooth and vibrant experience, problem-free, ethereal, full of celebration and excitement, that eventually ended with the healthy birth of my son and his subsequent death the following day. The second, so brief but so full of hope, we were so happy we shared our expectant news with family on Father’s Day, only to then lose the baby the day after. And the third, the most delicate pregnancy, where I declined a photograph from the scan for fear of becoming too attached to my growing hope, and I lay as still as a stone on the sofa for weeks just begging the baby to stay safely in my womb, only to miscarry the day before our second scan. All pregnancies were celebrated at differing levels, and all ended in loss. I can draw from these vastly different experiences the knowledge that, whether we hide away and decline an image or throw a shower and frame the scan picture, the outcome is still entirely out of our hands.
So yes, celebrate in any way you can. Take the growing bump photographs, document the kicks and rolls, you can allow yourself to immerse and believe. There is simply no such thing as investing in a pregnancy so much that it will end.
Nothing can end your baby’s life except the course of life itself.
For me, at a time when I have so few memories of my son alive, and the majority of those are of him unwell and dying, I count my pregnancy memories as among some of my most cherished. Even those pregnancies that were so incredibly brief held memories of happiness that deserve recognition. When we now understand how brief life can be and how it can cease at any moment, we can also understand that every second counts as life, whether that is in your arms or in your womb.
And yes, it is not easy. It takes strength, huge strength, to celebrate a pregnancy after loss, and there is likely to always be a sense of doubt playing as a constant background noise. It is absolutely reasonable to feel that way. Once we have lived through such a dark trauma we are understandably looking to protect our heart and we are inevitably pulled to our most painful memories. It isn’t exactly possible to skip through a post-loss pregnancy, and even with positive focus we are destined to deal with some level of anxiety.
Friends and family around us may not understand our new, less optimistic stance on our pregnancy. Those around me wondered why I still worried endlessly during my daughter’s pregnancy. Once we have the deep understanding that a pregnancy – no matter how problem-free and smooth – can end in broken dreams and an empty nursery, there is no going back from that. As with any of these difficult challenges on our journey, our greatest option is to always open up to those close to us. To say, ‘I’m happy that I’m pregnant, but I can’t always relax and just be optimistic,’ is completely OK. If people buy you gifts and you aren’t yet ready, then you can thank them, fold the clothes and store them in a cupboard out of sight. You are not being negative or purposely pulling a black cloud over the experience, you are just living through a pregnancy with an explosive wake-up call.
‘Is this your first? How many children do you have?’
A simple passing question that I once so relished answering quickly became an anxiety riddled bombshell that I avoided like the plague. When I carried Winter, I wished for people to ask me. My swelling belly invited strangers to join in my journey. Anyone who asked this question became witness to my transition into motherhood. ‘Yes, my very first baby!’ I felt giddy, bashful and full of pride to include anyone and everyone in my first steps to motherhood. But now, my stomach knotted up, my shoulders tensed, even my physical body felt the emotional blow of such a simple question.
The first time I was asked I was unprepared. Only a tiny little bump rested below my ribs, I wasn’t ready for anyone I didn’t directly know to take great notice. So my suggestion here is to take time early on to think how to answer this question, that way it is a smoother experience for you and the other unknowing party. How you choose to answer is deeply personal and it is your choice, there is no rule book as to what you should say. The differing experiences of miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal loss, how you choose to remember your baby and whether you choose to keep your baby private or speak publicly about them, are all valid factors in how you choose to respond.
You may want to acknowledge your previous baby but find the words difficult and the moment too emotional. It can be easier to say, ‘Yes this is my first’, and if that is what you would prefer to say then there is nothing wrong with it. No, you are not letting down the baby you lost by erasing their memory, you are just making the decision to keep some traumatic and intimate information to yourself.
I role-played this question by myself many times. It’s surprising just how many people ask upon seeing a baby bump, so I felt like I needed to be prepared. I found that it was comfortable for me to reply with, ‘It’s my second baby,’ in recognition of my son, and this was usually enough information to satisfy the observer. While I was never internally dismissive of my early miscarriages, I chose to quietly remember those losses – not through shame or embarrassment, but simply my own personal choice. You are absolutely allowed to remember and acknowledge your own losses however feels most peaceful to you.
If the question was followed up with, ‘You’re going to have your hands full then,’ I chose to just smile and say, ‘Hopefully.’
If the conversation continued to, ‘How old is your other child?’, that is when I said something along the lines of, ‘Sadly our first baby died. We are looking forward to meeting his brother or sister,’ and smiled and gave my belly a rub.
From experience, I found that replying with less direct answers, such as ‘My other baby lives in my heart’ or ‘We didn’t get to keep our other baby’ meant it was sometimes not clear that Winter had died, and I would then find myself explaining that later on, which gave rise to some uncomfortable realisations from the poor stranger on the bus/in the shop queue or wherever I happened to be. I also found that ending it on a more positive note gave the other person an easier time deciding what to say next, as I was offering two threads of potential follow-up conversation. They could either acknowledge that my son died or make a comment about being excited to meet our next baby – ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’, etc. It felt like a gentle way of delivering an emotional blow, which doesn’t make the passing stranger feel unnecessarily uncomfortable – because while we live daily with that uncomfortable knowledge that our baby died, it is a deeply sad event and in all honesty not everyone we meet is emotionally prepared to navigate such a devastating fact when it is sprung on them. It isn’t hiding it or putting others’ feelings first, I think it is more a ‘judge your audience’ situation. I didn’t divulge all to the 16-year-old cashier at Topshop but I did open my heart to the talkative kind lady I sat next to on the bus for 20 minutes.
There may be feelings of guilt that cloud this pregnancy. I often looked at photographs of my son and felt guilty that I was giving life to another baby when I could not give that to him. I felt guilty that I could be fulfilling all the dreams I had for my son, but with another baby. And I felt guilty that I would not be able to spend as much time on his memory as I would inevitably be juggling maintaining his legacy with the demands of raising another child. But we can always remind ourselves of the bottom line that saved me so many times during guilt-drenched moments: we love the babies we have lost, they know they are loved and they love you back, why wouldn’t they? And when you love someone you want them to be happy. We can imagine our baby, wherever we believe them to be, watching us, surrounding us, loving us back, and willing us to be happy.
Pregnancy after loss is both challenging and wonderful. The distinct but misplaced feeling that your body failed before and could fail again is terrifying and holds your entire pregnancy to ransom. Our bump grows alongside our knowledge that nothing is guaranteed.
Healthy, live babies are born all day, every day, all over the world; it is entirely possible that your baby will be too.
When treading the tightrope of pregnancy after loss, you can try to:
Remove expectations and prepare yourself for a new and different pregnancy experience.
Take this pregnancy one day at a time.
Tell those around you why it is a challenge. You are not being negative, you are communicating just how complex this journey is.
Allow yourself to feel. Hospital appointments are nerve-racking, being around other pregnant women is hard. It’s OK to be afraid, it’s OK to find things difficult, it’s normal. Just don’t let it swallow you whole.
And allow yourself to believe and to celebrate. There is no such thing as jinxing your pregnancy. Enjoy what you can.
And alongside all of the above, remember that if there is any change in your baby’s movements, and anytime you feel that something is wrong, you can call your midwife team and get checked up. Never feel as though you are a burden, never feel as though you are overreacting, simply put yourself and your baby’s health first.