My Baby Loss Story.
Myself & My husband, Joe, lost four babies through silent miscarriage during a 20 month period and it was the most horrendous time of my life.
From the moment you see a positive pregnancy test, everything begins. You imagine your baby, your future, the life you are creating, and when that is taken away, it leaves a kind of emptiness that is hard to put into words. Miscarriage doesn’t just take your baby, it takes the version of the future you had already begun to hold. It’s painful, physically and emotionally, and it changes you. Pregnancy after loss brings its own complexity too. What should feel joyful instead becomes filled with fear, anxiety and constant questioning. I remember obsessing over every symptom, every sensation, and if something felt different, my mind would spiral. Seeing a positive test didn’t bring excitement, it brought fear. Joe and I would barely speak about the pregnancies, instead we found ourselves waiting, holding our breath for each scan, bracing for what we felt might come. And with each loss, I felt like I lost a part of myself too.
On the outside, I probably looked like I was coping, but I wasn’t. There were nights I would cry until I couldn’t anymore, mornings were getting out of bed felt a real struggle, and days where I would just sit and stare into space, completely disconnected. Because we fell pregnant again quite quickly after each loss, I never felt like I came up for air. I was carrying so much grief without the space to process it, and looking back I can see just how overwhelmed I was, I was drowning in it. After our third loss, I felt my hope starting to fade, and when we lost our fourth baby, something shifted. For the first time I didn’t cry, it was as if I had shut down, and I began to realise I hadn’t truly allowed myself to grieve, not fully. I had been surviving and I was holding so much pain, I knew then that something had to change.
Each of our miscarriages were silent miscarriages, discovered at scans, and on two occasions I knew before the appointment that something wasn’t right. I noticed my pregnancy symptoms would disappear, and deep down I felt it, but I would cling to hope, trying to convince myself it was all in my head. Hearing those words ‘there is no heartbeat’ is something that stays with you. After our third loss we were referred for investigation, and we lost our fourth baby while waiting for our first appointment, as it was a long wait. When the results came through, I was five weeks pregnant again, and I remember the phone call so clearly, being told they had found something. I felt like I was being pulled straight back into everything we had already been through. I was diagnosed with a balanced translocation chromosome, and because I was pregnant, we were quickly referred to the genetics team. At 11 weeks I had a CVS procedure. We received the results around 15 weeks of pregnancy, and I was feeling hopeful as we had never made it out of the first trimester before. We were told everything looked healthy and I really began to enjoy my pregnancy. Our fifth pregnancy was successful, and we welcomed our beautiful daughter, Eva.
It has taken time to process everything we went through, to heal, and to even feel able to speak about it. For a long time, sharing my story felt impossible, but during those years I leaned on small ways to support myself, that for me have been a part of life. Reiki, meditation, journaling, and mindful practices became something I could return to, not to take the pain away, but to help me support myself, and to begin moving forward.
Since having our daughter, we have gone on to experience three further miscarriages, and having walked through four recurrent losses, then the joy of welcoming my daughter, and then facing loss again, I feel like I have lived through such a complex mix of grief and joy, all whilst adapting to motherhood at the same time. For a long time, I truly believed I wouldn’t experience loss again. Even with my chromosomal condition, I held onto that belief, and looking back I think I needed to. Because the time we went through before Eva was so traumatic for me, and I think in doing so it allowed me even better to move forward in motherhood. But loss returned, and with it came a deeper understanding of just how complex this kind of grief is. Miscarriage is a unique and layered grief — you are grieving a love you never got to meet, a future you had already begun to imagine, and a version of yourself that existed in that moment.
What has changed is how I have supported myself through it. After the second loss following Eva, I recognised much earlier on what I needed. Instead of trying to carry on as normal or mask how I was feeling, I allowed myself to slow down, to take the pressure off, to sit with my grief rather than push it away. I stopped trying to do everything, and instead gave myself permission to do less — to rest as much as possible, to feel, and to not expect too much of myself. I have realised how much my body and mind have carried, loss, birth, recurrent postpartum, breastfeeding. I have truly realised the importance of holding space for baby loss, as well as understanding the complex journey our hormones go on during and after loss. I have come to accept that this is part of my journey, shaped in part by my chromosomal condition, and while that acceptance hasn’t taken the pain away, it has softened the way I hold it.
Since walking this path, I have felt a deep pull to support other mothers navigating loss, wherever they may be in their journey. To create spaces where they don’t feel alone, where they can be met with understanding, and where they can honour their baby or babies while being gently supported through their own healing. If you see parts of yourself in my story, I want you to know this — I see you, you are not alone in how you feel, and you do not have to carry this on your own.