How miscarriage changes you

Taking from Pinterest - Inspiration After Miscarriage

 

Until it happened to me I was extremely naive about miscarriage. It was something I learned about in A'level Biology or something that happened to other women. Surely it happens to those who smoke, or drink or take drugs during pregnancy, to those who are really underweight or hugely overweight or who are pregnant for the first time. When I fell pregnant with our 2nd child it did not even occur to me that I might lose him.

 

None of my close friends has ever miscarried and the only person I knew who had was a friend I rarely see. At the time I passed on my commiserations but didn't think of a miscarriage as the major life changer I now know it to be. And that's the strange thing about miscarriage it's rarely talked about and if you haven't experienced one it's simply a sad, unfortunate fact of life. It's all there in Biology class, the chromosomes don't match up so the baby doesn't develop. When learning this at 17 I never thought that one day I would lose my baby in this way and when you experience it its far more than a case of too many or too few chromosomes.

 

When I lost my baby at 12 weeks, it wasn't simple biology because there's a whole emotional side that's never taught. I lost a baby. It doesn't matter that it was only 3 months along and the size of a plum, invested in that baby was a whole lifetime of hopes and dreams that will now never be lived and it's changed me completely.

 

I'm no longer the woman who walked happily into that scan two months ago, nor am I the woman who 12 weeks before thought a 2nd pregnancy would be as easy as the first, nor am I the woman who 4 months before that started trying for a 2nd baby and began investing in dreams about the future. I laugh and joke and look the same (though I tried hard not to with a haircut and new clothes) but the loss is always with me. It is there when I wake up and there when I go to sleep and is only kept at bay by keeping busy.

 

My boots and nails have never been so polished, nor the laundry so up to date. The hallway junk cupboard has been cleared out and everything is in clearly labelled boxes. I've signed up for another 5 weeks of Pilates and am thinking about running once a week in the evenings. Charlie's baby equipment has been catalogued and offered to be lent to my brother's first born due later this year and I'm committed to my work book club. I'm desperately trying to live the path I find myself walking to the full but inside I know something is horribly broken.

 

I have lost my inner calm, am quick to anger and will cry at the slightest thing. I've lost my ability to make small talk and find concentrating hard. My confidence has disappeared. Inside I am an emotional wreck, no longer the woman I once was. Time bends, it stretches and shrinks but so far time has not been the healer it is often promised to be.

 

There is now the added whirl of trying again, not to replace what was lost but to complete our family. There are date calculations and ovulation tests and a lot of being frustrated by the waiting. A lot of time trying not to think about it going wrong again and a lot of time trying to dodge pregnant women (who are everywhere in London). Every time I see a swollen belly I feel a blow in mine, a deep ache for what might have been. This week I would have been 5 months along and over half way through. Instead I am waiting for two lines on a stick to be the same colour so we can begin the whole process again and it hurts.