You may have seen the news reported yesterday that a large, high quality study has confirmed that conceiving in the months immediately after a miscarriage does not raise the risk of complications in a subsequent pregnancy. This subverts the current advice given by the World Health Organization that it’s best to wait six months after a loss […]
Category: Mental health
Baby loss burn-out
And so another infant and pregnancy loss awareness week/month comes and goes. This was my sixth one now as someone all too ‘aware’. This year, I felt increasingly disconnected from it all. Not least because I was away on a busy trip for the annual wave of light – the lighting of candles in memory […]
Five things I’ve learnt in five years
It was my birthday this week. Dan surprised me with a trip away – staying in a hotel in Marbella old town that we’ve been to before and loved. The last time we were there was five years ago, just after my third miscarriage. Which made me realise that it’s also now been five years […]
Guest monologue: ‘My brain wants one thing, my body wants another’
By Steph (@crossing_everything) I thought my days of crying in work toilets were over. But a few months ago, when an unsolicited scan picture with the cheery caption ‘baby no.2 on the way!’ appeared on my phone, I was right back there. Silently crying in a soulless toilet cubicle, jealous of the simplicity of a […]
You can’t ‘manifest’ a baby
Some things should be so obvious they don’t need saying. But apparently this really did. A week or so ago, I wrote a newspaper piece about the creeping trend for manifestation and the law of attraction and why this is a particularly unhelpful train of thought when it comes to fertility. Until the article was […]
Guest monologue: ‘Please don’t ask me how my Christmas was’
Well, it’s been a little while, hasn’t it? I’ve been working on something that’s taken me offline for the last quarter of 2021. I hadn’t planned to return to the blog just yet, but then an email landed in my inbox just after Christmas Day that I found I couldn’t ignore. It was an offer […]
Is taboo the right word any more?
Taboo is an overused word in the media, isn’t it? Miscarriage, in particular, is often described as one of the “last taboos”, although I’ve also seen the label attached to menopause, periods, post-natal depression, finances, pelvic organ prolapse and male incontinence. When Carrie Johnson announced that she and the UK Prime Minister were expecting another baby […]
Pregnancy after loss – a (gentle) survival guide
By the time you read this, it’ll have been more than a year since I was pregnant. This is only the second time this has been true in – what? – five years, now. The last time I could say it was when we took an extended break from trying to conceive after our fourth […]
Motherhood after miscarriage
In the days after my son was born, I would catch myself gazing around our house in wonder. Cards covered every surface, flowers spilled out of every vase we owned, while stacks of gifted baby clothes sat waiting to be put away. After four years of trying for a baby and four miscarriages we had […]