Dearest, Don’t worry. I know how you are really feeling about this birthday. And it’s neither of the answers you tend to give people when they ask – and they will ask – how you feel about turning 30. It’s not the faux, what-am-I-doing-with-my-life angst that everyone half expects, and which makes for easy self-deprecating […]
I think I’ve cried at every single episode of This Is Us. But the latest was something else altogether. Because, this was us. If you’ve not watched it (you really should) it’s about an American family, the Pearsons, spanning about 40 years of their lives, zooming in and out of their stories, hopping and skipping through […]
I’m often late. Not by a lot, just by five or ten minutes, usually. Enough to make me sweat and feel like everything is a disaster. It’s something I really dislike about myself and I’m never quite sure why it happens, because I’m a pretty organised person at heart. Perhaps it’s eternal optimism. Trying to […]
Not long after my first miscarriage I interviewed a brilliant psychologist, who specializes in pregnancy loss and infertility, for an article I was writing. I think I will always remember that conversation – how she managed to send some splinters of light through what was otherwise a blinds-drawn, shutters-down kind of time in my life. […]
This week Tommy’s launched its Together For Change campaign, which – if you haven’t seen the videos on social media already – is all about ending the silence and stigma around all forms of baby and pregnancy loss. Along with lots of other brilliant people who talk and write about this subject, I am in […]
Is it heresy if I admit that before our miscarriages I never really thought about the NHS – which is 70 years old today – that much? It’s an odd thing for a health journalist to say, I realise. In an abstract, political sense of course I was glad it was there. And as a […]
There is a print on the wall of the ultrasound room in the unit where they run our recurrent miscarriage clinic. It’s of a red heart, drawn in a swirly, slightly abstract way. Possibly it says ‘amour’ underneath in faux-romantic script. When I’m there, I always think I should make a note of what it […]
Stay positive. Just relax. Don’t stress. How often do you hear these things in relation to pregnancy or trying to conceive? I know they’re words well meant. But, actually, I find this always-look-on-brightside philosophy supremely unhelpful when it’s foisted upon me. In fact, nothing is guaranteed to fill me with more rage and general ill […]
And just like that, the due date for pregnancy number three has passed. In my head this was a big milestone. That somehow once it was behind us it would feel like freedom. Release. A neat conclusion to this over-long, unhappy chapter. The end. Fin. But, of course, there is no finish line to this […]
