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The Uterus Monologues: Miscarriage, motherhood and me

The Uterus Monologues: Miscarriage, motherhood and me

Life after recurrent miscarriage

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Tag: Grief

May 18, 2021May 17, 2021Jennie

‘Will you have another one?’

It seems a bit mad that my –  * checks notes * – third proper post since Edward was born is about the question of having another child, but I think the single most surprising thing for me about having a baby has been how quickly people ask when you’re going to do it all over again. […]

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May 7, 2020May 6, 2020Jennie

Guest monologue: Lessons from loss

A guest post by Bine @binemeadows A global pandemic – what a crazy yet eerily quiet and slow world we have found ourselves in. Whilst some of us are fighting death and risking their own lives on the ‘front line’, many of us are in lockdown at home. As much as my three miscarriages over the past one […]

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January 16, 2019January 15, 2019Jennie

Milestones and millstones

This week marks two years precisely since our first miscarriage. I almost didn’t remember…until I did. I’m not normally in the habit of marking the anniversaries of our miscarriages – or even the due dates any more. For a start, I am yet to find any sort of ritual I feel comfortable with. But also there […]

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December 13, 2018January 8, 2019Jennie

The audacity of hope?

I recently finished Michelle Obama’s autobiography. I bought it in its first week – along with literally a million other people. It is an incredibly warm, wise book – a book that says so much about womanhood, race, love, grief, marriage, privilege and, yes, politics. It’s full of lines that have you nodding along, thinking […]

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September 5, 2018September 5, 2018Jennie

This was us 

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 […]

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July 18, 2018February 26, 2020Jennie

Guest monologue: ‘It was a decision, not a choice’

After the Tommy’s Together For Change campaign launch last week, Laura from the blog Laura After Loss messaged me to ask if I would consider posting about an aspect of baby loss that you very rarely hear about, even in articles about pregnancy loss – termination for medical reasons. It is, as she put it, […]

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February 6, 2018June 2, 2018Jennie

Your life is here, now

Just a quick one this week. A thought for the day, if you like. I’ve spent most of the weekend curled up with the journalist Dolly Alderton’s book Everything I Know About Love. I inhaled it, drinking in every word, pausing only for more tea and another round of toast. It’s a memoir, and it […]

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Say hello on Instagram...

When I was pregnant for the first time, the 12-week ‘rule’ seemed little more than a fun tradition to me. We didn’t tell many people ‘in case something happened’, but without really believing anything actually would. Whether you tell people early, or whether you wait, either way, this enduring social convention starts to feel like a big cosmic joke after you lose a pregnancy.
Hi, I’m Jennie - and this is what the back of my hair actually looks like in real life. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I wasn’t going to share this picture. I’ve been having a kind of Instagram stage fright - it often happens when I’ve been posting reasonably regularly for a bit. I start to feel over-exposed, I annoy myself, I worry and question everything I start to write. I tell myself that if I’m going to share my awkward selfies and snapshots of my rather quiet life, I better have something powerful and important to say. So I end up saying nothing for a bit and feeling rubbish. But do you know what? Life’s too short.
This is from an old post, which I re-shared on my stories earlier this week. Judging by my inbox, it seems to have struck a chord so I thought I’d post it here too. Because I think there’s a still an anxiety around talking about abortion or being pro-choice as someone who desperately wants to become pregnant or who has grieved for a miscarriage - as if these causes are completely separate or even at odds with each other. As if by declaring one thing you are invalidating your own feelings about the other: your right to grieve, your imagining of what you lost as a life, or what could have been a life.
I am personally very grateful to this week’s guest post author, as it’s helped me appraise and explore my own feelings about this particular topic - whether and when to try for another child after a ‘rainbow’ baby. In this post, Steph @crossing_everything reflects so honestly on the prospect of trying again, after a miscarriage, a tfmr, and then after finding the newborn phase with her rainbow girl difficult. I found it helpful and - ultimately - hopeful, too. (Tap the link in my bio to read).
✨ Am I making the most of it? Am I cherishing our time? Is this ‘special’ enough? ✨ These sorts of questions have buzzed around my brain basically ever since Edward was born. Mostly, they existed as nebulous guilt; a panic I couldn’t yet articulate. Time was running out. I wouldn’t get these ‘firsts’ again. This was it, the moment(s) I had waited for for so long. Was I making it special enough?
Today marks 5 years since I wrote publicly about miscarriage for the first time. My first one. On the day the newspaper piece this quote is taken from went to print, I was actually pregnant again. There was part of me that thought writing and publishing the piece marked the end of that particular chapter of my life, when in fact it had barely started.

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