My book – Life, Almost: Miscarriage, Misconceptions, and a Search for Answers from the Brink of Motherhood – is published on Thursday. I can hardly believe it. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about sharing it with the world (as I tried to express in my most recent newsletter). And yet, at […]
Tag: Miscarriage
Guest monologue: Fight, flight, or freeze?
This week, I have a guest post for you, written by Lyanne Nicholl, campaigner and author of the new book, Your Postnatal Body: A Top-to-Toe Guide to Caring For Yourself After Pregnancy and Birth (in which I make a small cameo, but don’t hold that against it…) Lyanne interviewed me for a section in the book that […]
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 […]
The enduring myth of ‘perhaps we shouldn’t have told anyone’
‘Congratulations!’ my friend whispers, before bear-hugging me and then Dan. We smile and say thank you, but immediately follow it up with: ‘But it’s still early so, you know…’ Of course she knows. We all know the ‘rules’, don’t we? Convention dictates that a pregnancy is not to be spoken of until the end of […]
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 […]
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 […]