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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: pregnancy envy

September 6, 2019September 5, 2019Jennie

Sharp objects

It’s back to school season, and that means running the daily social media assault course of first-day-of-school pictures (I can’t be alone in thinking of it in these combative terms, can I?). A week-long parade of other people’s babies – and they do often look like mere babies, play-acting in their Big School uniforms – […]

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December 20, 2018January 15, 2019Jennie

Comfort and Joy (Pregnancy announcements: A how-to)

I was going to write a different post for the week before Christmas. About how Dan and I are trying to wring every last drop of joy from the festive season this year, my first not working – not on Christmas Day, not on Boxing Day, not on any of those surreal, time-passing-slow-as-treacle days in […]

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June 18, 2018June 17, 2018Jennie

Normal heart: A fourth miscarriage

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 […]

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Jennie, The Uterus Monologues, LLHM, half marathon, Tommy's fundraising
April 11, 2018April 10, 2018Jennie

The finish line

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 […]

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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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