It’s difficult to know what to write at times like these. My anxiety that something will go wrong with this pregnancy (our fifth) reached new heights this week. It’s been surreal feeling my nebulous, shapeless worries harden into concrete, very real fears in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Will I still be able to have […]
A guest post by Isla, @izzymatt ‘At least…..’ ‘At least’ is a phrase I’ve heard so often in our journey through secondary infertility and, in truth, I imagine it’s probably the most used phrase tossed towards anyone who has suffered through loss. It’s so terribly British. Our stiff upper lip sensibilities draw us immediately to […]
A guest post by Katie @withoutottilie Me and my womb aren’t exactly the best of friends. I love being a woman. And yet the one physical organ that defines my womanhood, has caused me nothing but pain. Our difficult relationship started on 28th February 1989, my Mum’s birthday, when I was 11. I knew about periods because […]
Sometimes I wonder if everything that’s happened has changed my personality in some fundamental way. In particular, I’ve noticed that my reflex these days is to expect things to go wrong. Not just pregnancy related stuff, but all my stuff: work, home, life admin. All and any of my carefully laid plans. I will get […]
The clocks have rolled back and they seem to have taken the easy optimism I’ve felt all summer with them. The middle chunk of this year has flown for me – one minute we were heading off on a spring holiday, the next it was baby loss awareness week again. But now the nights are […]
A guest post by Tash. I was 33 when I decided to pursue motherhood alone. I’m pretty much a ‘glass half full’ kinda gal, but after years of bland blind dates and demoralising Tinder swipes even I had to be realistic and accept that maybe not everyone finds their soul mate. I quickly realised […]
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 – […]
There is a pregnancy of mine I haven’t written about before, for the simple reason that I don’t know for certain that it was actually a pregnancy. It happened (or didn’t happen, as the case may be) after we’d been trying to conceive for about six months, well before our first miscarriage. I was about […]
Often when we describe pregnancy loss as a taboo, what we really mean, I think, isn’t so much that it’s completely unmentionable – or impossible to admit to – and more that we feel other people have no idea what our lives are like afterwards. That sense of feeling invisible and not properly understood can […]
