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Pregnancy after loss is holding space for grief, fear, trauma and hope all wrapped up in an anxiety ball while everyone tells you 'don't worry, it's going to work out this time'
@travelingwithgrief
The Ultimate Test of Resilience
"Enduring a pregnancy after loss is the ultimate test of resilience, love and hope. Choosing to re-live your most traumatic experience for the better part of a year, knowing full well that all the fear, nausea, anxiety, financial implications, tests, scans, hopes and dreams... may not lead to a living baby, is beyond courageous. Held up by a mother's unwavering love for her baby that didn't get to stay".
I’ve heard a lot from people further along that grief doesn’t get easier, it gets different. It changes and evolves, moves with you.
I anticipated being pregnant again would impact my grief in new ways. Yet anticipation is no substitute for experience, and I was surprised at how quickly new fears and struggles were taking hold.
The journey from guilt to pressure was swift.
This tremendous, overwhelming sense of pressure, to not let anyone down again. To not cause my husband and family to endure such immense pain, again. To not fail another precious, innocent baby.
Like guilt, this sense of pressure is self-imposed. There is nobody in my life saying anything intentional to encourage or imply this idea. It simply comes with the territory.
It comes from our own desperation to find hope again, to imagine a future with happiness and joy. To never find ourselves back in that room, looking at a screen of our perfect, fully formed baby with no heartbeat.
It comes with peoples well wishes, with their blind certainty that everything will be fine this time. With their eager congratulations and easily had conversations of a future where this baby is a given.
I go along with it all. Passively. I feign a smile, a thank you. They all mean so well and simply can’t fathom any other reaction besides total optimism.
But it all builds. The pressure. The immense pressure to do something so many take for granted. To bring a child safely into this world.
There are no additional surveillance techniques or preventative measures we can employ besides extra monitoring in PAL following an unexplained stillbirth. And even that would have been unlikely to save Ada.
Ultimately, nobody can do this for me. As the child bearing parent, it is my responsibility. My body that needs to create and execute.
As they say, we can only control the controllables, the rest is left to chance.
And the ‘rest’ can mean the difference between taking home a baby... or a box.