Thoughts after miscarriage

While my pregnancy may not have made a baby, it did make a mother. 

I became a mother as soon as I suspected I was pregnant, the test just confirmed what I knew in my heart.

From that moment, dispite the rising panic, I felt this huge surge of love that I could never have comprehended was even possible until I felt it. I knew then that nothing and nobody was going to stop me from keeping my baby; my life, my plans, they didn’t matter. This wasn’t ‘throwing my life away’. This was being the best mother I could be with what I had.

I didn’t even consider that I wouldn’t get to hold my baby. I didn’t consider that I wouldn’t have to stand up and fight for them when people said I was too young. 

I was preparing to fight, to live, it just ended up being a very different fight I had to face than the one I imagined.

I didn’t stand up for my child or myself when some playground mother turned up her nose at the 22 year old with a school age kid, instead I find myself standing up to the grief that sometimes threatens to swalow me alive. And I say ‘fuck you’to that instead.

I refuse to let every memory I have of my pregnancy and my baby be forever defined by the fact that I never held them in my arms. 

I was the best sort of terrified, I was overjoyed and panicked and excited and hopeful, I found I had so much love to give. 

I felt more in those few days than I think I have ever felt in my life, and more in the months following my loss than I dreamed was possible.

The most important thing I think I have read on this crazy journey is this:

“A mother is not defined by the number of children you can see, but by the love she holds in her heart.”

– Francesca Cox 

And I think the same would be true of my partner should you ask him, that, while our pregnancy did not have the outcome I took forgranted, it made a father as well as a mother.

I think it is the cruelest thing in the world that he became both a father and not-quite-a-father on the same day. I will always regret not telling him as soon as I knew. I thought we would have forever, I planned to tell him about my pregnancy, our baby, the day I had to tell him I miscarried. I thought thst there would be months, not days and weeks.

Love and support always, 

Surviving Miscarriage Together x