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You do a home pregnancy test and those 2 pink lines appear.  A positive pregnancy test creates feelings of elation, happiness, shock, fear and excitement. You start to mentally prepare for what's ahead of you and the new life that you and your partner have created. You begin to scroll through websites providing you with updates on the baby's progress - "At 5 weeks your baby is the size of an apple seed...", "Congratulations Mum! At 9 weeks your baby is the size of a peanut and it's facial features are forming...". You and your partner begin to discuss names for the baby, are either of you are secretly hoping for a little boy or girl? 

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This is a time filled with hope, expectations for the future and planning for the many ways in which your family will be growing and changing. Pregnancy can often bring you and your partner emotionally closer, particularly if you've decided not to share the news with anyone else just yet, This pregnancy is a secret between the two of you, you are both inextricably linked together by this tiny new life forming inside of you.

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When things start to go wrong the signs may be subtle, or they may be obvious or there may not be any signs at all. You might feel that something is 'off' or you might be feeling perfectly fine.  Over the past 6 years my husband and I have experienced four miscarriages together. Sometimes things didn't feel 'quite right' and other times they felt 'so right' that I was utterly blindsided by the news delivered in the ultrasound room.  Regardless of the way I've found out, the impact for me has been the same.  The future I was imagining is gone.  

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My experience after receiving the news that each of my pregnancies had ended has varied greatly each time. The first time I cried uncontrollably in the ultrasound room, then in the car park, then at home and then later that night when I insisted on accompanying my husband to pick up Thai takeaway for dinner.  I didn't stop crying for a very long time.  After my second miscarriage I sat quietly and very still in the ultrasound waiting room while arrangements for a D&C were made and then forced my husband to go back to work while I calmly explained to him that I would be fine. I drove to Woolworths to buy groceries, sat in the carpark, sobbed for 45 minutes and then drove straight back home empty handed.  After my third miscarriage my husband and I both silently left the ultrasound office and went straight home to pack for our trip to Queensland that afternoon, this trip had been arranged months in advance as it was my sister's wedding. I spent the following 3 days trying to be happy and celebratory for my sister, because nobody but my husband knew of our pregnancy nobody but us knew of our loss.  For my fourth miscarriage I was alone, my husband was overseas for work but even if he'd been in Sydney I'd already told him I didn't want him to attend the ultrasound appointment with me. We'd been through this process too many times by now and if the news was going to be bad I didn't want to have to cope with seeing the look of disappointment and despair on his face yet again. So I attended the early morning appointment alone, was told that there was no longer a heartbeat and went straight to work.  I spent the rest of the day outwardly behaving as if all was well. Yet again I'd told nobody of my pregnancy so I told nobody of my loss.

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How do you move forward from this?  How do you cope?  What do you do?

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Unfortunately I know what a struggle this is.  We are often dealing with the emotional and physical symptoms of pregnancy loss in secret and this can be a very challenging time for you and your partner, often causing a chasm to open up in your relationship as men and women often cope and process grief very differently, particularly grief surrounding miscarriage. As women we have begun to feel very attached to the pregnancy and the baby from the moment those 2 lines appear on the stick in our bathroom. This life was growing inside of us, we were experiencing all of the physical and hormonal changes so we'll often feel the loss of the baby so much more profoundly than our partners.  How do we explain the way we really feel after a miscarriage?  I know I've felt like a failure, that somehow it was my fault.  Was it because I still kept carrying heavy bags of groceries?  Shared that bottle of wine or ate that Brie cheese before I knew I was pregnant?  Did I exercise too much or not enough?  Was it because I didn't get enough sleep or control my stress levels more effectively?  I felt that I'd failed my husband, would we never experience the opportunity to have biological children together?  I know he'd be such a great dad to a child of ours and I wanted to see him in action.  I wanted to see him teach our son how to kick a soccer ball, hold our daughter's hand as she learnt to walk, be there on our child's first day of kindergarten.  I felt responsible for robbing him of those things.  I've been consumed by grief, guilt and at times intense anger.  Most of all I've felt like nobody understands what I'm going through.

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Because I've experienced miscarriage myself and from talking with clients in my practice I now know that all of these feelings are normal.  The grief we experience after losing a pregnancy is a complex grief, it's often referred to as disenfranchised grief which basically means that we are deprived by society of our right to grieve.  Because we often keep our pregnancy secret until the 12 week mark experiencing a miscarriage prior to this can be lonely and isolating as we tend to have no support network around us.  In some cases, even if we do have support we often feel that people, sometimes including our own partners at times, become impatient with us and our grief, the expectation is that we should 'get over it' or 'try again' after all it was 'only' a miscarriage, it's not as if we 'knew' the baby.  Society's reaction to our loss and subsequent grief can feel hurtful and alienating.  Just because we didn't get the chance to hold our baby in our arms doesn't mean we didn't 'know' them.  I know I imagined a future with them in it, I know I felt love for those little souls that my husband and I created.  Love is love and loss is loss.  Our love was real and valid therefore our loss and grief is real and valid too.

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