Blog
Dear Caitlin...
Dear Caitlin.
Dear child that I never got to meet.
The smiles I will never see, the hugs I will never have.
1 in 5 pregnancies results in miscarriage. Yet no-one talks about it. Most common in the first three months. Which is the point where no-one talks about being pregnant. And if you’ve not told people you’re pregnant, well… how do you bring up that you lost the baby?
Actually, when we found out that we’d lost the baby my initial thought was “phew, thank goodness we hadn’t told more people”. I mean, imagine the embarrassment of having to say that you’re not expecting now.
How do you grieve for someone that wasn’t born. Honestly, I felt like a bit of a fraud.
She only survived to around seven weeks - how can you grieve for that? But I’m not grieving for what I’ve lost, I’m grieving for what I never got to have
We were expecting. We were expecting to have another child to love, and to discover. And we had that taken away from us. That hurts. 1 in 5 pregnancies. That’s a lot of people hurting, but not talking about it.
And yes, at seven weeks you’re not going to know the sex of your baby. But we decided that we wanted to name her (it was my wife’s idea), so we chose a sex and name. I’m glad we did, it is helping to take away the feelings of fraud and to legitimise our loss.
It’s a painful time and I was nervous about telling people, but so far I’ve not felt any worse for telling someone that we’re having a tough time. Here’s to a world where that’s not something that we need to worry about!
