Miscarriage meal train

Just over a week ago I started bleeding at 12.5 weeks pregnant with my second baby. I bled profusely at week 13 with my first. I’d always put it down to a rough scan but was hoping that perhaps this was just something my body does at this point in pregnancy.

It just so happened that this was the same day I was due to have my first midwife appointment so I decided to just go along to it as normal and let her know what was happening. I was hoping I could go for a reassurance scan and check all was going ok in there.

I was incredibly, unbelievably nervous about this appointment. Through a series of awful and down right traumatising encounters with the medical profession for my mental health over the years and some very unhelpful ‘care’ during my last pregnancy and birth, I have utterly lost faith in the system to keep me safe.

We arrived and sat in the waiting room and I could hear a midwife being rude and patronising to some new parents and their screaming baby. Both my husband and I without speaking to one other had come to our separate conclusion that the parents must not be white to be being subjected to such de-humanising treatment. As they left the room we were proven sadly right.

I was almost shaking with anxiety about the prospect of this appointment and the endlessly screaming baby and the unkind manner of the midwife were not helping at all. As I was psyching myself up to go in to this woman’s room the baby suddenly settled, having finally been allowed to make its way to the boob, and a beautiful smiling woman came sweeping down the corridor radiating warmth and care. This woman was my midwife. My heart stopped its hammering and my whole body softened.

She introduces herself as Blessing and we make our way into the room. I open by telling her that I have been dreading this appointment but that she has instantly calmed me. I tell her I’m bleeding but explain my history and we agree that I’ll go to A&E after the appointment to have a reassurance scan.

The appointment is one of the most profound experiences I have had in this life. I find myself being treated not as a number, an appointment to be endured or an inconvenience. I am a human mother to be treasured. It is such a powerful encounter that I spend the whole time with my eyes welling with tears. She meets me as a human, she hears my fears and offers such warmth and reassurance that I melt into her care. As we approach the part of the appointment I have been dreading - she asks me to confirm from a list the types of abuse and neglect I have experienced. Tick, tick, tick, tick. And then asks about my mental health history. I feel safe enough to share about my hospitalisation but it shakes me to do it.

I have sat in medical appointments desperately trying to get the type of therapy I need and have shared feelings of wanting to die only to have the doctor in front of me continue typing and ask without tone ‘do you want to die right now?’.

This is what I have come to expect and I know I am not alone in this.

Blessing holds my gaze and she takes my hands. She looks into my soul as she hears me.

She asks me what type of care I feel I would like.

My body softens, the cages from my heart fall away. I am being given dignity, respect, care, choices. All of the things I deserved at the hardest moments of life. All of the things I have never received from any single healthcare professional.

I tell her I have a plan for this next baby. She tells me we will follow my plan. We will do whatever allows me to feel safe and calm because that is how I will thrive. She tells me she will write a letter to the head of midwifery asking her to take good care of me.

And then she looks me deep in the eyes and she speaks the only words a woman who has suffered ever needs to hear:

‘You have done such a wonderful job.’

A dam breaks. The tears flow. The feelings flood. I am overwhelmed with this woman’s kindness and her capacity to hold me. She lets me sob and she passes me a tissue.

The remainder of the appointment is more like a sermon on how to surrender. I feel I am in direct relationship with God in this moment.

This is how midwifery should be. This is the kind of care women deserve. This is what it is to be human.

My husband is welling with tears to see me softening. We leave the room and agree that this woman is an angel. He even jokes that she won’t even be there tomorrow.

Blessing single-handedly restored my faith in the system. I won’t always have encounters like this but now I know they are there and I can refuse to be in the care of anyone less humane than her. This is my right. This is our right.

This experience and a dream I had a few nights before (a story for another time) were essential preludes to what was to follow. I arrived at the emergency maternity department for a reassurance scan and as soon as they placed the probe and I saw their faces I knew the baby had died. She told me she couldn’t see what she needed to see and would need to do an internal scan. As she left the room and left me to undress I told my husband that there was no baby. At 12.5 weeks they should be able to see. So I braced myself for the worst. And as they inserted the internal scanner and moved it around searching, I knew. They had found the pregnancy sac but the baby was little more than a 6 week old embryo. My baby hadn’t ever come to be but my body had continued to grow and my hormones had continued to increase. I had felt pregnant all the way until that moment.

I had no idea this could happen.

She kept talking about misaligned dates and a ‘pregnancy that may not continue’. My husband was asking questions, confused. I simply stated ‘so the baby has died?’. In these moments we just need clarity. I know my cycles, I hadn’t had sex after ovulation, I am not the virgin Mary. I just needed confirmation but the medical system are forever stuck within litigation and legislation covering themselves. I get it but I just needed to know what was going on and what to expect.

She told me I’d need to come back for another scan in 7-10 days to confirm. She handed me a leaflet on bleeding in pregnancy. Me and my husband sat sobbing in a waiting room and they drew a curtain around us. I tried to cry out all of the tears knowing this would likely be the only tears I’d shed for a while.

We left the hospital with no information beyond it being, ‘like a painful period’ if it happened.

Women’s health leaves us as frontier explorers. Entering unmapped territories with only each other (or at worst Google) to guide the way.

I had to go home and tell my four year old daughter the baby we were all longing for had stopped growing. I had wanted to hide the pregnancy from her but she’s perceptive and also I believe that it would have been very worrying for her to be witness to me suddenly not being able to function and feeling sick all day for months without an explanation. I had tried to keep it as a maybe, ‘it might be a baby’ but as my belly had expanded and my boobs had grown it was becoming harder to hide. Sharing this news with her was one of the hardest parts of all. She went to bed and all I could here was her saying she was disappointed and sad. I am so glad we’d just been through this same experience with two of our alpacas so she had a reference for what was happening but it doesn’t soften the blow.

Parenting and grieving is so hard.

I don’t want to hide all of my feelings from her, this is how we grow as emotional beings but I also don’t want to overwhelm her with them and the daily motions must continue. Thank goodness for my husband for picking up the pieces and taking such good care of us both.

I got home and messaged two friends who I know have had similar experiences and asked them what I was to expect. Thank goodness for that and for them. What followed unnerved me. I was about the experience a form of labour. I slept uneasily expecting it to happen at any moment but it didn’t. I have always longed for my labours to take place during the day when I have more capacity and optimism for life and its hardships.

The next day I made the decision to continue going to a family Christmas gathering. I wanted my daughter’s life to continue as normal to allow some joy and respite for her. How surreal that we as women must undergo such rites of passage amidst a continuation of daily life. This is motherhood second time around.

Packing a book, a hot water bottle and messaging ahead for some pain relief we set off. Still bleeding and now cramping I knew it would be that day. I went through the motions, I was honest but tried to also continue as normal. By 3pm the pain of my cervix opening became to unbearable and I retreated to the bath trying to leave without my daughter noticing (and inevitably wanting to join me). Frantically Googling whether I am meant to get into the bath (probably not) whilst knowing that I wouldn’t endure the pain without it, I sat anxiously awaiting the next bit in the bathroom.

As I submerged into the water the contractions began. I didn’t want pain relief unless I needed it. I wanted to be gifted the natural endorphins that follow natural contractions. I was nervous but I closed my eyes, softened my jaws and dropped into the centre of the intensity until it passed. Then waves of natural endorphins as the pain receded momentarily. My daughter wanted to come in and check on my constantly and I wanted to reassure her and also protect her. The more I withdrew the more she was magnetised to my side. I told my husband I needed to get through this with concentration. He managed to get her downstairs with the family again.

After three or four contractions I am called to be upright and the blood starts to pour. I want to catch the embryo but the blood is too much now so I head to the toilet. My daughter tries to come in again, I have to set a boundary in this moment but don’t want to lock the door incase I pass out. Two thick palm sized clots fall out. I am reminded of my daughter’s birth and the slippery eel feeling as she slid out and I had no idea what it was. I am overwhelmed with the desire to reach in and pull them out. I am horrified that it has gone into the toilet but I was unsure what else to do.

I feel empty. I feel unemotional. A friend had shared with me that she felt the physicality had taken over and the emotion came later. So I went downstairs to make a hot drink and tell my husband it was gone and to spend time with my daughter to reassure her and settle her. She was blissfully running around playing in her own world thank goodness. Aware that something was happening but not too affected as to be interrupted from her imaginary world. I then retreated to bed with a hot water bottle and the cramps continued for hours.

It feels wrong to use the term ‘it’ but we hadn’t made it as far as he or she and I have my baby names. I don’t want to use them on a baby who doesn’t make it earthside because I hope to speak it out loud to a real life in arms baby some day. I’m confused about how to connect with this little being.

Eventually we manage to get home and I go to bed where I stay for two days. At first I felt a guilt filled joy at not feeling sick anymore. After 12.5 weeks of pregnancy and the most horrible all-day sickness it was a relief to feel ok again. Then came numbness and shock.

On the second day I stepped outside into the light with a mug of warming broth in my hands and was reminded that there’s nothing quite like grief to thrust you firmly into the present. A deep rising gratitude at the gift of life and love in the face of loss and sadness.

The frosty winter air awakening me to the day. Eyes caught involuntarily on the bright green of the parsley, still somehow growing and thriving in the harshness of mid-winter. The dazzling beauty of sparkling ice. The uplift of bird song. The subtle warmth of the morning sun barely managing to lift herself above the horizon.

I know there will be moments of numbness, crushing sadness, agitation, anxiety and despair. These moments of peace must be held close as a gift, a prayer, a life raft in the storm.

I don’t want to receive any messages mentioning pregnancy so I type out a message and send it to everyone who knows.

I am so unbelievably touched by the care that follows. Mid-life and particularly mid-life motherhood leave so very little capacity for much else. It is hard to show up for others. And yet show up is exactly what my friends do.

We are told to organise a meal train for our postnatal period but unexpected loss leaves no time to prepare. Prematurely thrust into a postnatal state with no warm little head to sniff, no placenta to slice into smoothies for the oxytocin, I am so grateful in that moment for my daughter and I feel my love for her expanding. All of the love my heart was growing to pour into our new baby is now flowing to her and I just want to hold her close and never let her go.

I am fed almost every single day for a week or more. A dear friend asks what she can do, I am brave and I say ‘your healing soups whenever you are passing if you have the capacity’. And she is on my doorstep almost before the message is sent. She whisks me out across the fields to spend time with her horse, who just so happens to be my neighbour. She knows me well. Then another friend comes with a venison stew and my daughter’s best friends. She needs the playtime. The beloved in-laws drop bone broths and more goodness.

On the second day my belly is shrinking, which feels welcome and my boobs shrink and sag, which feels less so.

New year’s passes me by, I spend four hours of it in A&E with my daughter who split her head falling off a frame with her friends. It’s now a new year. My 38th. The greys in my hair make me feel I am too old to be trying to conceive new life but I have friends in their 40s making healthy babies. I have faith but in moments I give in to worrying that I’ve left it too late, that it is not meant to be.

After three days in bed I return to the farm and my heart lifts. It’s snowing and our girls are screaming in their sledges down the snowy paddocks. Amy makes me lunch. My dear friend Bryony joins us after the husbandry work is finished and we chat and drink tea and laugh and knit and spin. I am so intensely grateful for community and care and connection. I could not be doing this on my own.

The next day I run an alpaca walk. I want to. I love being with the alpacas and the customers are so wonderful. We walk in the glistening snow and we sit by the fire and I am grateful to think about something else.

My husband continues to do all of the cooking and to look after me and my daughter. He is absolutely exhausted. On the brink of burnout this is the last thing he needed. I feel a guilt but I know that this is not a helpful emotion to feel right now. Our womb lives add such complex layers to our lives and relationships.

Bone broth, motherwort tincture, liver grated into all of my meals. I am trying to replenish and take care. But I’m also struggling so I am drinking more caffeine than I should. After a week I crash. I am exhausted, emotional, numb, frustrated, agitated. Google tells me I’ll experience mood swings. I do. Most of it because there are un-cried tears to be cried.

On the third day I had sat in the winter sun in the garden with my daughter beside me and watched the long tailed tits frolicking in the branches as bare as my womb. My mind was overflowing with words. As my womb empties and my heart aches my mind longs to pour words onto the page.

Creativity in motherhood often has to be caught in rough thoughts to be transcribed when time can be carved out of already too-full days. And so I sit here on the eleventh day with a small amount of time and space to write and I have sobbed as these words have finally met the page.

Most of them for me but I also write this because surely we deserve to be given all of the information. I had never even heard of a ‘missed’ or ‘silent’ miscarriage and the wording makes it sound as though the baby somehow disappears, it does not allude to the fact that we must birth this baby into the world.

We then must each make peace with what has happened in our own way.

I took a moment around the fire on the weekend after my walk. The customers had left and I found myself alone. Not something that happens often. I closed my eyes and I prayed. And I sought connection with this little being.

I believe each life comes here for a reason and this little being will have had its own reason for being here. For me, in a moment of sudden clarity I became aware that this little being came here to support me in the releasing of anxiety around this whole process. I was terrified of the midwife appointment and I received Blessing. I am very afraid of the postnatal period and I am in a small dress rehearsal right now seeing what is helpful and what is not. This baby has prepared me for the carrying of my next with less fear. This baby has helped me to see that I will feel ready to hand over the care of the alpacas for a time, something which had been worrying me. This baby has reminded me of the healing nature of pregnancy and its sedative effect. This baby has expanded my heart ever further than I believed it could go. And when my body is ready I am so ready to do it all again and this time I hope I get to meet them.

Carly x