Pregnancy After Baby Loss
When we said goodbye to our son, we knew that we wanted to try again quite quickly. The need to bring life into the world and to expand our own little family was strong. We gave ourselves time to physically heal and to process what we’d been through, but we both knew we wanted to try again as soon as we felt it was time.
Seven months later, we found out that we were pregnant again. We had about half an hour of happiness before the anxiety set in. It was extremely hard to allow ourselves to get excited. To trust that it would be different this time. The one big reassurance was that we were under the care of an amazing hospital and the same gynecologist that looked after us when we were in hospital with our son.
Being pregnant again after baby loss doesn’t erase the sadness of the baby you had to say goodbye to. This is something that is sometimes difficult for people to understand. Grief and happiness go hand in hand.
You can still be grieving your baby, while celebrating the fact you are pregnant with a new baby. You can look forward to meeting your new baby while feeling the excruciating pain that you won’t see your other baby grow up. “Grief is all the unspent love that you want to give, but cannot.” - Jamie Anderson
I’m an avid reader and I read Glennon Doyle’s ‘Untamed’ while pregnant with my daughter. She was telling a story about Mona Lisa. Apparently, her and her husband had suffered a baby loss and her husband commissioned Leonardo Da Vinci to paint her portrait to celebrate the birth of another baby. It is thought that she refused to smile more broadly for him because… ‘she didn’t want the joy she felt for her new baby to erase the pain she felt from losing her first. There in her half smile is her half joy. Or maybe it’s her full joy and her full grief all at the same time.’ (‘Untamed’, Doyle, G., 2020)
This quote really resonated with me. Fast forward to just over a year later, we walked out of the hospital with a baby in her car seat, bundled up and ready to go home. We were filed with unmitigated joy, but we couldn’t help but remember the day we walked out of the same hospital empty handed leaving our precious boy behind.
Seeing our girl’s personality come out more and more fills us with so much happiness. She’s funny, she’s happy, she’s stubborn and strong willed. We often wonder what our boy would have been like at 2 weeks old? A month old? 6 months? A year?
To say hello to our girl, we had to say goodbye to our boy. If we spend too much time thinking about that, it would be hard to get up in the morning.
Our joy and grief walk hand in hand. Neither one overshadowing the other.
My message is that anyone who has lost a baby and are lucky enough to go on to have another baby, the happiness you feel at the safe arrival doesn’t replace or wipe away the grief of your loss.
It was sometimes hard for the people around us to fully understand what we were going through. It was hard for us to explain. Tommy’s website helped us a lot in understanding our feelings and experiences. I hope this can help you to navigate what you have been through. It’s also worth sharing with the people around you so that they can do their own research. This website is such a valuable resource: https://www.tommys.org/baby-loss-support