Saying Goodbye
*In this post, I use the term ‘baby loss’ in the hope that people who need to read this will find it. However, the language my husband and I use around the loss of our son is ‘saying goodbye’. I explain this in more detail below. *
As soon as I saw the positive result on the pregnancy test, I felt like a mama. During the throws of morning sickness, I daydreamed about my baby – what would they be like? Would they look like me or their papa? Every decision I made, I thought about the safety of the life I was creating. Is it safe to eat that food? Should I lift this? Did I get enough sleep last night?
My husband and I found out that I was pregnant on our first wedding anniversary. We felt so lucky and excited, but we knew that it was still very early so we were cautious in our excitement.
It was the summer holidays; we’d enjoyed a two-week holiday together in the south of England and we had driven ‘up north’ to visit my family. After a few days, my husband had to fly back to the Netherlands for work and I would drive back with our two dogs two weeks later. By that time, morning sickness had hit, and I had to do the 12-hour drive back to the Netherlands on my own. I’m not sure how I did it, but I did. It took me two days to unpack the car because of the constant sickness I felt. I spent the rest of my summer holidays lying on the couch watching ‘The Real Housewives of New York City’ and eating as many carbs as I could get my hands on.
Eventually, September rolled around, and I had to return to work. Sucking on toffees got me through the constant sickness I was feeling while also surviving the hardest part of a teacher’s school year – the first term.
At 16 weeks, the sickness went, I was feeling good, and we were enjoying watching my bump grow. We went to all our scans; we found out we were going to have a baby boy, and everything was going really well…until it wasn’t.
Our beautiful baby boy was born far too early at 22 weeks. Within 48 hours, our world crumbled. We walked into the hospital two people and came out two completely different people. Walking out of a maternity ward empty handed was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever experienced and one that I will never get over.
But the mind is an incredible thing. I simultaneously felt complete devastation and complete clarity. During the drive home from the hospital, I said to my husband that losing our baby boy couldn’t be seen as a sadness; saying goodbye to him couldn’t be seen as a loss and it couldn’t be the thing that destroyed our marriage. My husband wholeheartedly agreed. Instead, we wanted to thank our boy for the new perspective on life that he had given us and a new strength of love that we never thought was possible. And so, our journey to changing our lives began. Because of him, we gained an insight into the life we wanted to live, and we have been working hard on that since saying goodbye to him.