Loss in general can prompt a lot of feelings and thoughts that we've never had to deal with before, anger and bitterness, jealousy and hopelessness, and all of these things are perfectly fine. It's common to be jealous of other pregnant women, and it can be hard to even look at them, let alone if they're friends of yours. It's common to have thoughts like "why me and not them? why do they deserve to be happy?", and it's common to feel a great sense of self-loathing for thinking those kinds of things. You're not that person. Grief is a strange experience, it changes us in ways we can't even imagine and in ways that we never thought possible.
TTC After Infant Loss
As I trudged through the murky waters of TTC after losing my son, my emotions went back and forth between desperation and determination. I needed to fill the empty space in my womb and thus in my life, but with each day that passed towards ovulation, and then towards a pregnancy test, the desperation grew and the panic of failure grew. I do not think, though, that this thought was exclusive to the situation.
There are flashbacks, the PTSD, the depression, the crying, the stress, all things that make you wonder if it's worth going through the pain again. I, and I suppose many others, spend more time than not thinking about ways their next might die.
Milestones come and go and in my experience I have found that the anticipation of them has been worse than the actual day itself. The day often passes with little incident – a lot of crying but little real incident.
What I think is exclusive to the idea of becoming pregnant after infant loss is never being decisive. You can never settle on anything because, in your mind, whether you have this baby or not is no guarantee that they will live. You may even get to a point where you can bring them home, but there's no guarantee that they will live. Every moment is fraught with uncertainty.
TTC After Miscarriage
Why me? I often thought. What did I do wrong?
Fact is, nothing. I hadn't done anything wrong, and I hadn't caused a miscarriage in any way, and neither do most other mothers. The vast majority of miscarriages are caused by chromosomal or genetic defect so bad that the embryo could not have survived.
These facts, however, do very little to calm the nerves or soothe the sadness that many people experience during and after a miscarriage.
What can also be a problem after a miscarriage is that you likely won't get any help from healthcare professionals (unless you have had three concurrent miscarriages) as a miscarriage proves that you can get pregnant, and it is not uncommon to have one, or even two in a row.
You can expect to be upset every month you are not pregnant, and think about how each month would have been closer to your due date. Some women will not fall pregnant until that due date comes and goes, and my advice to them is to let themselves be sad.
For me, TTC after both.
It seems to me that I go through phases of everything mentioned above, sometimes I am excited for the future, I'm excited to get my bump all big, I'm excited to bring baby home, but then I am brought crashing back down to reality, my reality. I think, well maybe that won't happen. I think, every day, of ways that my baby could die during birth, or in the hospital, or after I bring them home, I constantly think of what I would do in each of those situations. During pregnancy the paranoia I felt was crippling, I didn't talk about the pregnancy, I didn't think about it because in my mind it wasn't even there really. Not until there was a heartbeat, not until there was growth. Each scan made me feel a little bit better, but that swiftly went away because I knew that anything could happen at any point and I might not know about it.
Ignorance truly is bliss.
There is nothing braver than making the decision to try for another baby after these kinds of loss, because you are acknowledging the pain you have suffered and you are putting yourself back in the firing line once again. While it is very unlikely that you will have another miscarriage (unless there are genetic conditions present) or lose another baby, it's not impossible, and to recognise that and go ahead anyway takes a special kind of strength.
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