Category: General

I feel as if I haven’t written a blog for a while and I’m starting to feel the need to process some emotions again. It’s been a big year for us. I wish I had written more about my pregnancy. It’s such a unique time when you are expecting a baby and this time around, being pregnant after loss, in amongst a Covid lockdown and being told to shield, I feel as if I could have written an essay on it. There are two things I will say though about this time.

Firstly, how much I loved and needed my pregnancy yoga class. To be able to connect with others, even online, became the highlight of my week. I don’t think I fully appreciated how much I needed to feel like I belonged at this point in my life and the yoga gave that to me. A little online community. A safe space. To share. To listen. The breathing and positions helped my labour and even though this birth was pretty medicalised in the end, I am sure the yoga practise helped to keep me calm and still come away feeling like I had a positive birth experience.

The second thing I will say is I feel that professionals who went the extra mile to personalise our care helped massively on our journey. From our lovely community midwife who fitted us in for extra appointments, scans, and chats, to the nurse taking my blood who asked to see a photo of Ivy. You made such a difference and helped us feel listened to when so many of the generic questions such as ‘is this your first?’ felt unfair and difficult to have to answer each time we had an appointment with another professional. We won’t forget your kindness on our journey.

Daisy’s arrival has brought us so much joy. We genuinely laugh and our hearts burst with love and we are so blessed to have her here. Results show she isn’t even a carrier of SMA, she’s a strong and healthy little girl. She is teaching us what it’s like to be parents in the traditional sense I suppose. Our stories with Daisy are much more normal and people feel they can connect and empathise with us now. At a recent wedding, two other new parents asked the generic question ‘how’s the sleeping going?’ with a knowing look in their eyes and I love that. I love that I can be a part of this parenting club again, to chat about the ups and downs of raising a baby, the sharing of advice and recommendations. I’ve started to go to local baby groups with the security in the knowledge that Daisy is developing the way she should. All is going well. But at the same time, it’s not.

This is difficult. I feel as if we have had a resurgence of grief again.

You see, from the outside we look like a happy family of three. But internally we feel like a unit of 4. And I get that people say ‘but Ivy’s always with you’ or ‘she’s a part of you’ or ‘Daisy will know her sister because she’ll see photos and videos’ and yes, I believe all of this is true. Yet is it wrong to still feel sad that I don’t have my two babies here at the same time or that Daisy can never meet her sister? I think it’s valid to still find Ivy’s absence unfair and heart-breaking. I don’t want people to say these things to me because they don’t comfort me, they confuse me. Am I wrong to sometimes still have sad days? We get a lot of people saying, ‘you must be over the moon’ or ‘she must have healed you’ and again I will reiterate that we both wholeheartedly love Daisy, but we experience that alongside our grief, not in place of it.

Grief is complex. I don’t fully understand my emotions sometimes. In fact, I send an awful lot of WhatsApp voice notes to my friends (you know who you are!!) and those messages are like mini therapy sessions for me. I try to process what I’m feeling and get them to tell me whether I am being normal. I mean sleep deprivation makes me unable to think straight. Then add on top of that the hormonal storm that’s raging (thank you breastfeeding!) which makes me weepy over the slightest thing and unable to make decisions easily. So, I speak to them and I say ‘is this normal?’ Because I know that both Mike and I are very guilty of looking at life through the lens of losing Ivy. So when I ask ‘is it normal to stay up watching her breathe?’ It’s because I don’t know if all mums do that or of that’s a legacy of losing Ivy. So, trying to work that out is exhausting. I feel like we have an emotional hangover from what happened with Ivy. I sometimes still feel emotions that my brain is struggling to compute. Why do I feel jealous of that person? Why is the thought of that making my heart race? Why do I feel the need to fix this? Why do I feel like in this situation I have the strength to put on my brave face but in others I don’t? I quite often can’t understand so it’s difficult to explain it to others to help them ‘get it’.

I found Daisy passing Ivy’s age especially emotional. We hadn’t worked out what date Daisy would be older but instinctively we knew. We felt uneasy as if it was building to be this momentous occasion for it to be just be an ordinary day in Daisy’s life. A sense of an anti-climax but with a poignancy for us that she would hopefully not have picked up on.

There do seem to be some patterns to what I find difficult. I find the run up to Ivy’s birthday on Boxing Day and May 10th tricky. Often more so than the actual days themselves and yet simultaneously I also love Christmas and I would say that Spring is my favourite time of year. The good alongside the bad. So big days have been tough in the past, but will they always be? Will I find Mother’s Day hard next year? What about Daisy’s first birthday when I couldn’t celebrate Ivy’s?! And how will we feel when the room we had planned to make Ivy’s room becomes Daisy’s room?

I feel that life is so complex now, the constant combination of emotions. I know I have to accept two truths. One … nobody will ever truly and fully understand the ongoing pain we feel and two… this is lifelong. I wish it was not so. I hope people don’t feel like we are wallowing; that we are clinging on to the past. I hope people see that our lives are moving forward, and we have love and light and laughter in it again. We really do. But that from time to time we will have situations that arise that trigger us, and our grief and it can be scary and confusing and unpredictable. We panic, it can make us feel physically unwell and it takes courage to reach out and admit we are struggling. Not as frequent anymore but sometimes it still hurts…. A lot!

I guess I need to remember that it’s not a linear process, not an illness to get over, it’s embedded in the everyday… I used to think a rainbow baby was named a rainbow as a reminder that good comes after bad, but I actually think it’s more because sun and showers are happening at the same time and I’m beginning to accept that they always will. But maybe, just maybe, no matter how dark life can get we should just let Daisy’s light glow the brightest this Christmas season and in doing so we let her sister’s light continually shine as well!