Insecurity

Last night I cried. Not just a few tears but gut wrenching sobs, body wracking sorrow just coursing through me. Grief doesn’t go away, it lurks in every fibre of your being. Most days it’s silent and you can get up and get on with your day. Some days it brings a tear. Some days it hurts. Really hurts. It’s been a while since I’ve had a full blown meltdown over Jay. Retrospectively I think I knew it was coming though. Alfie’s friends at nursery are graduating and Oakley’s first day is approaching so obviously the thoughts that we should have been celebrating Jay’s first year in reception creep in. It’s another checklist moment of we should have been doing this and it’s torture. My mind reeling off all the things we’ve missed and are going to miss with him. And then to top it off one of the stones in my ring that has Jay’s ashes in it has fallen out somewhere leaving me devastated and having to figure out if I want to go through the process of getting another or not. With his birthday coming up the timing couldn’t have been worse. So yeah, last night was bad. I’m ridiculously lucky that I have Jamie who woke up at the sound of my crying and held me tightly. As the sobs intensified he just simply stated “I’ve got you” and “you don’t have to be sorry” in reply to my ragged apologies for waking him up at two in the morning. It’s what I needed and he eventually calmed me down after several more outbursts, knowing that he understood how much I was hurting in that moment and my heart was breaking again. Knowing that he felt the same way and that I wasn’t alone. I talked through a little of what I was feeling and putting words to the thoughts helped to still the pain a little. As well as the hugs. The hugs and the kisses on my head helped a lot. The physical reminder that yes he does have me and yes he is here for me. I'll be forever grateful that we have each other to navigate with through it all. These moments are so hard and I know I’ll have them forever on special occasions or milestones. It’s natural to feel that way but it also makes me really angry and I just want to scream “why?”. But the real kickers are the ones that creep in during daily life, the song on the radio, a line in a book that I’m reading, the storyline in a film. Losing Jay is not something we get over. They tear you out of your everyday life and push the pain button when you least expect it. It’s something we learn to live with. I’m still working on that part. An infinite work in progress you could say… But I guess what I’m trying to say here is just a simple feel what you feel. If you want to feel angry, then feel angry. If you want to cry then go ahead and let it out whether it’s silent tears or full body sobbing. Feel whatever it is that you need to feel in that moment. Don't feel guilty for it, your feelings are your feelings and you are allowed to feel them. And that's ok.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to write this blog post and it’s been a decision that ultimately I feel has been inspired by recent events in the media. Lets start with the facts…it’s 5.39 on a Sunday morning and once again I’m awake. As usual I have a thousand thoughts running through my head and the most cathartic thing for me to do to clear them, is to write. For those people that know me or have read my previous blog posts you’ll already be aware of our story. We haven’t shied away from opening up about our son Jay who was born sleeping in 2018 or the subsequent birth of our son Alfie in 2019. Fast forward to August 2020 and what only handful of people know is that I had a missed miscarriage. I was 11 weeks pregnant and due to have our 12 week scan the following Friday when I noticed the smallest amount of blood. After reaching out to my GP surgery I was given an appointment the next day at the early pregnancy assessment unit at the hospital. After two different scans I was given the news that the baby had stopped growing at 7 weeks and that I was going through a silent/missed miscarriage. In layman’s terms this meant that my body hadn’t realised that the pregnancy had ended and so continued to prepare itself for the pregnancy. Unfortunately due to COVID-19 I was on my own. In tears, with a mask on, in a cubicle entirely on my own I had to phone Jamie to break the news. There was nothing the midwives could do. They couldn’t come in and give me a hug, I had to deal with it on my own. I then got given my own little room to wait in as I had to have another scan by a different person to officially confirm everything. It felt like hours were passing when in reality I think I was at the hospital for only a little over two. At that point I remember calm Jen kicking in and taking over and the clarity of knowing that there was nothing I could do to change things right then and there and to just try and take everything in the staff were saying. I was given my options on how I wanted to proceed and with medical advice I opted to have a medical miscarriage. I had the option to stay in hospital and have this done or to administer it myself at home. I chose the latter as I wanted to be with Jamie and Alfie. I’d already had to go through everything on my own up to that part and couldn’t face doing it without Jamie there. The staff were incredible and despite the tough situation that they are having to deal with everyday managed to make me feel as comfortable as they could. They didn’t rush me and talked through everything openly and clearly with risks and benefits fully explained. I honestly cannot fault them and the twice now the staff at the Royal Gwent maternity unit have been nothing but amazing. So mind made up I left the hospital armed with my bag full of drugs, instructions on what to do, contact phone numbers and drove home. 9am the next day I took the pessary, antibiotics and anti-sickness tablets and six hours later I started to loose my baby. Baby C. Life is cruel right? You betcha! Imagine our surprise at the end of September to find out I’m pregnant again. I know, right? We were shocked too! And then three days later to start bleeding and have to go through my second miscarriage in two months. Yeah, that. So why now? Why let everyone know? I’m going to attempt to break it down into points so bear with me. Signing up for the 310,000 steps in October for the charity Sands in memory of Jay just felt like I was being a fraud. It wasn’t just in memory of Jay. It was for Baby C and then Baby dot too. Seeing hundreds of baby loss stories in the challenge group and feeling that I wasn’t ready to share my own story as not many of my friends knew about it was starting to really take its toll. Just to get this all down and have people know that ‘you know what I’m not ok’ can only be a good thing. To have people understand that things are really hard right now. To have people understand that I might not be able to reach out to you because its super painful seeing so many pregnancy and birth announcements but I’m still so happy for you. Seeing a celebrity couple get what can only be described as bashed for sharing a pregnancy/baby loss and photos of a child they wanted so badly and don’t get to take home. How dare those people judge anyone in that situation. Again how dare they? Who gets to decide how people grieve? I’m at a complete loss as to why anyone in their right mind would publicly criticise a couple who have lost a child and think that that is ok to do. It’s baffling. Going through a miscarriage at the same time as this news came out, and empathising with the couple so much as the parallels to Jay bring it back, and witnessing the reaction they have got from some outlets has just really made my blood boil. Why is it still taboo? I just don’t get it. One in four pregnancies end in a loss. Let me reiterate that again…1in 4! It’s a frightening number and I’m going to hold my hands up and say because of Alfie I didn’t think it would happen to me again. But it did. Twice more. I count myself lucky that I have Alfie here despite the odds as there are so many others who don’t have that. 1 in 4. Yet we still don’t talk about it. Those hushed tones of ‘oh did you hear about so and so’ like its something to be kept quiet and in a box. It happens everyday and more awareness is desperately needed around the whole subject. It is not the mothers fault and yet so many mothers are made to feel as though it is and that families shouldn’t speak about it by people who just don’t understand. I have a voice, I have lost babies, it wasn’t my fault. I’m guilty of thinking that I shouldn’t tell people about our two latest losses because maybe it should be kept private. But why? It’s ingrained into us that we shouldn’t really talk about these things but if I don’t then who will? Break the silence. I have the smallest of platforms and an opportunity to be able to reach a number of people. I had someone who I could ask about miscarriage at that stage as with Jay being stillborn it was completely different. I will never be able to thank the friend that answered my questions in an open an honest way enough. They helped me to prepare both mentally and physically for what I was about to go through and didn’t sugarcoat it. This person is one of the bravest women I know and ultimately they are the reason for this post. Thank you. I want anyone who knows me or just reads this blog post to know that if god forbid they ever find themselves in either of these horrendous situations that they can count on me. They can ask me any question no matter how hard or stupid they think it is. I will never judge. I will always talk about my experiences. I’ve been through hell and back several times and I’m still here. Bruised and always broken but I’m still here. Still fighting.

It’s been a long time since I last posted on the blog and there are a number of reasons for this. Firstly it was starting to pattern my grief. I was writing on a Thursday and posting on a Friday and this meant every Thursday I was so consumed by how I was going to express myself that in reality I was just making things worse. It added a stress factor when the blog posts were started as a tool to help me. It wasn’t healthy. I began to start overthinking them and they had started to become more about the people reading them than it was about letting people know my story. Out of the many that I wrote only three were published on our website as they were the most genuine to how I was feeling without consideration taken to how others might react. One of the harder aspects that I hadn’t factored in when I decided to tell our story was dealing with peoples reactions. Let me tell you…it’s hard work. At that point I was trying to deal with all of my grief and then help people with their feelings too. It was too hard. So I decided to take a break until I was in more capable space to properly address my feelings. And then… We got pregnant again. Five months after we had said goodbye to Jay we found out that we were expecting again. Apologies for the cliché but it was a rollercoaster of emotions. Could we do this again? What if something went wrong in this pregnancy? There was just an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty. I remember telling Jamie that the test was positive and us both being so happy and then in the same breath telling him that we shouldn’t get too excited though as anything could happen. This is true of all pregnancies but after something so devastating you learn to be cautious. We knew that this pregnancy wasn’t going to be a walk in the park from the beginning as health problems that I’d developed with Jay were, unusually, still present and so we had even more worry on our plate. My head space was all over the place. I constantly swayed from being ecstatically happy to fretting over niggles and pains. It was so hard. My confidence was at an all time low and I was really struggling with how to deal with it all. We had decided that this time we were going to keep the pregnancy to ourselves for as long as we could and honestly I think this both helped and hindered me at the same time. I could hide away my worries from the world and keep my issues hidden but also didn’t allow anyone to share in our joy which was so hard to do. Due to the pregnancy being classed as high risk I was monitored really closely throughout with lots of extra scans and midwife/consultant appointments which meant we were constantly going back and forth from the hospital and gp surgery. It was a lot to handle as each time I expected that day to be the day they gave us the bad news. Every single scan that I had, I would hold Jamie’s hand whilst first looking for the heartbeat, to check our baby was still breathing. Only then when I had seen it would I relax and enjoy seeing our second child on the screen in front of us. I would get home and just stare and stare at the scan photos, wishing and wishing that everything would be ok. Nobody on the outside saw this. Nobody knew about the times that we would cry together when we missed Jay or an event happened that we wished he could’ve been at. Nobody knew about the daily struggle of when the baby would have a quiet hour and I would go into full panic mode. The sleepless nights. The full on meltdowns. The agony of being so sad and yet so happy within space of minutes. To the outside we were strong. I suppose we are. At times. It wasn’t the easiest of pregnancies and at times I joked that I was playing pregnancy bingo. It just felt like anything that could be a barrier to getting our baby here safe and sound seemed to hit us smack bang in the face. High blood pressure, check. Gestational diabetes, winner. Restless legs, gotcha. Low iron, yay. Loss of fluid, ta dah. The list went on and on. I guess I can never just do things the easy way huh? It wasn’t all doom and gloom and I’m aware that I’m focussing on a lot of the negatives in this blog. The moment we decided to publicly let people know we were pregnant felt like a massive weight off our shoulders. It was a moment when I think symbolically that I could start celebrating being pregnant instead of hiding away. It was a moment when we could focus on our new baby with joy. It was a moment that we could share. Our circle of friends had grown a lot smaller after Jay’s death. People who we thought would be there for us weren’t and others stepped up. It was important for us to let those people who’d been there with us through the worst time in our lives to know first. We wanted them to know how special they were to us and how much we loved them. Being able to let them share in our news was so special. They shared every up and down along the way with us and I can honestly say that they are more than friends now. They are part of our family. After a week spent in hospital on the 8th September 2019, just four days before the one year anniversary of Jay’s death, we welcomed our second son Alfie to the world three weeks early. Babies that are born after a loss are called Rainbow Babies. Alfie is our rainbow baby. For those that don’t know the story there are some things that just defy logic. As we stepped foot out of the hospital after having Jay the heavens opened for two minutes followed by a vivid rainbow. The rainbow stayed in the sky as we got into the car and faded away as soon as we left the car park. I’ve certainly never experienced anything like it. If it wasn’t for that rainbow I’m not sure that I could have left the car park. It just felt like he was with us. Now whenever we see a rainbow it feels like Jay is near and having Alfie as our rainbow baby makes them both even more special.

One thing I’ve found surprising after the death of Jay is how angry I am. You kind of expect to be sad all the time but the anger has hit me like a ton of bricks. I am angry all the time. Now I like to think that I’m a pretty sensible and ‘switched on’ person and I’m well aware that a lot of this anger really is irrational. Don’t get me wrong, some of it is wholly justified but the majority is just plain silly. At times it’s like a red mist descends and there it is…plain old fury, just absolutely raging through my veins. Uncontrollable and unequivocal. Sometimes it’s there only briefly, other times I can’t escape it all day. Then there’s the anger that makes you cry. It feels like it’s my new superpower, I can get angry over anything now. There’s a prickling feeling behind my eyes and I just know that I’m going to sob because of how mad I am. Yes, I’m one of those people that deal with anger by crying. We‘re a special kind of people. In this blog I’m going to share some of the examples of random things that have made me rage just to demonstrate how irrational this anger really is. It’s incredibly embarrassing to look back at some of the things that I have written down and reacted to, but I think it’s helpful to have some context into what I’m explaining. This is not meant to cause offence but to show just how crazy loss can affect how you think and act. I’ve told this particular example to quite a few people recently and I thought I’d share it here as it was something that didn’t directly happen to me but yet I still got really angry. See how this irrational thing is working already? So I absolutely lost my mind when Jamie told me that he was having a conversation with someone and they’d mentioned that it “was nice of us to have had a funeral for Jay”. Cue my meltdown. I think there was a lot of swearing and absolute fury that this person thought it was a ‘nice’ thing for us to do. Now the logical side of me knew that this person meant absolutely no harm and probably just didn’t understand what we’d actually been through. Looking back on it I’m well aware that they were trying to be supportive and saying something that they thought would help but just didn’t understand the circumstances. They didn’t know the details about what we had been through. My rage had built up and I obsessed about this comment, it stayed with me for weeks and I thought about it all the time. I raged about how inconsiderate it was, I raged about what I thought this person expected us to do with Jay otherwise, I raged because they just didn’t understand. Then the part of my brain that had been telling me to calm down won over because I knew that this person wasn’t to blame and I was using them as a tool to vent my feelings. Stillbirth isn’t talked about enough and so how on earth was this person really supposed to know that obviously we had to have a funeral as I’d given birth to my son. I was angry because it felt like this person was saying he didn’t matter and I’d latched onto this because he did matter, he does matter, he was my world and I didn’t get to keep him. I needed something to be angry about and this was a perfect thing to grab hold of. Another example of this ridiculous anger happened because of something said on world mental health day that occurred not long after Jay’s funeral. I need you to know that it is excruciating to read this back as I have never been the type of person to belittle other people’s problems and as I was busy fuming away and I knew that it was so stupid of me to be behaving like I was and that to this person it really was a problem. I was well aware of it and completely understood their viewpoint but I just couldn’t stop myself, I could not get the rational voice in my head to speak over the irrational voice which was shouting and screaming. We are the centre of our own worlds and in that moment my selfish anger was bubbling over, I was my own epicentre and my problems were the most important thing. Luckily I managed to keep my anger in check and only raised my misguided opinion with Jamie as I would hate to have thought that I would’ve hurt someone else’s feelings. In that moment of pure anger though I couldn’t believe that what they had claimed had affected them so much was getting so many sympathetic comments from people and how brave they were for telling people. I was comparing myself to them unfairly, they were trying to do something good by raising awareness for mental health and I fully applaud that. My mind knew this but couldn’t control what was coming out of my mouth when I was ranting about how unfair it was that this was their biggest problem. I was simply reacting to my loss, I was reacting to how angry I was at the world, I was just plain angry. No excuses. I didn’t want to be in that position. I still don’t. Those two examples out of so many show how this irrational anger has at times encompassed my life and stopped me in my tracks, but on reflection I think it was what I needed. I needed to blame someone, I needed to be angry at someone because I just didn’t have that. I didn’t have anyone to blame for Jay’s death. I needed to be angry at the world but I felt like I was supposed to be brave. People told myself and Jamie over and over again how strong we were and I felt like I had to be like that always. It’s really hard to be strong and to be brave and to be solid when you feel broken and falling apart inside. It makes you feel really angry that they can have a sympathetic conversation with you and then move on, they don’t have the pain that you have inside, always. It’s not their fault and you know that. It’s so frustrating and in my case manifests as pure unadulterated anger. I’m going to end this post on something that I’ve learnt and will take away from this and it’s my reaction to others pain. This is completely just my own perspective and I can hand on heart say that others will feel very differently to this and they will appreciate it. For me personally though, I hope in the future when dealing with someone who goes through a loss or is dealing with any kind of pain that I don't do the thing that grates on me so much. I have found that there is nothing more annoying for me than ‘THE FACE’. You know the one I’m talking about…the one that drops when people see you walk in the room. The one that people pull at you when they’ve been having a conversation or laughing with friends and then spot you, so suddenly stop the frivolities. The one that just drops to that little sad smile with the head tilt. The one they put on when they squeeze your arm every time you walk by them even though it’s now the 127th time. I get it, I honestly do, I appreciate the kindness behind the gesture and the fact that you are supporting me but arghhhhhhh it makes my blood boil. It sounds so ungrateful but trust me it's that irrational ugly anger rearing it's head again. I can't explain why that one thing really gets to me, it just does. It makes me want to scream that you don't have to stop your conversation, just carry on, I promise it doesn't offend me, I honestly don't mind. I'm not expecting the world to stop for me, I don't want it too. I am so so grateful that people would take the time to show that they're thinking of us, but sometimes I don't want to be treated differently and 'THE FACE' provokes me and it stirs that little unescapable, irrational devil inside!

The story of Jay, our son, who was stillborn.

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