Baby loss – Stacey’s miscarriage journey

We recently re-shared a post on our TRB Instagram account, and it resonated with a lot of people around the world. For this reason, we asked the lady who wrote it, Stacey, AKA @stacey_janelle to write her story in a fertility blog for us to share with our readers.

Read on to hear Stacey’s TTC story – the hope and sadness she has had to face following miscarriage.

Read about how this baby loss has affected her relationships, and where she is at now.

My first miscarriage

Eight years ago, I had my son Desmond – my pride and joy, but also my most constant source of insanity and frustration. When he was two, I wanted to give him a sibling. My husband and I tried to conceive for a year. Finally, I was pregnant.

At 11 weeks, I went for my first ultrasound, ‘No heartbeat , the baby looks like it stopped growing at about 7 weeks’, they said.

I was devastated. What did I do wrong? Why did this happen? How could I have not known? Why did I still feel so pregnant, when I didn’t even have a living baby inside me?

I waited for a week, to see if I would miscarry naturally. And then I went to the pharmacy and got a pill – the one people use to abort babies they don’t actually want. I took the pill at home and waited.

I sat in my living room and cramped and moaned while tending to my 2 year old. Then got him to bed so I could sit on the toilet and bleed for the next couple of hours.

My marriage broke down

Over the next two months, my marriage became undeniably bad. It had been bad for a while, but I had this naive hope that if we could get pregnant and have another baby, if we could just make our family seem more picture-perfect, it would somehow become more picture-perfect in reality as well.

But I was in an abusive relationship that had no foundation of trust or honesty. Desmond was getting older and becoming more aware of the way I was being treated by his dad.

It was not a healthy marriage. Not the example of love I wanted my son to learn from. I had to get out.

Was it meant to happen?

Once I took Desmond, left my husband, and began the divorce process, it dawned on me that my miscarriage was meant to happen.

I needed to leave and, knowing me, I would not have left my husband if I was still pregnant or had a newborn baby.

I would have stuck it out, and who knows how bad things may have gotten? It was a strange and heart-breaking blessing in disguise, I suppose.

I was now a single mom to my 3-year-old son.

Not the life I had imagined

I was not the kind of mom I always wanted to be – the kind of young mom who had several kids by the time she was 30 and still looked super hot with her sexy, incredibly sweet husband who made her feel undeniably happy.

I had not yet given my son a sibling, and I had no idea when I ever would. It was just him and me now.

But I knew I would love him fiercely, raise him the best I knew how, make him my top priority always, and teach him to be the kind of boy who grew up into a kind, loving, honest, thoughtful, and caring man who would one day love his wife with tenderness and empathy, unlike his own father.

Finding happiness

Over the next four years, I looked for a man who would love Desmond and me in the way we both deserved.

I had a lot of requirements – one of them being he had to be open to having more children. I did not want to have another baby until I found the man I wanted to be with for the rest of my life. This created a great sense of pressure.

I didn’t want another bad relationship, but my mommy heart continued to ache for another baby. The baby I felt I was meant to have. I had already had to change and adjust so many of the plans I had had for my life.

A lifelong desire to have multiple kids

I met a man with four kids.

Tim was good and kind and loving and understood me and all my fears and desires and reservations.

The four kids part threw me off for a while. I didn’t know if I was up for the challenge of going from my one and only to a mother of five. I didn’t want to give up my dream to have more babies of my own.

But did I really want that many kids to care for? Tim was up for the challenge, however, as long as he got to do it with me. In the end, I felt the same way about him.

Trying to conceive with Tim

Tim and I have been married for a year and a half.

We gave ourselves a bit of time to adjust to our blended family and new roles as step-parents, and then we started trying to conceive. I didn’t really know what to expect.

With my son, I got pregnant fairly quickly. But with the second, it took a while. We tried for several months, and I became more and more nervous each month when I started my period.

How long is this going to take? What if I have fertility issues? What if I don’t get pregnant? What if I don’t get to have the baby my womb has ached to have for so long?

A positive pregnancy test

I waited a few more days. Finally, I took a test. It was positive.

Tears of joy in my bathroom. I couldn’t believe I was seeing those two lines. I had wanted this for so long. Finally, it was becoming a reality. Finally, something important was happening again in my life, just the way I had always wanted it to, without having to make any changes or adjustments.

I couldn’t wait to tell my husband. Then I remembered the last time I had seen those two lines. How happy I had been then. How I had never expected to miscarry, but I did. There were no signs then. There were no signs now. It could happen again. I shouldn’t get too excited. I didn’t know how this would end.

So for five weeks, I tried not to think about the fetus inside me. I tried to ignore the increasing nausea, the tiredness, aversion to certain foods and smells.

‘Maybe it’s all in my head,’ I thought. I couldn’t trust anything until I had had my first appointment, heard the heartbeat, and listened to the doctor confirm to me that there was indeed a healthy baby growing inside me.

Pregnancy after baby loss

When you’ve longed to carry a baby inside you, it’s impossible not to have it in your mind, every minute of every day: making sure I’m eating well, exercising, but not overdoing it, taking my vitamins.

‘I swear my stomach looks thicker’. ‘We’ll have to get a bedroom ready’. ‘I do hope it’s a girl’. ‘She’ll be born in April’. ‘Desmond will be such a good big brother’. ‘I’ll need some new maternity clothes’. ‘I wonder how different it will be this time, nine years later?’ ‘But maybe I won’t make it that far’. ‘I shouldn’t get my hopes up.’

I dreamed I woke in a puddle of blood again last night. This morning, I immediately checked my sheets, once again. Surely I’m just being paranoid though. Surely I won’t have to go through that baby loss again. Not now, not this time. This time, I am meant to have a baby with my husband, a little sibling for my son.

I tried so hard to prepare myself. My husband didn’t understand why I was so worried. He had never known the trauma and heartache of a miscarriage before.

He was excited for our first ultrasound. I was so nervous and anxious. Even so, I couldn’t deny the hope I felt, continually trying to convince myself to be positive; the amazing thought of being a mother again, of feeling kicks inside me again, of holding and nursing my own newborn baby, once again.

Dealing with baby loss again

Then, like a terrible episode of deja vu, I went to my appointment and had the same scenario as the last time play out all over again.

‘It’s just a terrible, unlucky, unfortunate coincidence’, my doctor said, because everything in my body apparently looks fine; no obvious sign as to why I would miscarry in the exact same way, six years later.

None of it made sense to me

There must be something I can do. Something to prevent this same terrible heartache and loss from happening all over again.

I can’t go through this again. I want my baby. I have waited long for this baby. I have hoped and prayed so hard for this baby.

Through my feelings of emptiness and depression, I am trying to remain open and optimistic, to see some lesson that is supposed to be learned, to take this experience and somehow grow from it and become better for it, so that I can be done with it and never have to experience this again.

I am strong

I am a strong woman. I am a warrior of a mother. I am a brave step-mom. I am a miscarriage survivor. I have lived and healed and continued on through heartbreak.

My journey through motherhood has taken me many places. But my journey is not done.

It is not over. I have not resigned, I have not consented. I will still keep trying. I will keep going.

I deserve to have a baby. I am good enough. I am a good mother. I will be a good mother again.