My little Olive is gone

It's just not meant to be this time; I was pregnant, but now I am not. I was contemplating deleting my old posts, ignoring the miscarriage that is making itself present.

But then I asked myself – why?

After doing some research, I found sad solace in knowing that 15–20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage – and yet for something so common, it's still an occurrence that remains taboo. I think part of the secrecy lies in the fact that early pregnancies are often hidden until a safer time. So when miscarriage occurs, many people haven't even made it known that they were expecting at all. As I've found, this approach kind of leads to a weird 'tell and untell' situation with family and close friends. "I was pregnant, but before you get excited, now it's not happening anymore."

As my 7 week dating scan approached, I became increasingly anxious. I tried ot be positive, but I just knew something was wrong – my symptoms where either disappearing or nonexistent. It was a rough night beforehand, and poor mum had to bear with my tears on the way to the clinic waiting room. Then I waited to see what the scan showed, and my fears were proven to be true. There showed the gestational sac, but nothing more than a white ambiguous shape showed inside. Something that tried to grow, but could not go on. The woman conducting the ultrasound asked me to come back in a week, saying it might just be too early, but I already knew (or felt) what was going on.

After that I tried to go to work (which didn't go well at all, trying to hold it together in front of everyone!), and then, to be honest, I just went home and took time to be sad. Ben was amazing on the phone, and helped me see everything with a level-head. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but this is what I was thinking: there was a life form growing in my body. I don't care that it's cute little lips hadn't formed yet, nor had it's functioning ears. It had, at least, a spirit. But that night, I wandered along the beach and had a very honest conversation with my little blueberry, asking it simply to 'do what it needs to do', freeing it to return back to where it came. It may sound like some weird spiritual mumbo-jumbo, but I felt so at peace afterwards. I trusted my body to do what it needed to, and allowed it to. I no longer thought about the still spot resting in my tummy, but thought of the little spirit that needed to leave and return.

For now, that is what keeps me strong. Miscarriage is a sad event which is hard on both body and mind. But it shouldn't be taboo, weird or tainting. And it happens all the time.

Now, I feel strongly that women should share the joy of their pregnancy when they find out. The three-month secrecy rule ‘in case things go wrong’, is now, I've discovered, redundant. When things go awry, you need the support of the people around you. And I don't mean you need to tell everyone, but hiding it from the entire world is useless. Tell the people that you'd want to have around if things did go badly. And if it doesn't, then you've taken some people along for the whole pregnancy ride of excitement, not just the last 6 months. That's just my thought on it, anyway.