Author: Jo Dubé

Life is cyclical by its very nature when you’re female. Back in the days before we started trying to conceive, the cycle was there but it wasn’t particularly important. I’d probably be annoyed if my period started on holiday, and I definitely had to stock up on painkillers and chocolate at the beginning of every month. But that’s as far as it went. It was part of life, but a relatively small part. As someone with PCOS, my cycles weren’t always regular, which made it easier to forget about it all between periods.

But once you start trying to make babies, the cyclical nature of the process really comes home to you. Every few weeks, there is disappointment, which tends to get more crushing as time passes. After the disappointment, renewed hope. Let it be this month! If your cycle is irregular, or if you’re a few days late, the hope builds and builds… and then it all comes crashing down again.

So far, this is a very familiar cycle to many women. It’s talked about, and lots of people will recognise it. But what is less commonly mentioned is the added dimension that comes into play for mums who have lost a baby, at any stage of pregnancy or after birth. You still have the building hope and crushing disappointment every month, and it’s still exhausting. But now there is something else as well. Something that never, ever goes away.

It’s fear.

It wasn’t too bad after my first miscarriage.  After my first and second chemical pregnancies, it was still relatively easy to push it into the background. But after losing the twins, and then another chemical pregnancy, the fear looms large and it never goes away.

As every day passes and I get closer to the beginning of a new month, the fear gets stronger.

I am afraid that this month, yet again, I won’t be pregnant.

I’m afraid that I will be, but only for a few days.

I’m afraid that I will pass that milestone and see my baby’s heartbeat, but that there will still be bad news a few weeks later.

I’m afraid that if we pass that terrible rite of passage (and yes, facing the stage at which you learned your baby died will always be hard, even when this baby lives), it will be another difficult pregnancy, only this time it will be harder because we already have a small child.

I am afraid that even if we get through all that, we still might not get to take our baby home, because when baby loss is part of your life, you know there are no guarantees.

Every month, all these fears swirl around and build up until I feel as though I am screaming inside my head.

And then another month begins. There is no pregnancy, again. The crushing disappointment is no less painful. It is not less because of the fear that preceded it.

Philippians chapter four, verses 6 and 7 tell us not to fear anything, but to pray about everything. That’s great advice: but unfortunately, although prayer is a wonderful tool and does work to reduce fear, it doesn’t take it away completely, because we are human.

If we do have another child, I will face each of these fears in turn and, hopefully, by grace of God and with my family and friends’ support, I will manage to get through them and come out on the other side.

If you know anyone who lives with the loss of a beloved child, they may be living with fear like this. It’s really hard to talk about, and to write about. But it’s also really helpful to do so.

And if any of my fears come true, I know that with God’s help, and the love of those I love, I will be able to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Because although the fear is always there, every new month brings hope as well. Hope and fear… fear and hope… the hope doesn’t drive out the fear, but the existence of hope makes it possible to live with the fear.

Anniversaries can be difficult.

I don’t mean joyful anniversaries. I’m looking forward to our tenth wedding anniversary celebrations with great excitement.

I mean the anniversaries of panicked 999 calls, of nights in hospital. The anniversaries of caring professionals saying, “I’m so sorry,” with tears in their eyes.

Tomorrow is the twins’ anniversary. A year ago today, despite the consultant’s warning, I was praying without ceasing and clinging to hope. Whilst there is life, there is always hope.

When Husband and I were engaged, we each confessed to the other that we had always wanted twins. Several people told us, before we were even married, that they thought we would have twins. So when the consultant told us that there were twins, it was a dream come true as well as an answer to so many prayers. My positive pregnancy test was exactly 366 days after we found out that we had lost Gracie Wren.

We had just moved out of our old house, the house where we built our marriage through the difficult early years, where we waited (and waited) for my first pregnancy. The house that K came home to, where we began to learn how to be parents. The house that slowly grew too small as K grew bigger. The house with walls that began to press inwards when we lost Gracie Wren and had two chemical pregnancies all in ten short months, whilst the For Sale sign stood forlornly outside and the only serious viewer was very rude about the quirky things I loved the best.

We had a few weeks between houses and I knew I was late because of the stress of moving. But I was actually late because we were going to have twins, at long last.

So we moved into our forever home (which is amazing and beyond our wildest dreams) and after a very rough year and a half, it looked as though things were turning round at last.

But our precious little ones never had a chance. They were only nine or ten weeks’ gestation when I felt something snap deep inside, and I didn’t need the flood of blood that followed a scant five seconds later to know that they had both gone.

Everything is so slow when the world goes into crisis. I phoned the hospital to tell them what was happening, and called an ambulance at their request. My husband called my mother to come to sit with K (it was the evening and she was asleep. I will always be thankful that she never had to see Mummy covered in blood). It seemed to take hours and hours for the ambulance to arrive, and the journey was endless, lying flat on a gurney, facing backwards, on bumpy roads, when I feel travel sick at the best of times and all I wanted to do was scream.

Because we knew there were two embryos, I had to have more than one scan to ensure they had both gone (although I knew they had). My reaction to extreme pain is to imagine how much worse it could be, so when they asked how bad it was I told them five. Luckily my husband was there, and he patiently explained that they wanted to know how bad it was, not how bad I imagined it could be. So when they came back I was able to say ten, and later when he went home I remembered what he had said, and was able to say that the pain was still a nine.

That was a long night. My cannula fell out, and it wasn’t until the sixth person’s third attempt that she managed to defeat my stubborn veins. Well meaning people kept coming to ask how I was feeling. I knew they meant physically, but how can you separate physical agony from emotional anguish?

Today, and probably tomorrow, I cannot help living through that pain again. It isn’t a new pain any more, but because of that it goes deeper. It just adds insult to injury that I’m experiencing monthly cramps today, and expect the same tomorrow.

We named our babies Thomas, which means Twin, and Perdita, which means Lost Child. These are not the names they would have had if they were here now. If they were rolling over and smiling and laughing, and sitting very well so long as there was something to lean against.

I am learning how to take care of myself. I have self-care plans in place for Wednesday and Thursday this week. So I am praying that this level of pain will be relatively short lived this time.

But right here, right now, my body and mind are remembering my little Thomas, my tiny Perdita, and it hurts.

I’ve spent quite a lot of my life being unhappy for one reason or another. Most of those reasons don’t really matter now. I wasn’t a very happy child, for reasons that are entirely in the past. I suffered a nervous breakdown at nineteen, and struggled with depression for several years. I was in unrequited love throughout my twenties, which was hard.

Since my marriage, ten years ago in August, I have in general been much more able to reach out my hand and grasp the joy. But of course, we are human beings in a fallen world, and there have been bad times.  There was my husband’s illness which began in our second year of our marriage and caused our relationship to founder. We underwent counselling and built a much stronger relationship as a result, but there were two hard years.

Throughout that time, babies were very much on our agenda, but in human terms we needed to work on our relationship, and from a faith perspective we needed to be as sure as we could that we were following God’s will for our family. At last, everything fell into place and we started trying to conceive… and I was ill with labyrinthitis for most of the next year.

At last, after two years, I fell pregnant, and after a difficult pregnancy, three years ago we were waiting for our little girl. She will be three tomorrow, and nothing in the world has ever been a greater source of joy.

She will be three tomorrow. We never dreamt, three years ago, that she would still be an only child on her third birthday.

She’ll be three tomorrow, and she has started asking for a brother and a sister. Her angel siblings are definitely part of her parents’ lives, but how can you explain something like that to a little person who has no concept of death or of Heaven?

This is a bittersweet day. My birthday, yesterday, was full of joy, and I’m certain that tomorrow will be joyful too. So all the ambiguity and conflicting feelings and grief have come out today.

What is it like, to be a person whose inclination is always to embrace joy, and also to be someone who deals with grief and depression? I often feel two-headed, like Janus, but my two heads are joy and grief rather than the past and future.

In practical terms, what usually happens is that either grief or joy is uppermost. They are not opposites, but neither do they coexist comfortably.

There was a time when I felt very wary about accepting or expressing joy. When there is so much sadness in my life, how can it be right to be happy? But when it’s summer, and a day of celebration, or an ordinary winter’s day full of quiet happiness, it is not wrong to feel good. The painful thoughts and the grief will still be there when the happiness recedes.

Neither is it wrong to feel sad. The last two years have been full of sadness. I never knew it was possible to feel this bad and still to get out of bed every morning. Even on the days when I am overwhelmed with grief, my innocent child has mostly happy days.

And, when the latest wave of sorrow passes, there is joy to be found.

So perhaps this is the answer. Grief comes in waves, unpredictable, uncontrollable, terrifying and overwhelming. But if you are a person to whom joy comes naturally, in between the waves are the quiet calms of joy.

Our God is omnipotent, omniscient, perfect, and impossible to know fully.

Our God is the God of love, and created us all in order to be in a relationship with us.

There are a lot of things about the nature of God that I don’t understand, and can’t. But I do know that He loves me fiercely, more than a parent, more than a child, more than a lover… and all at once.

Many Christians who suffer miscarriage and baby loss find that their faith is rocked to the core. I completely understand this reaction. The world has changed for the worse, permanently and irrevocably. There is no going back.

Many Christians find comfort in the thought that God has called their child to Heaven, and that they will meet them again one day.

I do believe that my children went from my womb straight to Heaven to dance with God. But I don’t believe that’s because He called them there. I don’t believe death is ever part of God’s plan. I believe He intended these children to be part of our family, and that He mourns with me. After all, He knows what it’s like to lose a child.

Death is a consequence of our fallen world. The allegory of the garden of Eden is difficult to understand, but some things are clear. Death came into the world as a result of disobedience: it was not part of what God had in mind for humanity.

Now, one of the great things about God is that He can – and does – redeem anything. I have met a lot of parents whose living child(ren) would not have been born had they not lost a child when they did. I am such a child myself. Certainly, when we lost Gracie Wren, we assumed that we would have another child who would not have been conceived had we not lost Gracie. This is not entirely untrue. Every child after Gracie would not have been conceived had we not lost the sibling(s) immediately before them. And yet, all my babies except the first one are with God, not in our arms. With the human limits of my knowledge, I can’t understand how it is that God intended each one of them to be part of our family. But my understanding is limited by the boundaries of time. I see the past, I live in the present and I look to the future. God is not limited by time.

God can redeem anything… and through His redempton, my babies are living in glory. They only ever knew love and safety. They were never hungry or thirsty. They were safe inside me for the whole of their lives. And when life was no longer safe for them, they went home to be with God. I miss them every hour of every day – but they are with God. He understands how much I hurt, because He lost His child too – but His child and mine are with him, now and forever.

I live with depression, grief and trauma recovery. These things are always there in the background, whatever else is going on. Some of them will never go away, although as time goes on I hope they won’t loom as large as they do now.

Some days, when I wake up in the morning, it feels as though my head is full of treacle. My brain works slowly and I struggle to get out of bed and get dressed. You probably wouldn’t know I was struggling if you were watching, because I just get up and get moving. One big difference between depression when I was a student and in my twenties is that I don’t have the luxury of staying in bed on a bad day. I certainly didn’t see it as a luxury at the time, especially once I had a job and didn’t get paid on the days I stayed in bed. But it isn’t an option now, so I get up, get dressed and keep putting one foot in front of the other, even on the days when I perceive everything through a haze of grey. I keep reading stories, rolling out playdoh, mixing pink milk, singing, admiring Duplo constructions, and scolding badly behaved trains. On my really bad days, we watch more television. The better weather is a gift, as K loves playing in the garden.

When my husband and I first fell in love (after some years of friendship) he started to call me Joy. He said that I have a gift for joy, for experiencing it myself and for encouraging others to find it. And, although it’s very easy to dismiss (or simply miss) the moments of joy when everything is cloudy, they are still there. When K flings her arms around me; when she insists that I’m a kitten and she’s a baby rabbit and we have a feather to chase; when she bursts into song; when she declares that a pâté sandwich, strawberries and apple juice is the mostest yummy lunch ever ever; and when she calls me “Mummy sweetheart”. It’s true that on the bad days these things don’t help as much as they do on the good days, but they are still there. And I do believe I would be in a much worse place, physically and emotionally, if I didn’t seek the joy and try to notice it when I find it.

Some people suggest, or seem to suggest, that depression is a choice and if we all just focus on the good things, we’ll all feel good all the time. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of depression. Looking for the good things doesn’t make depression go away. On bad days, it doesn’t even make it better. But it’s still there. And, for me, it can be a sign of hope. If I can see and celebrate the good, perhaps the darkness is a little bit further away. Perhaps.

I am a stay at home Mummy to my three year old girl.  I’m happily married. I live in a lovely house in a beautiful little town in Scotland. I have a small craft business that has really been a neglected hobby for quite a while. I’m a Christian.

In the course of just under two years, I have lost six babies to miscarriage at various stages. This is a place for me to write about grief, trauma recovery, negotiating a new relationship with a changed world, prayer, God, and joy.

If my story resonates with you, please share it. I’ve been told that my writing helps others and that’s my goal.

If you know me personally, please don’t use my name for now. I’m not anonymous to my friends, but I hope my posts might be seen by people who don’t know me.

The first time you lose a child, the world divides into Before and After.

I thought I was an adult. It took two years to conceive your big sister, and her pregnancy was complicated. I had to face my own mortality, and Daddy had to face the possibility of losing us both. Then the first months of parenting were a steep learning curve, as they are for all new parents.

But we knew we wanted more babies, so we started trying again when your big sister was eight months old. I can’t describe how thrilled we were when we found out you were on the way! We were apprehensive about two under two, but we thought it would be amazing to have siblings so close in age.

The great advantage of high risk pregnancies is the early scans. At six and a half weeks we saw your heart beating. Then we knew you were really real.

Every pregnancy is different, and there are many benign reasons why people bleed during pregnancy. So when I started spotting dark blood at nine weeks, I managed to silence the doubting voices. It was significantly less bleeding than I had with your big sister! But when the blood turned red, I knew. I tried to tell Daddy but he didn’t believe me.

The next day, your big sister went to her godmother and we went to the pregnancy assessment unit for a scan.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the world shifted and everything changed. I already knew that we had lost you. But still, everything changed when we saw that your heart wasn’t beating. It had probably stopped a couple of weeks before, when the dark spotting started.

The midwives were lovely. They gave us a choice of options, and I decided I wanted things to proceed naturally.

On the way home, Daddy had to pull the car over so that he could cry. He said, “I thought we could call the baby Wren, because he was so small and had to fly away so soon.”

“I thought we could call the baby Grace, because by grace of God she came, and by grace of God he will never know pain or suffering,” I said. We have called you Gracie Wren ever since.

Daddy took the next day off work and then it was the weekend, so we had three sad, quiet family days. On the Monday, I gave your big sister a lovely day, and I was so proud of myself.

The next few hours are etched on my memory and always will be, but I can’t write about them yet. Just a few images stand out.

Your tiny big sister, eleven months old, standing against the French windows watching as I went into the ambulance. I didn’t know whether I would be able to come back to her.

The ambulance ride, which made me horribly travel sick.

Waking up after surgery and finding that I was still alive. I would be able to go home to Daddy and my living baby.

Did you want your Mummy to come and dance with you in Heaven, Gracie Wren? I was so torn. In some ways it would have been easy. But I didn’t want to leave my living child, or your Daddy. I knew they would never recover if I did.

Mummy and Daddy didn’t know any better, so 36 hours later I was full time parenting again. For months I couldn’t speak about you at all. It was all too raw. I descended into bitter depression.

In September that year, we had a few days of joy when your first younger sibling came and quickly went away. That loosened my tongue, and I found I could talk about you, and that doing so helped a lot. In February, it happened again.

A year ago, we were between houses. We had to move out of our old house a month before we moved into our new house. I knew I was late because of moving stress, but Daddy persuaded me to take a test. When it was positive, we thought the day had been redeemed. So we went on holiday the following day full of joy. We were about to move into our dream house, and we had a new baby on the way!

Our first scan was on my fortieth birthday, and we found out that it was twins! There was a note of caution from the midwife, but we were so thrilled to be having twins. A dream coming true for Mummy and Daddy!

A week later, the consultant told us that it might not be a viable pregnancy after all, and five days after that, the twins came to dance with you in Heaven. We named them Thomas, which means Twin, and Perdita, which means Lost Child.

And on January 4th this year, our New Year baby went to join you too.

Oh Gracie. The last two years have been so short, but endless. I know I will see you again one day. I believe that you will recognise me first. I visualise you dancing in God’s presence with your five little siblings, and I am sure that you all watch out for your big sister. Please watch out for your next little sibling, when there is one, and help them to stay with us, too. Mummy is weary and sad, although I still try to hope.

Good night, Gracie Wren. Mummy will never stop loving you.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the world shifted. There was Before. Now, forever, it will always be After.