I had an awful dream this week. I was about four months pregnant and my waters broke and I knew that I would lose the baby but I went about my everyday life. Not able to accept the inevitable but being so so sad as I knew it was hopeless and the loss felt overwhelming. I thought if I can keep the baby inside me everything will be okay and none of this is real.

And the reason this was so realistic and horrible is because I had lost a number of babies before I was luckily enough to have my daughter, Lucia. With each of those pregnancies I got a little further along before the sonographer said ‘I’m really sorry I can’t find a heart beat’. When I was pregnant with Lucia my waters broke at 28 weeks and while I thought ‘oh, how lovely we will be able to take our baby home later today, earlier than planed but hey ho’, Not able to accept that really it was unlikely she would live and really I thought that this was just another pregnancy that was a little further along than the others and that realistically I would probably have another number of miscarriages before we actually managed to carry a baby to full term, ridiculous huh?.  As if that is how it works, that you get a bit further along each time you are pregnant until you hit the magic 40 week mark. But my 28 weeker did live, nine week in intensive care and then we could take her home,

With miscarriages, or in my experience anyway, once you are told your baby no longer has a heart beat you can wait for ‘nature to take its course’ and expel the baby or you can have an operation to have it removed. They do these ops on specific days of the week so you carry your dead baby inside you for at least a few days. These are only really options with early miscarriages. I know this sounds disturbing to some but to me I wanted to keep my baby inside me as long as possible, keeping it safe. I didn’t drink during my pregnancies but when I knew the babies had died I could have a drink if I wanted but the act of swallowing that first sip of wine felt so final, that when I took that sip it was acknowledging that the baby I was carrying was dead.

And then this week, a few days after my dream, a Facebook memory popped up of me at a cousin’s wedding a few years ago (see main picture). It was a few days after I had found out I was pregnant with my first baby and I was so thrilled. Little did I know that a few weeks later I would be in A&E bleeding and then a few weeks later being told ‘I’m really sorry…’.

Maybe subconsciously I had remembered that this time of year is the anniversary of my first pregnancy, I don’t know, but it made me feel sad. I always feel sad when I think of my lost babies, it make me weep, that never changes. The passage of time has enabled me to be able to not wake up crying even morning, to not cry every time I see a new born baby in the street, but the intensity of the pain in my broken heart doesn’t change however it no longer stops me in my tracks.

I wholeheartedly believe that having Lucia has helped me deal with my grief hugely. I am grateful every day that I am lucky enough to have her, she isn’t a replacement for my lost babies, but for me I knew that the only thing that would help me after losing my babies was to have a baby in my arms. This isn’t the same for all people, I know this. I wanted to try and get pregnant again as soon as I had physically recovered from the operations but my ex husband was reticent, he thought I needed to psychologically recover first but I was desperate, I wanted/needed a baby. Getting pregnant was never a problem, usually happened with in the first two months of trying. Keeping them alive inside me was the problem. I found great comfort in the people and forums on social media I encountered who were going through  the same thing. Whenever someone got pregnant you wished them luck and hoped that they had a #stickybean.

So, am I feeling nostalgic as a friend has commented? yes, I think I am, but not in a ‘wasn’t that a wonderful time, if I only I could relive it’, but in a ‘goodness wasn’t that a painful time in my life, and my, it still hurts now.’ I will be mindful of my self, look for signs that I am getting depressed and address them should they appear. But right now I am just a little wistful, wondering what the babies would have looked like, missing them and grieving them still, as I shall always do.