Periods, for 23 years I’ve been having periods and for the first 5 years that’s all they were, but then I lost my first child and every period after that was like a painful reminder of what I lost. You see when you have an early miscarriage it’s just like a very, very painful period. I knew I wasn’t in the right place in my life to be the best mum I could to that baby but I still wanted it and it still hurt when I lost it and 18 years ago an early miscarriage wasn’t even recognised as a real loss. I got told things like, it wasn’t even a baby really and its only a miscarriage, not like I actually lost a child! But I did lose a child because it was my baby. I was only 16 and the dad didn’t even know about the baby and he still doesn’t to this day, so I was completely alone with noone to grieve with.
I promised myself that the next time I got pregnant would be with the right man and I would be in the right place in my life, kind of like a promise to the baby I lost, I promised I’d do better next time and so after a year or two, periods went back to just being periods. Then 7 years after my first loss I found myself in a good relationship with a good man, a man that I knew would be a good dad. We’d been together for 3 years and it was going well so we decided to try for a baby and we fell pregnant! But unfortunately it wasn’t to be, the baby was ectopic, it broke my heart and once again periods became a painful reminder of our loss but with an added twist this time. You see we didn’t know we were pregnant because I had my period as I should have but then 3 days after my period finished I was in a lot of pain and I started bleeding again, that’s when we found out I was pregnant so after losing that baby, every time I had a period not only was it a painful reminder but it was a scary thought that it might be happening again, I couldn’t trust my body to let me know if I was pregnant, if there was anything even slightly off about it I’d wait until it had finished and do a pregnancy test to be sure. When all you want is to be a mum doing endless negative pregnancy tests really messes with your head especially when deep down you know you’re not pregnant because you had your period, but how can you trust that when you’ve had an ectopic.
After the ectopic I was finally blessed with two beautiful girls one with the father to the ectopic and one with my husband and oh my goodness they are perfect! And then came Nayely, 16 weeks and 3 days pregnant when I gave birth to her perfect, beautiful but lifeless body. I’m now 34 years old with 5 pregnancies and only 2 living children, with every loss I experienced, I learned a little bit more about all the different ways you can lose a child and now every period is a painful missed opportunity to be a mum again and every clot I wonder is it a period or is it a baby lost so early I didn’t know it was there. Every period is a heart stabbing count down to my last chance to conceive, a child I didn’t conceive, another feeling of loss.
I know how lucky I am to have my girls, I know too many women who haven’t been blessed with children. I don’t wish to sound ungrateful I just wanted to give an insight to how something as every day as a period can be so drastically affected by loss, we don’t just lose a baby and get on with it. Loss affect so many “every day things” it changes you entire world and every loss is different, I thought I knew how to go through the motions with Nayely – after all she wasn’t my first loss but I was so wrong I didn’t have a clue. So if you know someone who’s lost children please give them time to grieve every loss differently because just as children who live are all different, so are the ones who die and every loss is different.
Nayely Adelpha Foundation 