The Rainbow After The Storm

Pregnancy: that time in your life that you spent years avoiding, until suddenly your body hits you with some compelling urge to be a mum… right now.

At this point in your life, you can all you can to ‘put it off’ – buy a dog (works for all of three months, maximum), book an expensive and child free holiday (but secretly hope you get pregnant anyway), listen to your parents tell you how they are all too young to be grandparents (and ignore every remark, knowing they will be ecstatic when you finally are with child).

All of this this will work to distract you for a short amount of time. Until you come into contact with a baby again, and It’s then that you realise there is nothing in this world that could make you feel complete besides being pregnant with your future child.

For some, pregnancy happens right away and is even unplanned. Unfortunately for lots, it doesn’t. We were the latter, and it broke my heart every month when I would take a test (always far too early) and those lines just didn’t show.

In October, we decided to follow everybody’s advice and ‘stop trying’ because ‘then it will happen’. So off we went to visit friends by the coast for a very boozy weekend, and to have ‘recreational sex’ for the first time in months! Upon return, I still hadn’t come on my period, so I took a test. And there they were… those two pink lines I had longed for for so long. I cried, I screamed, I Face timed my parents, and immediately told all direct family.

The absolute joy could not be hidden from my face. Everywhere I went, people said to me ‘You look so good’ or ‘You’re so happy lately, It’s lovely to see’, many even went as far as ‘See, I told you obsessing over conception was making you unhappy.’

Little did they know that, hidden behind the smile, was a pregnancy I was desperate to shout from the rooftops.

Luckily, I didn’t shout from the rooftops.

Because, just a week after those two lines had appeared, I started feeling cramps. In a bout of denial and naivety, I continued like nothing was wrong. I went to work, I pretended the pains were normal, and I smiled – but this time that smile looked different. Eventually, I broke down and I went to the doctors after taking a pregnancy test which lacked in those two lines that made me so happy, just one week ago.

The same doctor I had seen just three months ago about struggling to conceive looked at me sympathetically as she told me that my HCG levels were too low for me to be still pregnant. I had lost my baby, and that – because it was so early- I would ‘just pass it naturally.’

I broke. My whole life stopped right there and then, and what I thought was heartbreak every month turned out to be far from it. This was heartbreak, this was grief, and nobody could do anything to make me feel any remote form of happiness.

‘It just wasn’t meant to be.’ They would say. ‘At least you know you can pregnant!’ They would reassure me. ‘It’ll happen when it happens, guys.’ They would tell us.

Nothing helped, because I was so ready for that baby to be in my life for so long. ‘It was just a bunch of cells’ people told us, but that bunch of cells was my pride and joy. That bunch of cells was my little boy or girl. And that little boy or girl was just too good for this world.

We’ll always wonder who he or she would have been, but after every storm comes a rainbow…