Joy, Fear & Everything In Between
If you haven’t been pregnant after a miscarriage, it comes with a particular kind of anxiety no one quite prepares you for.
It took until my early thirties to be sure that I wanted to start a family. And whether my maternal instinct had been suppressed or delayed, the cruel reality is that it took a missed miscarriage during my first pregnancy to uncover just how much I wanted a baby.
Fast forward eighteen months, a second pregnancy, the birth of 2025’s most scanned baby, and although basking in newborn bliss, I can’t help but think back to that ill fated first pregnancy and the lingering effect it has had on the past ten months.
It’s with guilt and regret that I wish for more positive memories of the pregnancy that birthed my daughter. But when your only lived experience ends in loss and heartbreak, it’s perhaps easier to sympathise with the fear that ruled my life from the moment my result turned positive, to the day I gave birth, and beyond.
I wrote a letter to the baby I lost, promising to protect any future pregnancies from the worry and anxiety that had dictated our journey. But in truth, there wasn’t a single day that these emotions did not resurface the second time around. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to share the news with pride or take weekly photos of my growing bump and talk openly about nursery plans, but I was scared to, because what if something went wrong again?
I developed an irrational paranoia of routine movements and bodily functions, convincing myself they posed potential hazards. From sneezing and farting to bending down and handling inanimate objects, I was scared as though humanity hadn’t been successfully reproducing long before central heating and prenatal pilates. But the thought of it being taken away from me was a trauma I was terrified of reliving.
Embarrassed by the extent of my mental struggle, I sought support on apps and WhatsApp groups to connect with other expectant women. The more conversations I had, the clearer it became that what I was feeling was far from unusual. Women who had miscarried recognised it immediately, but so did many mothers, particularly those navigating pregnancy for the first time, who admitted that intrusive thoughts were damaging the joy of being pregnant.
Documenting anything during my second pregnancy made me nervous, but I tentatively started to journal about my private fears in an experimental attempt to manage them. After my daughter was born, I felt a strong urge to reframe them into something positive and maybe even something that might reach other women living with the same torment.
So, this blog isn’t about resolutions, or advice, or to tell you everything is going to be fine, because, quite frankly, as I sit here adorning breast pumps and sick-stained pyjamas, contemplating the unnecessary A&E visits and the small fortune I spent on private scans, I am not qualified to do that. My intention is to share a very honest account of my experience, in the hope that it resonates with anyone who needs to read this to know that whatever you’re facing during pregnancy, you aren’t alone.
Miscarriage: The Part No One Talks About
A brief note about the next section: The first two paragraphs share more details of my missed miscarriage. I am not including it to heighten anyone’s worry, but to provide context and to raise awareness of something that I had never heard of, but that is statistically far more common than we tend to discuss. If it does not feel helpful for you right now, or you just don’t want to read about it, please skip ahead to the third paragraph.
My first full term pregnancy came off the back of a missed miscarriage nine months prior. This is when the body, for whatever reason, doesn’t naturally expel a ‘non viable pregnancy’. In my case, not only were there no symptoms that anything was wrong, but I continued to experience sickness and fatigue throughout the first trimester. So, instead of elation and excitement at our 12 week scan, my partner and I were met with a sad, deflated little form and the deafening sound of a beatless heart.
Being told there is nothing I could have done to change the outcome of our baby’s biological course, will never ease the particularly painful knowledge that my body had been reluctant to let it go. And although devastated, I was strangely unsurprised, as for three months I had been harbouring a terrible, unshakeable belief that something was going to go wrong. Even though my logical brain still reminds me that one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, I could not shake the suspicion that my own cynicism had somehow caused the loss of this little life, and that intuition had been preparing me for bad news.
Guilt is profoundly common in women who have miscarried. Fuelled by prior expectation, social media, and what others choose to tell us, there is a perception that pregnancy is a pure and magical experience that we must tenderly savour. While true for many, this ideology is often not representative of the daily reality and can instead fuel resentment and bitterness. Why did this happen to me? Why did people tell me everything was going to be ok when it wasn’t? What if this happens again? Will I ever be able to carry a healthy, full term pregnancy?
Elisabeth Kübler Ross’s five stages of grief outline a remarkably accurate timeline of my emotional state in the months following my miscarriage: denial that the loss is real; anger that it happened to me; bargaining with the universe to reverse the chain of events; withdrawal as the reality sets in; and eventually finding the strength to accept that this might not be the end of the road.
I went on to develop a sixth stage of grief for this particular circumstance, one I’ve diplomatically entitled ‘Compulsive Conception’. Definition: a ruthless determination to fall pregnant again as quickly as possible, whether detrimental to your sex life (and wider relationship) or not. This is the phase where you obsessively purchase every app and ovulation tracker on the market, and adopt a rigorous, no excuses approach to timing. A ‘mouth shut, pants down, impregnate me immediately’ kind of strategy.
But with every month that a period presents itself, frustration and disappointment follows, until the next ovulation window brings with it, the opportunity for successful fertilisation. And so the literal and metaphorical cycle of events continues. Until suddenly one month, there it was – a second blue line. A pinch me moment where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so you inevitably do both, in a state of euphoric disbelief.
And that’s where I wish the story’s positive turn remained. But six months of counselling and cycling through endless mindfulness practices in a desperate attempt to rewire my brain could not compete against the previous year’s trauma, and so, happiness very quickly descended into the same fear and doubt that plagued my first pregnancy.
Pregnancy After Miscarriage: The First Trimester
I was approximately eleven and a half hours late for my period before I took a pregnancy test. Premature for most, but an exercise in endurance for me, encouraged only by the goal of not sacrificing another Clear Blue.
The extreme, but not uncommon irony, was that I fell pregnant in a month where I was convinced we hadn’t had enough sex. Two weeks before, I’d directed an extreme emotionally charged rant at my partner, frustrated at how we’d missed my ovulation window and were destined for a childless relationship.
And despite the irony and overwhelming sense of joy, I remained sceptical that I was really pregnant again. I lived in a state of permanent alert, frightened of everything, from the absurdly trivial to the medically catastrophic. Chat GPT quickly became both my closest confidant and my worst enemy. Every search spiralled into a diagnosis that ranged from perfectly normal to terminal, leaving my catastrophising brain to decipher where my symptoms sat on that spectrum.
One morning I would panic that I was not nauseous enough and the next, I would be hunched over the toilet simultaneously retching and peeing. Was I actually sick, or was I imagining it? Had I developed a rare complication, or god forbid, a phantom pregnancy? Was I really craving marmite sandwiches or had I always eaten this many?
In the hope that I would look back and laugh, I started keeping a list of all of the things I was scared of. Some behavioural therapists call this the ‘name it, to tame it’ technique, but in my case it functioned more like ‘name it, to professionally overanalyse it’.’ Still, in the spirit of full disclosure, here is the unedited list to convey my lack of reasonable or biological understanding during this time:
- Sitting cross legged (in case I accidentally fold my baby in half)
- Accidentally eating an anchovy (then realising it’s ok to eat them in, but still worrying about it)
- Any form of exercise, including a relaxed Sunday walk (in case the baby falls out)
- The cats jumping on my belly (despite them being semi feral and largely indifferent to my existence)
- Rolling onto my front in my sleep (despite never having slept in this position)
- Standing up too quickly & reducing oxygen to my placenta (a valid concern for anyone over 30)
- How drunk I got the weekend before I found out I was pregnant (will my newborn be addicted to spicy margaritas?)
- Unloading the dishwasher (surely this squashes my baby?)
- Sneezing (a violent and uncontrollable act that could dislodge the pregnancy)
- Falling over (not because it has happened, but because it theoretically could)
- Sexual intercourse (Officially, I was concerned about opening my cervix. Unofficially, I was terrified of prodding the baby)
- Tensing my muscles while being sick (despite that being a symptom of pregnancy)
- Weeding the garden (on the grounds of vague toxicological concerns)
- Crunching my stomach to pull the car seat forward (… squashing the baby)
- My one attempt at pregnancy yoga (modifying every pose into near complete stillness)
- The very brief jog I made to the car when the alarm was going off (just how shock absorbing is amniotic fluid?)
- The ever growing tightness of my jeans (Not wearing them in case they restrict my baby’s breathing)
- Bending down to tie my shoelaces (a manoeuvre so challenging it must be harmful)
Every day felt like an exercise in damage control. The doomsdayer within fought hard to dispel any progress made by the Buddhist monk from Spotify, employed to help me maintain a plausible mental facade. Needless to say, it was going to take more than fifteen minutes and a chorus of bird song to stabilise this nervous system.
Abandoning social media was less of a choice and more of an act of self preservation. Not only did it seem that every distant acquaintance I’d ever met was announcing a pregnancy or hosting an extravagant gender reveal party (since when did ten tier cakes, firework displays and enough coloured powder to gas the neighbours become a social requirement?), but I found myself conducting creepy audits of other people’s pregnancies. I’d roughly calculate the date of their conception and then scrutinise the size of their bellies in comparison to mine. On one particularly dark day I made sure to stop seeing the joyful updates of the rational pregnant community by muting several accounts, including a close friend – an act of digital self defense I am not proud of.
While I struggled to believe that I really was going to have a baby, the algorithms needed no convincing and after two days of light research triggered an avalanche of targeted ads. Having decided that I wasn’t going to make any purchases until we’d safely made it past twenty weeks gestation, being force fed videos of shapeshifting, intergalactic powered baby gadgets felt premature at best, inappropriate at worst and I took great delight in reporting them as such to Meta.
By the time I was eleven weeks pregnant, I’d already had three scans. At six weeks, a five hour trip to A&E found that I had upgraded shooting pains caused by wind, into an ectopic pregnancy. Despite the embarrassing diagnosis, I took great delight in being offered an ultrasound, which albeit very early, gave me proof of something I’d never seen before – grainy visuals of a tiny, teeny, flickering heartbeat.
It was still dangerously early to feel reassured and so, merely two weeks later, I went for my first (of five) private scans, revealing audible confirmation of the pregnancy, and photographs one and two in my vast collection of sonography prints. So far, so good, but it was the circumstances behind my third unplanned scan that remains sharply etched in my memory for all of the wrong reasons.
The prospect of a trip to Bali had quickly changed from a bucket list holiday, to the irresponsible conundrum of a pessimistic worry wart. My list of reasons not to go was extensive. A two legged journey, long distance flights, ferry crossings, food poisoning, mosquitos and mopeds. It felt far more comfortable finding things to worry about at home, than it did on the other side of the world. But with practical instructions from my midwife to take precautions, move regularly and if possible, enjoy the holiday, I was sweet but firmly reminded that my life ought to continue whether pregnant or not.
But merely four hours after landing in Singapore, an episode of panic on the twenty third floor of our hotel, felt ominously in keeping with my worst predications. I was bleeding, and it was too late in the evening to do anything about it. After a sleepless night governed entirely by worst case thinking, I was once again lying on a medical bed, breathless at the anticipation of what was going to appear on the monitor screen.
It took a £350 fifteen minute consultation to learn that it was nothing more than the release of an old clot, likely prompted by prolonged travel, though it felt far more expensive emotionally than financially. Even so, the doctor’s welcome news came with serious instruction to ‘keep my cervix closed’, as though I had been carelessly leaving it ajar. In practical terms, that meant no hiking, diving or excessive sun exposure, just relaxing. I gladly agreed, in principle, but the last time I remembered feeling relaxed was the night before I found out I was pregnant, over two large glasses of sauvignon blanc that later became something else to fret over.
You might think after three positive scans I would have felt more excited than nervous for my NHS 12 week scan, but anxiety doesn’t follow logic, and so, as I had done at every one previously, I cried through my pre-scan ritual of reliving bad memories from the previous year.
The intense joy of seeing and hearing my baby’s heartbeat was a relief that did not subside, even in the hours and minutes leading up to her delivery. The first trimester had carried a sense of unbelievability, but my twelve-week scan marked an undeniable milestone we had not reached before, and surely I would now be able to start enjoying my pregnancy…?
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