Blog 9 : A Dad in Grief : Grieving the Future

Blog 9 : A Dad in Grief : Grieving the Future

As any parent or parent to be will know, the 9 months of pregnancy is spent preparing for the arrival of your new baby. The first 12 weeks are generally quite low key, you tend not to tell anybody unless you really have to as that first scan is the first big milestone. You sometimes pick up some bits and bobs after the 12 week scan but generally you wait until 20 weeks to really start preparing for the arrival of the new addition to the family. With both of our pregnancies, we have spent the second half of the pregnancy meticulously planning not only for the arrival, but for the whole life of that little person. Whether it be a good thing or not, my wife and I both display tendencies of OCD!

Bringing a baby into the world is a truly wondrous experience, after all, it is what we are put on this earth to do, to procreate. The second child is always more difficult to prepare for, the logistics need to be considered. How old is your first child, what time do they go to bed, nursery, school, there is so much to consider. That's why, with Mia, we had already mapped out so much of her early life for her. We didn't know we were having a girl, but deep down we both suspected we were, all the signs were there. The most significant of signs was when we ordered the pram. The pram comes as standard black and you add colour packs to give it the colour you want. We had always talked about if we had a girl we would want a plum coloured pram and when we ordered it, it was on offer. The stand out thing about the offer was that it came with the plum colour pack as it was the only one available at the time. "You can change it for another colour when baby arrives" the lady in the shop said. Obviously, it was great that we could, but really, we both knew that we wouldn't need to. We knew what kind of clothes she would be wearing and when, we had thought about how old she would be at her first Christmas and what toys we would get her. We'd even planned her Christmas outfit and where her presents were going to be on Christmas morning.

This is what sets the grief you feel after losing a baby aside from what I am going to call "normal" grief. It is part of evolution and the laws of the universe that as human beings, we are likely to lose our parents and grandparents at some time in our lives. The grief you feel after this is what I refer to above, normal grief. At times when you are finding things hard, you can think back to all those lovely memories you shared, you can look through the albums of photos that you have and simply reminisce. This is what is missing with baby loss. The photos that you have are very limited, but so very treasured, and the memories that you have are both the happiest and most devastating of your life, but are always there as the stark reminder of what you should have, and the life that you should be able to share together.

I think this is what makes baby loss so hard to deal with. Every day is filled with so many "what if's" and "if onlys" that it can often be hard to think of anything else. It can be the little day to day things that can upset you, the simple things like she'd be starting nursery today, she'd be starting to walk/talk now but it's the big events that really upset me. My wife had always dreamt of taking her little girl to dance classes and on girlie pamper days and we had planned the dream holiday to Florida in 2016 when our little boy, Kyran would be 6, and our new arrival, Mia would be 4, and old enough to appreciate the wonders of Walt Disney World. But the thing that upsets me more than anything else, and I often have trouble getting the thoughts out of my head, is thinking about what would be my little girls wedding day. I have been a groom, I've been a best man and had to make speeches for both, but I'll never get to complete my set of speeches, I'll never get to give that Father of the Bride speech. The whole subject of weddings now upsets me deeply, who'd have thought that when my wife was watching Home and Away that I'd be sat on the couch crying because Alf Stewart got to make his Father of the Bride speech? It's not just the speech that gets me, it's the whole thing, I'll never get to make that car journey with Mia on the way to her wedding, where I tell her how much I love her and how proud I am of her and I won't get to walk her down the aisle and give her beautiful hand to my future son in law.

So when you lose your baby, it's not only the baby that you lose, it's that babies future, it's all the things that you planned as a family. The grief you feel is not just for your immediate loss, but the endless list of 'firsts' that you will never get to experience. I think that's why baby loss is so hard to deal with, the grief never ends.