On Pregnancy after Loss: When Guilt, Grief and Joy Live Together

Published on The Everymom

I’ve been pregnant four times in the last six years, and have two living children. Like many other women who have experienced recurrent miscarriage, I have run the gamut of emotions before, during and after each and every one of those pregnancies. Still, during my most recent, and perhaps happiest pregnancy, two new feelings inserted themselves during that time of waiting.

In my first trimester I spent plenty of time researching topics related to adding a second baby to our family–from how to keep up with a toddler when you’re battling morning sickness to learning what a baby “sprinkle” was. But no amount of googling kept me from feeling that welcoming a second baby might take something away from our first–our daughter I had fought so long and hard to meet. I couldn’t tame the feelings of guilt and grief that arose as I considered how this new pregnancy might forever change my relationship with my little girl.

Navigating parenthood and pregnancy after loss

Both my husband and I were raised with siblings that we are close with and love dearly. We each experienced our childhoods with sisters in tow and surrounded by cousins, and we cherished those relationships so much that we hoped to provide the same for our own children one day.

Despite this wish, there were moments before our daughter made her way to our arms when I wondered if parenthood–much less parenthood to more than one child–would ever even be possible for us. I was heartbroken when, after weeks of testing, my husband and I were told we were miscarrying for the first time. Less than a year later, we lost another pregnancy, and we were devastated.

When I was pregnant with our daughter, I waited nervously for the other shoe to drop. Thankfully it never did, and as I held her in my arms and kissed her baby curls for the first time, I knew how lucky we were to get this far. As time passed, and my husband and I grew into parenthood through all of the sleepless nights and sweet babyhood milestones, we began to consider the possibility of giving our daughter a sibling once again.

I will never forget the moment I realized I was pregnant with our youngest, and how I actually shook the pregnancy test in happy disbelief, as if to reassure myself that the two pink lines weren’t just a trick of the light. I hastily giftwrapped a onesie to surprise my husband with, and we laughed and cried when we shared the news with family. Throughout the celebrations that followed, we were cautiously optimistic at first, and then overjoyed as we passed each early milestone.

As my pregnancy progressed, however, exhaustion and nausea often left me depleted by noon and ready for sleep myself once my toddler’s bedtime rolled around. Though I had envisioned months of bonding with my little girl ahead of the new baby’s arrival, the sheer physicality of pregnancy was taking its toll much earlier than I had anticipated, and by the sixth month I was worried that time was running out.

As I cared for my exhausted pregnant body, reality took hold. I had long wanted more than one child, but hadn’t before stopped to consider how I might feel as the finite resources of time and energy shifted from my first-born to include my newborn. Short of cloning myself, there was no possible way to give as much time to my daughter as I wanted, and that realization made each pregnancy celebration bittersweet. As a parent who had experienced pregnancy loss not once but twice, I knew how very lucky we were to even have the option of growing our family without navigating problems like secondary infertility, and this knowledge further intensified feelings of guilt. It felt ridiculous to admit, but in pursuing the dream we had to give our daughter a sibling, it troubled me to think I was stealing away dedicated time with her devoted mama. The more I thought, the more I worried that her future relationship with me would be less, somehow, as I prepared to care for two children.

Normalizing a spectrum of emotions throughout pregnancy

I spiraled frantically as only a pregnant person in the thick of their pregnancy “feels” can. I searched for mothers sharing similar stories online, hoping to find reassurance that I was not alone in my worries. I needed to feel seen in a way I didn’t when I looked at my social media feeds–which in large part were flooded with glowing mamas confident in their choices.

I read somewhere that mothers having a second child often feared they wouldn’t love their new baby as much as the first–but that was not my concern. My concern was this: I was certain I would love my new baby as much as my first, and that no matter how many time-saving hacks I might implement, I would only have half the time I did now to spend with my daughter.