Watching the sun reflect off the boys as they sit and play together with a ball on this amazingly sunny day as I sit on a bench in the park, you would be forgiven for
Watching the sun reflect off the boys as they sit and play together with a ball on this amazingly sunny day as I sit on a bench in the park, you would be forgiven for thinking that I was a very happy, lucky mum to be sat here on this gorgeous park enjoying life with my family.
First impressions are often deceiving and in my case this is very true. You see because alongside my gorgeous two boys that are sat in front of me playing, the bench that I am sat on has a plaque on saying “In memory of Millie Thompson, forever playing in the clouds”
I have a daughter that I lost suddenly in an accident when she was 9 months old and 4 years later I also had a missed miscarriage – our family life hasn’t been perfect, we haven’t had it easy when it has come to creating our family, it’s been hard, it’s been a struggle but we are still standing.
Even sitting here doing something that is so normal to so many families is something that 5 years ago when I was pregnant with my son I could never have imagined doing.
Losing Millie sent me into whirlwind diagnoses of various mental health problems that I never imagined would ever affect me.
Things that I had very vaguely read about, words that I had seen flittingly in media articles and medications with names that I couldn’t even pronounce.
To suddenly have to rely on medications, counselors and psychologists to even get me through a day was a shock to my system itself, as I had never had to rely on anyone or anything before.
Sitting in silence in a psychologist’s chair, wondering how the hell I was going to articulate the incomprehensible thoughts in my head or screaming at my husband in front of a counselor who was nothing but a stranger to me, was not how I imagined my second year of marriage to be like.
Anxiety. Complex Bereavement Disorder. Depression. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
List above? Just in case you were wondering which mental health illnesses I was diagnosed with after losing Millie and some again after my miscarriage. They’re words. No, they’re much more than words; they are labels. Of course they are labels, why wouldn’t they be? Our Society loves to increasingly give people labels and place them into neat little boxes. The problem with me though is that I suffered from a set of mental health illnesses with symptoms that regularly overlapped one another and then each labeled illness fed in to another and I felt as though I was drowning in symptoms, in books and articles attempting to find something somewhere that would tell me what to do or when it would get better. But I found nothing. There was no answer, no specific solution to my problems, my issues. I just had to live in hope.
Waking up each day was a battle, getting to sleep each day caused me nothing but heartache because every time I tried to close my eyes all I saw was my daughter lying there, not breathing. Then my heart raced, the tears came falling down my face, the tightening of my chest and the uncontrollable cries of a mother who couldn’t bear the thought of never holding her child. Then when I did fall asleep, I would be woken with a jolt and for just a few seconds I would think my daughter was still in the next room and then the heartache would start all over again. A never-ending cycle of vicious mind games that I had absolutely no control over. The loss of control over my life was debilitating. The control had been taken away from because of these illnesses and I had to try and find out what was going to help me, which medication or treatment would bring some kind of normality.
Losing your baby, your child is the worst possible thing that could ever happen to a human being in their life, nothing will be more painful than losing the person that you created, losing the baby that you never met or the child that you didn’t have long enough with to get to know.
Research has shown that depression can last many years after losing a baby and this can continue years after conceiving again.
Unfortunately I have met many people that assume that when you conceive again that all your pain from losing your baby/child magically seems to disappear. It doesn’t. The psychological impact on a parent after losing a child I believe lasts a lifetime, with the worst psychological trauma being straight after the event; most would argue this anyway but I think it depends on the circumstances and experiences of each specific individual. My experience for example will be completely different from someone who has lost his or her first child to a miscarriage. I lost my first child at 9 months old; she was my world like any child to any parent. The worst part of the trauma was as soon as we lost her, it was sudden, our world automatically collapsed, our hearts were broken and we couldn’t function like normal human beings, my mental health problems stemmed from those first few traumatic hours. Then I had a miscarriage 4 years later. To me at the time, this wasn’t traumatic. I had been through trauma, I had lost my baby girl who I had held in my arms, who I had cuddled to sleep and whom I had sat and laughed with. How could I feel the same about a baby that I had never met? By the time I miscarried physically, I was 12 weeks pregnant and my body continued to feel as though as I was pregnant … but I went into practical auto mode. Get on with it, it’s happened, it’s over. I think people around me were quite shocked with how I was dealing with what happened; to the outside I was looking strong, on the inside I was slowly crumbling. This was in late November and it took me until the due date of the baby the following June for me to breakdown and grieve properly and this is when my anxiety started again; I’d lost another baby, not just a pregnancy, I’d lost another child and now I felt guilty for dismissing the loss of a child when I miscarried.
Mental Health after losing a child is an astoundingly complex matter and I personally feel that the way in which you lose a child and the age of the child affects the grieving process afterwards. The loss of the child is an extremely tough experience and I am not surprised that some people just cannot cope with living their life without their child and go on to complete suicide. I could have done this if I didn’t have the immense support of my husband because without him, I no longer felt that I had a reason to live.
I do think the loss of a child has a long-term mental health effect on any parent, even if the child is 50 when they pass. Yet I do believe that the loss is more weight bearing on a parent with a younger child because there is a loss of promise with the loss of a child. The loss of the first day of school, a graduation or saying goodbye as they travel the word, a loss of seeing them get married and having children; the loss of hope.
Not all people will suffer with mental health problems after the loss of a baby/child, I have met many who haven’t but it does not mean that you are weak if you do suffer from a mental health illness after losing your baby, we are all different, we have our own stories and we will all survive in our own way; whatever is takes.
If you are suffering after the loss of your pregnancy/baby/child there are many resources you can visit for help, some of which are listed below.
https://www.sands.org.uk/support-you/how-we-offer-support
https://www.lullabytrust.org.uk/bereavement-support/grieving-and-common-feelings/
Copyright: Joanne Millie Thompson September 2019
This post was originally written for Stickerscape in support of Baby Loss Awareness week.
Email: samepersondifferentme@gmail.com