I’ve heard the second year can almost be worse than the first year, and I’m beginning to understand why.

It’s Christmas time…where it’s meant to be magical, wholesome, lovely and fun, but we can all admit the busyness of life, the pressure to make it magical, the forced social interactions can all make it incredibly anxiety inducing and exhausting, let alone the grief or loss factor that can be experienced by (probably) the majority in a range of different ways and reasons.

…I’ve got this unrealistic expectation that I’ve ticked all the boxes of triggering things through the pregnancy because that was so damn hard, and now when things come to smack me around the head, I’m so unprepared they knock me for six.

I had felt a grief bomb waiting to come with this baby surpassing the age of Herb dying. The thought of it made me immensely sad. Of course the trauma brain would tell me I won’t get there at all. But, here we are. I hate the fact Herb is not here, I hate the fact he didn’t get to join our family and live a normal life. I hate that he died. I hate my body caught a parasite. I hate my body for letting it cross the placenta….

35+3 today, the c-section is booked for the 10th August, less than 4 weeks to go. Comparing this pregnancy to Herb’s is difficult to look past. Comparison is a natural, human thing we do, subconsciously, consciously in many different ways. At 34+5 we discovered a problem with Herbie’s brain at a routine appointment with our obstetrician. So, naturally I’ve been stressing out that something would go wrong now.

Feeling uncomfortable and an impending doom of difficult dates and milestones to get through over the next 5 weeks navigating pregnancy after loss.