The trouble with pregnancy loss.

Last year, to celebrate our wedding anniversary, my husband arranged an overnight trip to the venue where we were married. This was the first time we had visited since our wedding day (now 20 years ago!).

I was thrilled that he had been so thoughtful as to arrange this and I was very much looking forward to taking our daughters to see where we celebrated our special day.

I wasn’t too sure what to expect. I didn’t know whether our wedding planner would still be there or whether, after so many years, the castle would have been changed and updated so that we would barely recognise it. Sadly, our wedding planner wasn’t there but despite some upgrades it was still very much the place where we became husband and wife.

What really took me by surprise was how nervous I was about visiting this beautiful venue. I had a real sense of anxiety about being there. The feelings started as we left home to make the fairly long drive and by the time we got there, I felt extremely uncomfortable.

Despite beaming from ear to ear, recounting memories with my husband and watching our girls dance together on the very same dance floor where we had our first dance as husband and wife, I just couldn’t shake this sense of unease. At first I couldn’t understand why I was feeling this way.

It took some time of reflection for me to understand the cause of my unease at visiting one of my favourite places. I realised that although the venue hadn’t changed all that much, I had. Generally speaking, I am still very much the same person. I still laugh at the same things, I still hold the same moral values and I still have the same weakness for cake (the more frosting the better!) but I am a changed person. The person who arrived on that summer’s day dressed in a wedding gown eagerly anticipating the start of another chapter in her life had a very different perspective towards life.

On that day, I was hopeful and optimistic. This day was the creation of a whole new family which I was excited to add to when the time was right. I had seen friends of mine become coupled-up (either through marriage or the buying of a house together) and go on to have babies, creating their own beautiful families. Our wedding day was the start of this journey for us, I was finally following in the same footsteps as my friends and this to me was my absolute dream, my heaven.

Sadly, the story of growing our family wasn’t like a fairy tale or a romcom. Despite it starting well with the birth of our first daughter in 2007, the story then took a dark twist down the lonely and frightening road of pregnancy loss. This was a road that culminated in anxiety and depression and created a lens on the world that made everything appear in black and white.

The truth is that I am not the same person I was on our wedding day. I may still be fun-loving, silly and caring but underneath it all lies a hurt that I don’t feel will ever go away. I wasn’t scarred then but I am now. The scars run so deeply within me that they were crying out at me as I walked down the aisle retracing the footsteps that I had walked many years ago. And that in itself scares me. I have gone from being an excited, optimistic and hopeful bride to a woman baring wounds.

My pregnancy losses have changed the core of me and that’s why I felt so uncomfortable being where I was. It was the realisation that everything I had hoped for and probably expected to happen, didn’t happen in the way that I had planned. I started to feel cross with myself for how niave and foolish I had been back then.

It’s been necessary for me to challenge the judgments I have made towards myself. Was I wrong to be hopeful and optimistic for our future together? Was I wrong to be excited about starting our journey as a brand new family?

No, I wasn’t!

What is life without hope, optimism and excitement? We have to look to the future with a positive outlook and see the possibilities ahead of us.

But when things don’t go to plan, we need to look at ourselves in awe and wonder at the strength and courage we have shown in our pursuit to realise our dreams.

I hope my husband will take me back again one day and next time I won’t feel anxious. Instead I will walk in there with pride and remember how that optimistic, excitable bride didn’t change at all. Instead, she developed into a brave, courageous mother who loves her babies unconditionally and who cares enough to support other mothers who have been left with the same hurt and scars that pregnancy loss has left me with.

That bride was a lioness, she just didn’t know it yet!