Starting today’s blog with a trigger warning: If you followed me on social media or if you subscribed to my newsletter, you know about our pregnancy loss. 

A lot of what I’m feeling called to share right now is my experience in navigating this. And while this post won’t necessarily talk in-depth about the loss specifically, I do want to provide that trigger warning.

I know that everyone is in different places in their mental well-being and their own healing journies, so if this is something that you feel is going to affect you, please feel free to come back another time. 

While I don’t plan to get too in the weeds with the nitty-gritty details of my experience, I want to share a few “silver linings” that I have found in my healing process so far. 

Prefer to watch, Mama? Here’s the video for you!

I’m only a couple of weeks out from learning our news, having the procedure, and starting on a physical, mental, and spiritual healing journey, and I believe that when we go through any type of trauma or something that is life-altering for us, our brains tend to want to make sense of things, and it isn’t always easy to do that. 

So in my searching and reflecting, while I haven’t necessarily been able to make sense of things, we have gotten some answers, which has been really helpful in healing. In all of this what I have clung to is trying to find the silver linings and positive things to hold on to in this time that’s really challenging for me. 

This first silver lining is going to start out as a negative, but I’ll change it to a positive so bear with me. 

In my experience with going through my procedure and physically healing from that procedure, I have been so disappointed and so frustrated with the lack of support and information I have been given to physically heal my body. 

For this pregnancy, I had decided to establish care with hospital-based midwives, so to have my procedure done, I had to have my care transferred to an OB.  The OB was fine, but she’s not my primary care provider that I’ve seen throughout pregnancy and with whom I have a relationship. 

For all I know, this could be standard care across the board, and being a doula and very involved in women’s health, my guess is that it is.  But  I am just flabbergasted at the lack of information that is given prior to the procedure, during the pre-op prep for the procedure, and especially during the healing process after the procedure.

Now, again, because I’m in birth work, I know that there’s a lot of gray area when it comes to women’s health in the perinatal space. I always joke with my clients that some of my job feels like a cop-out and that I feel like a weatherman where it’s like,  “Maybe it’ll rain, maybe it won’t.”

A client could ask me a question about how things may go, and I could give them five different scenarios with five different outcomes. So I know that there really are some gray areas in this work and why it’s such a benefit to (shameless plug) have a doula who can walk you through those gray areas.

So with this procedure, I expect that that is similar, in that there are gray areas where everybody’s body is different, everybody’s body responds to things differently, and there may not be a blanket recovery plan for this type of procedure. 

But the information that is given or that I was given was so minimal, and it left me asking a lot of questions, and it left me feeling very anxious. 

As someone who is in this perinatal space quite frequently, I’m very aware of the flaws that the system has. I felt like I was left to figure it out on my own after bugging my care team quite a bit, which I’m happy to do, but it was really frustrating!

Thankfully, I didn’t have any of the big warning signs, but because of that, I felt like I was brushed off with a simple “it’s fine” and that is not enough to me. 

I just wanted a little empathy, and maybe some reasoning behind why I was feeling the way I was feeling and what’s the purpose behind it to try to help my brain make sense of it and I felt like my concerns were very dismissed.

Women who are experiencing this and are already going through such turmoil in the healing process of the mental and spiritual aspect of this… we need better care. And that goes across the perinatal space. I know there are so many flaws with the medical system. We deserve better care.

Now, the silver lining is that I plan to provide that better care. I don’t know what that looks like, or how that support will look yet, but you better believe that I’m going to find a way to, at the very least, provide better information to ease women’s minds who are going through this.

I’m ready to fill those gaps and find a way because it’s a little absurd, the dismissiveness that I experienced, even though, I had, the education and knowledge to know to ask specific questions. So, I can’t imagine women who don’t have that baseline education to where they even know what to ask or if they have any red flags beyond just like the three bullet points given on your discharge paper.

Another silver lining that goes along with providing support in the perinatal space is that, of course, when I first learned the news about our baby,  a big question mark for me was going back to work. 

How do I  go back to being so involved in the birth space? And when will I feel ready for that? And what does my entire business now look like? 

The silver lining here is that I think because I’m constantly in this space where I see pregnant people, birth stories, etc., I’m less triggered by it now, after my loss. 

I open up any of my social media apps and there’s just always pregnancy, motherhood, postpartum… it’s always right there in my face. So I think because of that, it feels less connected to my own experience. So for me being in this line of work and being so exposed to that constantly, maybe I have a higher tolerance for it and I  am not bothered or triggered by it. 

Being very early on in this healing process, I’m sure triggers may pop up out of nowhere. So who knows what will come up for me at any point, at any time in this healing process, but I am very relieved that I am not completely shaken by being around pregnant women.

And while, yes, I’m very much taking care of myself still and navigating how I want to step back into birth spaces, it doesn’t feel as daunting as I thought it would, and that is a huge silver lining for me.  

And finally, another silver lining that I have started to process through is the reminder to strengthen my faith. 

For me personally, I don’t consider myself necessarily “religious”, but I do consider myself “spiritual”. What that means for me is that I believe in God, and I believe in God as a personal relationship to myself.

Over the past many years, my relationship with religion and spirituality, and even with God has ebbed and flowed and changed a lot. And in this process, I’ve done a lot of praying about finding answers about what went wrong, and those prayers have been answered.

So in all of this, I feel like I have a renewed relationship with faith and renewed motivation around exploring what faith means to me and my relationship with God and being more intentional about spending time in prayer and in meditation and things that I had put to the backburner in recent months. 

While I expect to be processing all of this for quite some time still, these have all been really good reminders of the blessings that I know that I do have.

And I know there are a million other things that I have so much gratitude for but these are some of the main themes that I am feeling gratitude for right now.

Always, thank you for your support, and for allowing me to process my feelings in this space 

And even though I certainly wouldn’t say that I am an expert in this area, I do have lived experience in it and I do consider myself an expert in supporting women in this whole family planning experience. So just know that if you’re in a similar situation and need a listening ear or resources or just to vent and cry, I’m here. 

I’m always here, no matter where you’re at in your family planning journey. 

Always feel free to send me an email at ebbirthing@gmail.com or come on over to Instagram @ebbirthing where I’ll be sharing more about this and other family planning resources, support, and education. 

I’d love to see you there, mama!