I woke up early for some reason this morning, the cat was probably banging around, but like normal, I checked my morning Facebook to see it anything exciting had happened and saw something that would stop me going back to sleep.
It wasn’t news, it wasn’t anything tragic, it wasn’t anything exciting, just a picture of a face I knew holding a baby. Now I should probably explain, i knew this person for about a year just under a year ago, I am not Facebook friends with this person but we have a lot of mutual friends and therefore when one of them liked the photo it popped up in my newsfeed.
A little bit of detective work told me this baby was born sometime at the end of November/beginning of December – A couple of months after my Effy should have been born.
I don’t know why this stirred such ridiculous emotions in me, that she was pregnant at the same time as I had been, that when I announced, she was also pregnant but too early on to tell anyone, or when I lost Effy, she had probably just announced. One of the happiest moments of her life at the same time as the worst of mine.
I found myself flicking through her photos, not looking at what her baby was like, how her family was together, but looking at her baby and seeing what mine should have been like, how big she would have been at three months, how I should have pictures of us in the park, with her in a Christmas suit, with her winter coat on to keep her warm.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t resent this lady having her baby at all, she deserves it, but I think it must have been the shock of not knowing she was pregnant at all to seeing her with a three month old. I suppose I should expect it, having shut myself out of the pregnancy world for so long, scrolling past any Facebook post that mentioned babies, scans or pregnancy. So long infact, someone could have got pregnant and given birth in the time!

Losing a baby has made me change my views, I now walk down the street and flinch when I see a pregnant person. I find myself wondering if it’s their first, whether they have ever lost a child or whether they have 6 kids at home all waiting for tea. I can’t just admire pregnancy for the wonderful gift it is, my brain wants to know everything, but at the same time nothing.
But my brain has also become paranoid. When I catch another woman looking at my bump, I don’t think that they’re just guessing how far along I am, or that they’re disapproving because I’m a bit young, I instantly wonder if maybe they’re silently hating me for being pregnant when they’re not, just as I felt in the months after I lost her. I want to walk round with a sign over my head telling people what has happened. Screaming that I deserve this.

I’m sure that my head will calm down, that maybe when I have given birth and the raging hormones have settled down a bit, maybe when I have my rainbow baby I’ll be able to look at the world rationally again, but until then every pregnancy is either a mockery at my loss or a challenge, and I hate feeling like that.
Every pregnancy is different, faces different challenges and every pregnancy deserves a positive outcome. I don’t once wish that someone else went through what I did instead of me, that wouldn’t be fair, I just spend my days wondering how life would be different if it hadn’t happened to me.