I did another post about this already, but it wasn’t extremely in depth and I feel it’s a big issue impacting many women which makes it worth writing more about. This time, I’ve looked into what has helped other people cope with this and compiled all the best advice for you in one place. Here’s some helpful tips I’ve found from other strong women out there.
Take it one day at a time
Whether you recently had a miscarriage, are waiting for it to pass, are trying to conceive again or are newly pregnant- take it one day at a time. Don’t get overwhelmed imagining a larger picture which isn’t necessarily true. Consider that you made it through another day and find one thing to be grateful for that day, even if all you can find is your own ability to get through a really hard day. That is not nothing.
Acknowledge your strength
Like I said in my last point, acknowledge that you got through a hard day and a hard experience or for many of us, multiple hard experiences. It’s not an achievement you wanted to gain, but it’s something you gained because life threw it at you. You going through that and overcoming that hasn’t left you the same. You’re a different person now. You are stronger and more resilient and what you learned through these experiences will help you later in life. You may have lost something, but something was gained as well, even if it’s hard to see it right now.
Accept that bad things happen
Trying to sweep negative outcomes under the rug, ignore them, and only focus on the positive can be hard and often impossible if you’ve experienced loss. It impacts us so deeply that we can’t help but be aware of everything that can go wrong. So what if instead of trying to push those thoughts away, we just accept them? Yep. Everything can go terribly wrong. That’s a possible outcome. Everything can also go well. That’s also a possible outcome. Negative and positive, light and dark, it’s all part of life. We can choose to walk through the shadows of fear as a strong resilient woman or we can choose to cower in the corner, an anxious mess.
Distract your mind
Accepting the bad doesn’t mean dwelling on it or obsessing over it. Accept the thoughts, let them pass through your mind, and then move on. Find an activity, a tv show, or something to do that gets your mind off things. If there’s nothing you can do to change an outcome – especially through anxious, spiralling thoughts, then why give it extra time?
Worry is part of motherhood
Another way to look at things is that you’re already a mother, because you’re already worried. And learning to cope with that worry is a skill every mother has to learn. Before you conceive you worry if you’ll be able to conceive. Then you do and you worry about a chemical pregnancy. Then when you get past that you worry about a miscarriage. Once you get past the miscarriage risk you worry about abnormalities and birth defects. Then you worry about stillbirth. Then the baby is born you start to worry about SIDS. Then you get past that and there are illnesses and accidents and bullies and negative influences and basically the worry never ends, it only changes. Accepting whatever stage of worry you are currently in and learning to cope with it is part of being a mother. Welcome to the motherhood club!
Believe the evidence when good is happening
If you get a positive test and the lines get darker, believe things are progressing. If you have a scan and it goes well, believe things are going well. If everything is going well, then believe it’s going well. Try to base your worries on actual evidence. I’m now almost in the third trimester of my pregnancy and I’m constantly worried I’m not feeling enough movement and constantly wonder if I need to go in and get it checked out. When I do kick counts it helps me see that I actually am feeling movement but for some reason my mind is perceiving it different than the reality. This way I can collect actual evidence so that if I do find the movement is reduced I can base my decision to go on off this solid information rather than my anxious emotional state.
Check out the statistics if you find it helpful
When you have experienced loss, especially multiple loss, you have been on the bad side of statistics. I experienced 3 losses in a row which is supposed to be a very rare thing to happen. So when people would share “Miscarriage Reassurance Calculators” expecting that to be something comforting, I did not find it very comforting. I could see that at however many weeks the chance of miscarriage is a lower percentage but because I had experienced things that were supposed to be really rare statistically it meant nothing to me. And the chances of birth defects or second trimester chromosomal abnormalities may have been low, but to me I felt someone has to be the rare statistic and based on my past experiences, sometimes it’s me. However, eventually the statistics met with what I felt safe to believe. Somewhere after the NIPT results and the anatomy scan I choose to believe that things are actually going to most likely be okay. Some people might find looking at these calculators and statistics helpful earlier on, so I’m mentioning it.
Anxiety is not intuition
I know for myself, I believe strong in intuition. When I’m worried about a negative outcome there’s part of me that believes it’s because I intuitively know something is wrong. But I have learned that anxiety interfers with intuition and can mask itself as being intuition, when it’s not. It’s a very strong fear from your past experiences that is getting in the way of your true intuition. Don’t trust it right now.
Decide if it’s worth it not to feel joy
Everyone has different ways of coping. Some people feel that everyday you don’t miscarry is a day you are pregnant and that should be celebrated and embraced joyfully. Why miss out on experiencing that joy and happiness just because you are afraid?
Others, like myself, try to just exist in a limbo of “maybe being pregnant” so that if things go wrong, I hadn’t fully embraced it yet so hopefully it protects me from being as upset and sad. At some point I feel safe enough to allow myself to feel joy and enjoy the pregnancy but I wait until at least after when my past losses had happened. I just feel more comfortable with this approach.
Know that it does get better as the pregnancy progresses
The first trimester can feel like pure torture but as you go further in your pregnancy you CAN start to relax at least a little more. Eventually the odds of miscarriage really do go down. If you get a NIPT you have that. If you get an NT scan, you have that and then the anatomy scan. And then magically one day you start to feel them move. Sure, there’s anxiety around that but there’s also just as much reassurance. Feeling your baby move every day is a constant reminder things are okay.
Try to see how you’ve become more resilient and a stronger woman
Not everyone knows this pain or difficulty. Not everyone has to go through it and not everyone gains what we have gained. It sucks and it’s not fair, true. But wallowing in self-pity doesn’t help anyone. It’s more productive to try pluck some kind of gain out of it, and honestly every life experience is going to change us in some way. Every hard thing we go through is going to give us something in return. Some of those things are unhelpful such as fear, anxiety, even PTSD but some of those things are helpful – such as resilience and strength. We carry it all with us moving forward. We can use it to get through future difficult situations and even more beautifully, to help others get through difficult situations.
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