On pregnancy loss, finding connection, and why this space exists.
For many people, October means autumn leaves, cooler mornings and getting ready for Halloween. I still find enjoyment in those things. But after pregnancy loss, a month can take on another meaning. Alongside everything happening around us, there are memories, anniversaries and dates that other people might never know we are carrying.
October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, with Baby Loss Awareness Week taking place from the 9th–15th October. This year, I wanted to use this space to think about what that recognition means, and why being able to read someone else’s experience can make such a difference.
Before I began writing here, I was reading other people’s stories. Sometimes someone would describe a feeling I had struggled to explain, and I would recognise myself in their words. It didn’t change what had happened, but it helped me feel less alone in what came afterwards.
That is a big part of why I created Her Beautiful Life.
Pregnancy loss can be an incredibly lonely place, for you and your partner. Even when you are surrounded by people who care, there can be a distance between what they see and what you are living through. Finding someone who puts words to that distance can bring a little relief.
What comes afterwards
There can be so many expectations around grief. How openly you should talk about it, how long you should feel sad, when you might try again, or when you should seem more like yourself. Even well-meant reassurance can be difficult to absorb when you are still trying to understand what has happened.
Within a relationship, you may also grieve differently. You have experienced a loss together, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need the same things at the same time. One person may want to talk while the other struggles to find words. Partners need room for their grief too, including when everyone assumes their role is simply to be strong.
Every experience of pregnancy loss is individual. Our circumstances, our memories and the support around us will be different. I don’t expect anyone reading this journal to see their whole story in mine. My hope is that they might recognise a feeling and realise there are others who understand something of what they are carrying.
I want this space to make room for life after loss: the grief, the uncertainty, the changed relationships and the small moments of enjoyment that can slowly return. There should be room for all of it, without pressure to reach a particular point in your healing.
The dates we remember
There are dates that become part of our lives in ways we never expected. The day we found out we were pregnant. The scan where we learned a heartbeat had stopped. The day we said goodbye. The due date that arrived without the baby we had imagined bringing home.
Those dates can feel enormous, even when the rest of the world carries on as usual.
October offers a shared space to acknowledge those memories, wherever they fall in the year. For some, that might mean sharing a name or lighting a candle. For others, it may mean remembering privately. You don’t have to tell your story publicly for your loss to matter.
I find comfort in knowing there is a time when families can remember together. When something often held so quietly is given space to be seen.
What people cannot always see
Something I keep coming back to is how much grief we carry while continuing to show up. We go to work, care for our families, make conversation and get through the ordinary demands of a day.
People may see strength when we remember barely managing. They may see calm when, inside, we feel paralysed. They may see hope without knowing how much fear sits alongside it, or how an unexpected question, announcement or situation can bring everything close again.
I know that difference between how things look and how they feel.
Being able to function doesn’t tell someone the whole story of how we are coping. Sometimes the person who seems to be managing still needs someone to ask, to listen, or simply to remember with them.
Why awareness matters
My hope for this month is that these conversations lead to more understanding, better care and support that continues beyond the immediate loss.
Pregnancy loss can change a whole family. We grieve our baby and the future we had already begun imagining. For some of us, it also changes how safe we feel in our bodies and how we move through the world. Everyday situations can become unexpectedly difficult.
That deserves to be taken seriously. We deserve compassion without having to prove how deeply we have been affected.
Reading other people’s stories helped me begin to understand my own experience. Through this journal, I hope to offer a little of that connection back, and gradually build a community where women feel able to be honest about what comes afterwards.
This October, there is room here for sadness, remembrance, uncertainty and hope. And if hope feels far away at the moment, there is still room for you.
Whatever your experience, and however quietly you carry it, you deserve to feel supported beyond this month too.