Grief Encounters

Jess O’Neill is a writer and mother from Carlow, who has been documenting her family's life on her blog My Moo And Roo since 2017. In an incredibly brave an open interview, she chatted with Sasha and Venetia about miscarraige, and what can be done to open the conversation around a virtually unspoken subject. Jess became pregnant just before Christmas, and her and her partner Matt were delighted with the incredible news.  They had planned to have 3 kids under 5, when starting off their family, and they announced that baby number 3 was on the way in early January, to everyone's delight.

Sadly Jess is representative of the well publicised statistic that 1 in 4 pregnancies will end in miscaraige, having realised something was wrong in February.  For something that is such a common occurrence, why is the conversation rarely had between friends, family and even in detail by medical professionals, which was the case for her and Matt. In the interview she speaks about anger and guilt , as well as trying to balance the difficult act of motherhood itself while stuck in the middle of her own grief - something that she speaks about in her latest blog post: Being ‘Mammy’ While Grieving

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I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, trying to find the right way to explain it.

When you have kids and you go through a loss, in my case miscarriage, it’s hard to grieve. You’re not in the position to curl up and stay in bed for weeks, even though that’s what you want to do. You still have to get up and feed the kids, dress them, bring them to playschool, mind them. I’m so irritable these past few weeks and I know the kids are picking up on it. There are days I really feel ‘I can’t do this today’. The days I’m overwhelmed by grief, when I can’t quite seem to catch my breath. You can’t, as much as you’d like to, lie down and cry. You realise the world keeps spinning and as much as you want off, you have responsibilities.

I find when I’m in the car driving and I get lost in my thoughts or a song comes on the radio, just as I’m welling up and about to go off the deep end into a good cry, Max pipes up from behind me and says something or does something funny and it stops me in my tracks, makes me smile and laugh. The tears retreat and I’m left wanting. It’s like someone interrupting your sneeze. That unsatisfied feeling.

It’s a stop start grieving process and I’m finding that hard. It’s frustrating. By the time the day is done, I’m so used to being stopped in my tracks, I can’t cry. Or I’ve learned to switch off the emotions, because the constant stop starting is painful. It’s like I’ve to schedule my grief, and in a perfect world, that would be ok. But I don’t live in perfect world, none of us do. Grief comes when you least expect it and if in that moment, you can’t grieve, when do you?

I have to get up and “mammy”. I have two wonderful, albeit cheeky rugrats, to look after. They really do keep me on my toes and I am shattered by the time bedtime rolls around. And by that time, I’m half asleep on the couch. To a degree I’m delighted I don’t have the time to grieve because who wants to feel like that? I am scared though, that time will pass and I’ll realise I’m not dealing with our loss, not fully processing it, because I “don’t have the time”. It’s such a 21st century statement – “I don’t have time to grieve”.

It was Mother’s Day last weekend and I found myself incredibly emotional. We would have been just over 17 weeks pregnant with our baby. 5 weeks has passed and I honestly feel like it’s only hitting me now. Robyn’s broken leg has hit me hard and in ways I feel like I’m right back at square one. Being in a hospital room on Mother’s Day wasn’t what I’d imagined. I received mother’s day cards from two of my children, and I can’t shake the fact that ‘bump’ wasn’t signed on the card (something that has been done for me since becoming pregnant).

So if you’re struggling or like me, you wished that...