08/12/2025
🌿 Grief Awareness Week — Remembering My Babies
For this part of my reflections, I want to talk about my (Beccy’s) babies. I’m grateful every day for my beautiful, clever, quirky daughter Evie — but I’ve also had seven miscarriages, and those experiences have shaped me more than most people will ever know.
My first miscarriage happened before Evie. It was the hardest, partly because we’d already had a healthy scan and had nicknamed them Pip. There was no warning that anything was wrong until the morning of my 12-week scan, when I noticed some spotting. We still didn’t expect the worst — we’d been reassured it was normal, and I still had all the pregnancy symptoms. Nothing prepares you for a sonographer quietly saying, “There’s no heartbeat.”
Pregnancy loss is such a strange, complicated kind of grief — made even harder because miscarriage is still treated as a taboo. From the moment you see a positive test, that is your baby. You love them instantly. You imagine their future and your future with them. When they die, you grieve not only for them, but for who they could have become and the family you pictured with them in it.
I also found myself grieving my own body. We’re so often told that carrying babies is “what women do,” and when it doesn’t happen easily, it can leave you feeling broken, even though none of it is your fault.
We did go on to have Evie, who is now 14 and wonderfully, unashamedly herself. But after she was born, we had six more miscarriages, ranging from 6 to 12 weeks. Those years were relentless — a rollercoaster of hope and heartbreak for us and for everyone who loved us. The longing for a second child can be all-consuming, and the comments people sometimes make about having “only one” certainly don’t help.
I missed picking Evie up from her first day at school because I was in hospital following another miscarriage. That was my wake-up call. I realised how much I was missing of the child I did have while grieving the ones I couldn’t hold.
Miscarriage can feel incredibly lonely. When an adult dies, people speak their name, share stories, hold space. But when a baby dies before birth, many don’t know what to say — even though inside you’re desperate for them to be acknowledged.
My babies changed me — as a mum, as a wife, as a person. They taught me that some things cannot be fixed, no matter how much we want them to be. They also taught me deep gratitude. Evie’s pregnancy wasn’t easy, her birth was early, and her first months were difficult — but she is here, and she amazes me every day.
I wish we talked more openly about pregnancy loss. I found healing in speaking about my babies, and today I carry seven tiny oak leaves tattooed on my skin — one for each of them — alongside the birth flowers for myself, my husband and Evie. A small mark of our family, in all its forms.
