Conceiving After My Loss: The Urgent Need For A Baby

When we lost our daughter, our grief compelled us to begin trying for another baby as quickly as possible. It’s easy to misunderstand this need to become pregnant again as a desire to replace the baby we had lost. The reality was far more complex. Losing Baby H was an outcome neither of us had expected. I am a pesimist by nature. While I was gleefully excited to be pregnant with baby H, I had lingering thoughts of complications or birth defects we might have to work through. These intrusive thoughts flickered across my mind every so often but seemed to be a natural result of coping with the unknown rather than genuine concern. In the same way, you might think up a “plan” for someone breaking into your home on the night you are home alone. You don’t actually believe someone will ever break in, but it’s still a comfort to feel like you have some control should the worst happen. Blood tests, ultrasound, and chromosome testing during the pregnancy all came back normal. We had every reason to expect an uneventful pregnancy and a healthy baby girl. We were unprepared for the reality that Baby H would not make it. That possibility had never crossed our minds.  

Part of our desire to become pregnant again so soon was a sense of missed time. I felt like there was a timeline before me that I’d now been knocked off of. I was transfixed with the milestones I should have already reached. Milestones she should have lived for. I was haunted by our daughter’s due date, and each step of development we should have been experiencing as a family. I felt robbed of that missing time. I didn’t want to endure wasting more of it. 

Some moms say it is the quiet nights, laying in bed trying to find sleep, that the grief hits hardest. For me, it was the shower. I was alone. There was nothing to distract my attention. Looking down I saw my bare, flat stomach. No baby bump. I could feel how empty I was. I needed to feel life growing inside me again. 

Another reason we tried to become pregnant so quickly after the loss was to prove to ourselves we could have a successful pregnancy. I will be blunt; I felt like a failure. My body had failed me, my instincts had failed me, and the medical system had nearly killed me. Was I even capable to carrying a pregnancy to term? My whole world was now viewed through the lens of a mom with a dead baby. I didn’t want to rest on that. The grief and the failure were all too uncomfortable to let sit. Some moms who have lost need to process their loss before they take the leap to try again. I couldn’t leap fast enough. With the complications and after loss surgery, it took two months before my body was physically capable of trying. I carefully tracked my ovulation and then counted down the days, then the days in hours until I could take an early-detection pregnancy test.  

I returned to bed crying the first morning I could test. No baby. 

Each day after I took another test, ticking off day after day towards my expectant period. I lost an enormous amount of blood in the months after by loss. I couldn’t stomach the idea of seeing more. I held my breath as the days slowly ticked past my expectant period. I was suddenly faced with a scenario I hadn’t anticipated. No baby, but not period? What did this mean for us? I was now in limbo. No definitive answers, joyous or devastating, to fall back on.  It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that the doctor was no help. “There could be a lot of reasons, give it time”. The internet basically said the same. 

Weeks went on. I was no better at waiting. That sense of lost time was now suffocating. I had no dates to anchor myself by. I couldn’t even track my ovulation without a new period date to calculate from. I was desperate for any information on my predicament, even if that information was a defeating predictable negative line. Still, I tested on and off. By now this testing was more a symptom of routine than genuine expectation.  

Positive. I took another test just to be sure. 

We would come to find out that I had ovulated TWICE in the same month, two weeks apart. I can only speculate that all I had endured, and the flush of pregnancy hormones following the loss had overloaded my system. Perhaps this is nonsense. I don’t care. I chose to see this second pregnancy as partly thanks to the hormonal contribution of my daughter.  

I realize how fortunate I am to become pregnant again. My journey from loss to second pregnancy was extremely short compared to most. Some won’t get this chance. The months I waited lingered hour by hour and consumed my daily life. Still, despite how torturous the wait felt, it was still only a few months. Many others wait much longer.  I found myself reading many loss stories but did not find many that shared about trying to conceive after the loss. I hope my experience brings you some comfort. Something to aid self-reflection if you are also walking this journey. It can feel more cathartic to bury yourself in shared experiences of loss and grief. It is much harder to make the leap to hope.