this talk: is about the heartache of losing your baby - with Franky Hunter
It’s like everything bad that had ever happened to me led up to this moment.
Somehow all the pain, the anguish, the questioning I had been through leading up to this, all made sense.
I looked down at my very first pregnancy test, and the big fat positive that stared back at me. I wasn’t shocked, I wasn’t afraid. To me, becoming a mother was the happily ever after to what could have been a tragedy, and an even happier beginning to a new story all together.
I never fitted in the mould of what a mother “should” be. I was not healthy, physically or mentally when I conceived my son. When I was fourteen, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type 2, Generalised Anxiety Disorder, while simultaneously battling Anorexia. By the time I found out I was pregnant, I was 19 and on the tail end of relapse of my eating disorder, and I struggled with binge drinking.
Ultimately, I was empty. And I was too depressed to do anything about it. I was alive, though I wasn’t truly living. My future was uncertain, and could only go as far as the next shift at work, the next drink at the bar.
I knew the moment I found out I was carrying my son, life would never be the same. Yet, nothing sounded better. Overnight, the light and direction I had been needing became so clear. Never was I one to believe in destiny, though that is the only way I can describe what it felt like to be crowned my son’s mom.
As the weeks and months passed, I fell more and more in love with my little baby. His father (my now husband) and I grew even closer, and we had become the family neither of us had dreamed of, though we both desperately needed. We named him Rosario Albert Hunter as soon as we found out it was a boy. All the pieces to a jumbled puzzle were finally coming together. I was finally allowing myself the peace I deserved after so many years of heartache. Everything made sense. I had a purpose, and that was to love and protect my sweet boy for as long as I would live.
But then at the start of the third trimester, my baby boy had died suddenly, and without explanation.
I gave birth to him, and held his still body in my arms.
Now his ashes rest on a shelf just for him in our home.
I don’t know if I would've handled my son’s death “better”, had I not struggled with mental health in the past. What I do know, is no matter how healthy you are, giving birth to death is traumatising. Having a baby die inside you is indescribable.
My new relationship with his dad, my new found life and happiness, all of it felt conditional on me being able to raise my son. So when I had to say goodbye to him, I convinced myself I needed to say goodbye to the life I built because of him.
I went back to square one. I drank every single day. I looked for my baby everywhere. In the clouds, in my home, at the end of every bottle. I couldn’t feel him anymore and I wanted to die. I resorted back to every single self-destructive behaviour I utilised in the past, hoping every day for it to catch up to me and take me wherever he was. It felt like there was some higher power playing a cruel joke on me, as I had no idea why I was handed the world just for it to be taken away,.
This went on for months, until my husband gave me an ultimatum. Although it seemed cruel at the time, it ended up saving my life. I went into the hospital as an inpatient to help me detox and work towards recovery. The work didn’t stop at my discharge. However, it did allow me to see things more clearly to get to where I needed to be.
Till this day, I'm still healing. I’m continuously working on my PTSD from his death, while still coping with other illnesses. Baby loss can turn even the most well-adjusted individual extremely frail. It is not something you just get over, and for those like me, it’s an ongoing process to unlearn all the guilt, shame, and self-hatred that can follow a loss of this kind.
I hope my angel is looking after me while I do.