The More Unspoken Unravelling: Relationships After Loss

After Charlie died, we were given a Red Nose pamphlet on grief. It outlined the types of feelings we might experience; sadness, depression, anger, anxiety, numbness.

I feel what is less spoken about in the world of baby loss, is how much not only do you change as a person but how much your relationships change with the people around you. The one perhaps least spoken about but most affecting, is your relationship with your partner.

The difficulty lies in the fact that both of you have become completely stripped of your identity and left to flounder in a vacantness that would have been filled with arguments over who got up (or didn't) to the baby.

Whilst both of you are scrambling, desperately, to find some semblance of who you used to be amidst the storm that follows baby loss, you are in desperate need of being loved yourself. And then, the very person that you'd normally turn to is also adrift, a fragment of who they were.

So here you are, needing love but also wanting to be alone. Perhaps pushing away in an attempt at self-protection with your nervous system at rock bottom and meanwhile your partner may be navigating the same loss but in a completely different, alien way. And all you want is your baby.

At the depths of my struggles, I looked over to my seemingly collected husband and in my brain couldn't understand how he appeared to be 'coping' when I was falling apart and the world around me felt chaotic. And then I read something that acknowledged how the father's typical role is to support and protect. When the mother collapses in the initial months this is what he does and then once she begins to stabilise, he begins to allow himself to grieve. For us, anyway this seems to be true.

I'm partial to a metaphor. This was the metaphor I felt was true in my mind. My husband and I are out on a boat. A storm hits and the boat capsizes (Charlie dying). My husband is terrified and grieves the journey he thought we were going to take but he swims to shore. He is standing on the shore calling out to me. He cares. I can see he cares. He says, 'come, swim. You can do it.' And yet, I can't. My legs are too heavy. My mouth too full of sea water. And huge waves keep swamping me so that it's harder and harder to hear him calling.

It's been five months since Charlie was born. And we are at a point in this metaphor where I feel, we've both found ourselves life rafts. We are on the rafts, safe but drifting about. The ocean is mostly calm, almost deathly still at times but the thing is, we don't have paddles. We can feebly paddle toward each other but there's a current and at times it pulls us away from each other. Other times, we speak to each other but our voices seem hollow. His voice reverberates but I find it hard to take anything in.

You're probably thinking, ok, chill with the metaphors. But the fact is, baby loss changes relationships. It makes people either gush around you, or tiptoe around you. It makes people paranoid that they're doing something to remind you of your baby's death, as if you don't think of it nearly every minute of every day. It makes people face the scars that they've built up over lifetimes if they find themselves grieving your baby's loss too. Those scars might feel so uncomfortable and sensitive that they prefer not to acknowledge your baby's death, which can cause a chasm because of course, we want our babies to be acknowledged, to be remembered.

And if your partner, like mine, loves your baby as much as you do, even if you feel like you're adrift on the ocean, remember that no one else knows your grief like they do. This is not easy. This takes a lot of conscious effort when your nervous system is being raked over the coals. Remember, that whilst others can turn their backs to make it easier on themselves, your partner can't turn their back on their loss, even if they might try. They are in it with you.

And so perhaps, when they hand out those pamphlets maybe there should also be some acknowledgement, that maybe you will walk out of those doors, leaning on each other but it won't be that easy. It will be hard. It'll take you on the wildest, grittiest ride of your relationship. Is it worth it? Only you know that deep down.

Losing a baby and having to fight for the relationships around you was never going to be easy. We probably will never feel like the young, optimistic, carefree couple I remember us to be. But who knows? Maybe it will make us stronger. Only the future can tell.