By ELAINE FORD
A father who lost two children due to miscarriage has helped set up a volunteer male-to-male peer support service for other grieving dads.
Wayne Faulkner, who lives in Western Australia and has a full-time job, also volunteers with Sands Australia – a not-for-profit organisation of bereaved parents that support other parents who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth and newborn deaths.
Mr Faulkner started the volunteer male-to-male peer support service where “dads, granddads, brothers and workmates can come to gain more information on how they can understand and cope with the tragic circumstances of the death of their baby”.
“The male peer-to-peer support thing came from what I’m doing and that’s now filtering out into all the states, which is fantastic,” he said.
“We are all volunteers, we all have other jobs – real jobs.
“I work in the oil and gas industry in logistics and that’s as stressful as a job I’ve have at the moment anyway.
“To take this on board on top of that, I thought ‘well, maybe it’s going to take off fairly slowly, and as we develop it, there’ll be more blokes want to come on board, and maybe husbands of the mums that are already involved as volunteers will want to help and assist’, and that’s slowly happening.”
He said the main theme through everything that Sands does was about peer support.
“There are other groups that offer professional counselling and all those sorts of things [but] we don’t put ourselves up as being counsellors – we’re not, we don’t do that,” he said.
Top Comments
From one bloke to another. Good onya mate, that's awesome and I hope it all goes well.
I fully support this - what a wonderful group. As a woman who has lost her first baby, I knew exactly what I was feeling the last few weeks, but my partner has been a bit of a closed book. I knew he was incredibly excited when we found out we were pregnant, but I think he compartmentalised his grief to keep me going. I asked him to open up and talk to me and he told me he was sad and disappointed, but felt that his attention was to get me through the next few weeks because I was not only going through the emotional loss, but would still have to go through the physical loss.
We found out we were pregnant at 6 weeks, found out at 8 weeks that there was no heartbeat, then we had to wait to miscarry. After 3 weeks the hospital wanted to do a medical intervention (tablet) to bring on miscarriage, this didn't work so after another week, I was booked in for a surgical intervention (suction curette).
I am another 2 weeks past the surgical intervention and physically, I feel better than I have in weeks, emotionally I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It's an incredibly sad thing to go through and I worry for our future pregnancies, but I don't know what I would have done without my wonderful partner by my side, ready for cuddles or a shoulder to cry on. I hope I have been as supportive to him as he has been to me, but I also applaud programs that help men to deal with their grief in a male setting. Men can be tough cookies, but they are human too.