'The weird countdown to a due date that has no baby.'

This story includes references to pregnancy loss that may be distressing to some readers.

I am in the baby-making season of life and I love hearing stories about conception, IVF, health, and birth stories. 

Listening to my favourite birth podcast recently, the host mentioned at the start of the episode that part of the birth story included a miscarriage but they had chosen to edit it out of the episode. 

It felt well-intentioned. They didn’t want to detract from the joy of such a positive birth story because of the previous sadness. Maybe they would share it in a separate episode later.

I wish I could neatly edit the ongoing pain I feel out of my miscarriage story.

Watch: A tribute to the babies we have lost. Post continues below. 

My heart hurt hearing those words. Fair enough, they wanted to save us from the sadness, to tuck it away for a time when sadness was allowed. The episode was only about joy. 

The cosmic misalignment of joy and grief could be avoided with the power of podcast editing. It felt all too easy to take the miscarriage part of the story away.

But I wanted to hear it. I needed to know that I wasn’t alone. That a miscarriage was part of the story and that if she had a happy ending, maybe I would too. 

Yes, I’m making this all about me; it’s my story now.

In the past 12 months, I have had two miscarriages. When I had my first miscarriage, I distinctly remember saying to my husband, “Maybe this will be the one second of our podcast episode where I casually say we had multiple miscarriages but we kept trying and now we have a baby in our arms,” laughing darkly trying to console myself. 

It was the start of December 2022; our shop was busy, and I had to try and park the pain and focus on work. 

I did a truly terrible job and was in constant pain the whole month before I was finally allowed to have D&C surgery to remove the last remaining 'products of conception'.

Traumatic doesn’t cover how hard that month was.

We resumed trying to conceive in February 2023, which was made more complicated because my husband had chemotherapy in 2020. Cancer is the gift that never stops giving. I am grateful that my husband is alive, he’s thriving, but the tiny troops have been depleted and limp towards their goal. 

The first miscarriage was apparently a good sign. Our IVF doctor suggested that if we had magically become pregnant then, we should try and maybe it would work again. Maybe we’d be lucky.

Months of home ovulation and pregnancy tests feel like a very unsatisfying way to spend your money when the result continues to be negative.

Then the day I kept praying for arrived in the middle of July. I unwrapped a test, performed the exact well-practised instructions and left it sitting on the window ledge. I ran out of the bathroom and got dressed, mentally counting down the three minutes to the result. 

My husband was sticking his head out of the shower as I walked back into the bathroom, grinning from ear to ear. “I think it’s positive,” he said beaming.

The joy was very short-lived. After confirming with a positive blood test, and a week of excitedly exchanging baby name ideas and glowing about what a great big brother my son would be, I lost the baby, again.

When I realised our second miscarriage was starting, I wailed loudly in the bathroom as my heart broke. My husband came running from the kitchen. He held me, and after a furious cry, I quickly pulled myself together. I tried to edit my pain in real-time. 

I wanted so badly to pause the grief as I realised that I would be sharing my 35th birthday with my second miscarriage. A horrible misalignment of joy and grief.

Maggie May with Remy. Image: Instagram @maggiemay

Then the weird countdown to a due date that has no baby and is just filled with all the 'what could have been' milestones started again. 

I had just gotten through the last ‘miscarriage milestone’ journey, and now I had to start all over again with another whole person who was so dearly prayed for and wanted.

I realise now that miscarriage happens to a lot of us, but we are quiet in our grief.

We don’t want to frighten other women or upset anyone with our misfortune. If you share the pregnancy too soon, then you have to tell everyone. If you tell no one, then you’re alone. Even though we didn’t tell anyone, I still shared my miscarriage. It’s part of our story.

After one healthy baby, it was a horrible surprise to me that a positive pregnancy test would result in anything other than another baby. As I share my journey online through my Instagram, I’m hundreds of messages deep into “I had a miscarriage too.”

I’m not pregnant. There isn’t a happy ending in this story, yet.

But I hope my story makes you feel seen, especially when we might like to neatly edit this part of the story out or skip ahead to a happy ending.

If this has raised any issues for you or if you would like to speak with someone, please contact the Sands Australia 24-hour support line on 1300 072 637. 

Maggie May Moshe is an artist and founder of Think Thornbury. To follow Maggie and read more of her words, go to @maggiemaymoshe on Instagram or visit her website here.

Feature Image: Instagram @maggiemay