8week miscarriage isn't quite the same as delivering a full-term stillborn?

[Lira]

I'm really sorry for the upsetting nature of this post but i am heartbroken. Tomorrow is the third anniversary/birthday of my stillborn son who was born full term. I have phoned round my friends to ask if they are free to mark the occassion like we do every year. We go for lunch or something. We talk about him.

My friends have been quite evasive about it this year and finally one called this morning saying she thinks i should let it go. I can't keep letting this haunt me forever. She had a miscarriage at eight weeks a few years ago and i don't see her organising anniversary lunches etc. Her words.

I'm so sorry if this sounds cruel, but to me - yes, they are two horrible situations but not quite the same. Delivering a full term baby, and holding him, getting a photo of him etc is not on the same level as a eight week miscarriage. Just as i think someone losing a child - for example a baby to cot death - is again far worse than delivering a still born.

I understand that everyone has different emotional boundaries. So for some people, a miscarriage at 4 weeks could feel the same as someone losing a child to cot death.

Basically, i jusst feel quite embarrassed now and isolated. I want to celebrate Ethan's life no matter how short it was. But i've been made to feel it's insignificant. Am i being unreasonable thinking both of our children's deaths are terrible, but not quite on the same level?

Absolutely expat you do find out who your friends are.

There may not be many left but those that are are usually diamonds.

i am so sorry for your loss op and i hope you have a special day remembering Ethans birthday.

fwiw if one of my friends was having lunch for this reason i would make sure i went.

i dont think its worth comparing grief, its such a personal thing, am also annoyed this thread has been moved and no explanation from mnhq! if op requested it was moved that is fine. if not then shame on you mnhq!

i agree with expats posts and miasmummy

much love to all who have suffered the loss of a child xxx

"But, maybe it is time for a change.

3 years ago, I had a 1YO and a newborn. Now I have two children in school. Times change. "

Dear Lord, that has to be one of the most insensitive comments I've ever seen in response to the loss of a child

The thing is, there is a hierarchy of grief. Some losses are way more traumatic, life changing and harder to deal with than others. The difficulty is that everyone's hierarchy is different and you sometimes can't predict what yours is until some shit things have happened to you.

I found not getting pregnant painful, IVF failing more painful and the final round of IVF failing totally surreal in its other-worldliness. My life changed in one sentence and because I didn't even have any embryos transferred that time, I felt totally unable to share with anyone. It isn't a loss that many people would be comfortable discussing and its not like you can buy sympathy cards for "Sorry your IVF failed and you are totally barren"! In my case my mother was diagnosed with (they thought) terminal cancer the day after, so the family's focus was (understandably) on her crisis. So I can identify totally with your feelings of isolation which took me a long time to deal with.

The problem is that you can't make your friends empathetic. The best you can do is to explain to one of them privately how you feel and how you had a real child which you are still grieving and how lonely you feel.

If that isn't going to work then I would suggest finding and talking (online or in real life) others who have suffered a similar loss. There are sadly many others who suffer in the same way who may also be able to help you confront others in your life in a way that helps.

I'm so sorry for the loss of your baby - if you are anywhere near me I would happily celebrate with you.

My niece lost her cousin a few years ago. (Daughter of her fathers twin brother had an Epileptic fit in the night)

She was asked to say a few words at the funeral. She said "People ask me how many cousins I have and I say 5, but one is living with the angels looking after us all. I cannot say I have 4 cousins but had 5, because this is not true, I still have 5 cousins, Alice exists, in my mind, in my heart and in my memories, I will have her for ever". I thought this was very beautiful and perceptive of a young girl.

Of course you should celebrate your childs birthday. I am not taking your friends side in this, just trying to explain how she might feel, and why she might have reacted like this. It reminded her of her own loss, and she needs to move on, I suspect.

My uncle died of whooping cough he was 2. I know his name, where he was buried, when he died because my grandmother still talks about him occasionally. She's 97.

Since losing Oliver I've found I have far more empathy for people who've lost a child.

Yes his death was totally traumatic and even now I can still start shaking out of the blue but I can absolutely break my heart when I hear or read about another mother losing her child.

It isn't a competition and nor should it be.

I do struggle with the idea that there are no hierarchies of grief and that it is no 'competition'. Because isn't that denying the reality? Most people do have a hierarchy of grief in their minds. Say that I tell you that I lost my friend Bertie 10 years ago. I'm still inconsolable. Bertie was a snail in my garden. Is that ridiculous? Of course it is. If I truly am inconsolable, that is probably because I am emotionally not very stable.

On a different scale, I don't think it's fair to tell someone who has suffered a stillbirth that it is the same emotionally devastating experience as suffering a miscarriage at 4 or 6 or 8 weeks, and that thinking otherwise is somehow engaging in competitive grief. The fact is that most people will never get over a stillbirth, which on the whole is not the case for miscarriage - and that as far as I am concerned is the right way around. I had an extremely traumatic ectopic pregnancy a while back, but would I compare it to a stillbirth? Not in a million years.

I feel as if lots of people expect you after a decent amount of time, say 6 months, to be more or less reconciled and moving on. They would like it if you became their wise, compassionate, ocasionally wistful but never discomforting friend.

I agree libelulle. I've had 3 early mcs and went on to have two children. The mcs were upsetting at the time, but had i suffered a full-term stillborn. Well I can hardly imagine how devastating that would be.

whatevertheweather, I think I may have upset you with my post and if so I am very very sorry. (I was someone who suggested a more private thing to mark the day). The reason I said that is not because I don't think the op's or anyone else's ongoing grief at losing a child is valid, I do, very much so. If she was my friend I would be marking the day myself. But as the op's friends are pulling away and seem to be offering her less support and to be less keen to mark the birthday, I thought that for that reason perhaps something with just close family or her dH might be more of a proper birthday marker. I can't imagine it would be helpful for the op to have friends there who are half hearted about it or don't really want to be there. I should have clarified that in my post, I didn't express myself very well, the last thing I intended was to hurt anyone who has lost a baby. Im my experience though there are many people who are very uncomfortable dealing with death and who do want the bereaved to "move on" because they find it all too uncomfortable. I don't think that is right, but it happens and we can't always change that attitude, or may not want to drop the friendships.
OP can you talk to your friends about this?

Anyway, Lira I'm so sorry your friend hurt you. She's obviously a good one as she so upset you so I hope you two can work this out.

In the meantime Ethan is in my thoughts.

When I was 8 weeks pregnant with my dd, I suddenly started bleeding copiously and passed a massive clot (sorry for tmi)
I phoned the hospital, the doctor told me that it didn't sound too hopeful and to come in for a scan the next day.

So I thought I'd lost the baby. I really did. I thought you couldn't lose that much blood and still be pregnant. It was dreadful. I felt awful, robbed. devastated.

But it turned out, she was still in there heart beating away. Later my obs found a second empty sac so it seemed I had lost her twin.

Then I had her at 28 weeks and then she died unexpectedly 7 weeks later. I should have still been pregnant had the pregnancy gone to plan.

There is NO comparison! Yes, they are both a loss. But if you get pregnant, you know at the back of your mind that a lot of pregnancies end in early miscarriage. So you know you're not "there" till you have the 12 week scan and the baby looks viable.

With stillbirth, you lose a fully formed baby. You felt him kick, you bought stuff for him. You can hold him/her in your arms and cuddle them until you have to give them back. They are a child. You have a funeral, a coffin. And most of the time, it is totally unexpected.

I lost Sylvie-Rose to SIDS, not stillbirth. But some of the ladies on the bereaved mums' threads who lost their babies to stillbirth lost babies who had actually been on the earth longer. Some of them were bigger, heavier babies than she was. They were babies. And even the ones who were smaller, earlier, nothing in any of the conversations I have ever had with those ladies would ever make me think their loss was less than mine because their babies never cried or saw the world.

When you lose a child you never, ever get over it. There is no moving on. Time marches on and other people may forget but we don't. It's not like losing a parent which is bad enough in itself, because your parents are supposed to die before you. When you lose a child, you are always thinking "He/she should be now, should be walking/talking/going to school, should be getting on with the business of growing up.

I will celebrate my daughter's birthday every year. As it happens, I don't have friends who come over for the occasion but I would be very, very hurt if anyone who had been involved to start with, decided to opt out.

Lira I am so sorry. Losing a child is one of those situations in life where you find out who your friends are. I have been so disappointed in friends I thought would always be there and surprised too at some of the people who came up trumps.

onceortwice "Amber but at some point, you don't 'relive' the birth anymore, do you? You celebrate the child, where they are now"

Dear God, I would love to know for sure where my child is now! But I can assure you, last August 16th, when we sang Happy Birthday and cut a chocolate cake and released a "1" balloon into the sky, I was not at that point thinking "This time last year I was lying in a hospital bed, doped to the gills having had 10 units of blood and not so much as a photo of the tiny girl who was in an incubator upstairs"
I was celebrating the birth and existence of that little girl, however short-lived it was.
And hoping that somehow, she was still there in spirit watching us all and knowing she was remembered.

I've had an 8 week miscarriage and I had a 20 week live birth. They were totally different events, I was heartbroken by the miscarriage but it's totally different to going through labour to push out your lifeless baby, to hold them whilst they die and to cling onto their dead body wishing you could change something to bring them back.

There's a reason most people don't talk about being pregnant until 12 weeks, because you know pregnancy is vulnerable that early on. When I was pregnant with my angel-baby I got to 8 weeks and felt a little more relaxed, got to 12 weeks and thought I was invincible. When I started to get a lot of pain at 19 weeks I was happy to believe it was a UTI like the doctor said and I'd be OK. Until the moment she was born no one had ever said I was in labour and I didn't believe it, I thought it would stop and everything would be OK babies just aren't born at that stage.

Yes someone might be heartbroken and devastated by an early miscarriage but they wouldn't be less so for a stillbirth or early death, I don't know anyone who has been through both who has said that the two were equal.

"I will celebrate my daughter's birthday every year. As it happens, I don't have friends who come over for the occasion but I would be very, very hurt if anyone who had been involved to start with, decided to opt out."

Why?

Why can´t they stop at some point?

diddl, losing a child is incredibly intense. It seems that you don't want to understand - just be belligerent.

I do want to understand-which is why I´m asking.

Of course they can stop, diddl! They can do what they want. But I would be hurt if they wanted to drop out.

Diddl - I think it would depend on why they stopped participating. If it was because they had lost touch with you, or were going through a lot of shit themselves, or some other reason like that then you would just have to let it go. But if they were quite happy to ask you for favours and see you for other reasons but then just suddenly said "I think you should move on so I'm not helping to celebrate your child's birthday," then I think it would be normal to be very very hurt and to reevaluate the friendship.

Don't you agree?

Because, diddl, your child does not stop being your child, even if they die. And if my friends love me, they will want to remember my child.
Friends we rarely see, sent a card for dd's birthday. Not a big "Hey, you're One! party time!!" type of card but a lovely card to show they cared. That's what friends do.

Sorry, you already put that

Kewcumber the "time for a change" lines you quote from another poster; I was utterly gobsmacked by them when I read them in their orginal post. WHAT do they mean? Are they as absurd and callous as I think they are?

I would do anything for my friends as they would me.

That's the whole point of having and being a friend.

I don't get why anybody would say it's time to move on or let go. Awful.

Oh and on my daughter's birthday we buy chinese lanterns (bamboo and cotton, no wires) for everyone who is there and we each write a message on one. Then we release them and my eldest shouts bye to them.

It's not a book club.
The OP presumably thought long and hard over the people she wanted to share the memory of her son with
It's not something that is ever going away, it's their birthday, it's the one day that will be there year after year, never changing
'opting out' , suggesting it's finished, that she move on, is just awful, insensitive and derisory. Of course she has got on with her life, we all do, remembering our children doesn't preclude that