If you knew me in pregnancy you knew I was here for all the knowledge, I was obsessed with learning how my body was changing and growing, what that meant for me and my baby and understanding what it was capable of. My mindset became more focused on how our body knows what to do to deliver a baby and often it is our own intellectualising that is a barrier to what can happen. I would hope it goes without saying that I am very aware that a positive mindset does not equal a positive result, but still, through the trauma and grief I have lived with, I know that my body knows whatit is doing. I may not have had the low-light, serene, powerful and transcendent birth I hoped for. But the preparation I did, knowing that my body can carry me through is something that keeps me going now.

‘Listen to your body’ was something that came up so much in my pregnancy, in relation to exercise, knowing when you’ve overdone it and need to rest and also in birth preparation. Pregnancy prepared me for this with the niggles and aches that become increasingly hard to ignore or excuse away, they build to the crescendo of birth where your body will not allow you to not listen to it. Pregnancy isn’t just to grow a baby, it helped me gradually listen to the needs that I had. I was both the strongest and weakest I had been at birth and felt the preparation to allow my body to do what it needed felt right. It was in someways exactly what I expected.

Allowing my body to carry me through grief though is not something I anticipated or realised until recently. The pain of losing a baby is physical, not just in the obvious sense, the surgery, the healing, the recovery. But in the way the body needs to allow the intensity of emotion to travel through it. As a society, we seem driven to make sure things are okay or good all the time, when our bodies allow everything. On any normal day our physical bodies may feel energised, sore, stiff, free, strong or any other combination of things we don’t choose mentally to experience. When these are mild in contrast or feeling we don’t notice them as much or try to change them, they are just part of how our bodies work. Yet in immense grief our bodies feel pain and numbness and those around us try to make these feelings go away or cover them up with perspective or platitudes.

I’ve recognised that when the intense feelings within our bodies exist and aren’t a result of something external that can be changed, let them be, my body knows what to do. The pain is there for a reason, it is processing the enormity of my experience and I have to give it space and safety to carry me through this like it has carried me through everything else. Healing and care happen alongside.

How did I know how to grieve? I think because I learnt how to mother. I prepared myself to listen to my body and my baby’s. I learnt feeding cues and how to recognise when things didn’t seem right. The birth prep classes I did helped me reframe my perspective on the relationship between my mind and body. They both serve an equal purpose and both equally have control. Intellectualising the needs my body tells me it has and attempting to cover it will only prolong the inevitable. I learnt that our minds can only get in the way of birth and I think in the same way, when it’s too much for our minds, grief is the same and our bodies simply take over. I need to let it run its course. The intensity of agony has changed overtime, I miss my girl, that has not changed. Separating the two has been vital to allow for a life beyond pain.