When Emma-Kate Dobbin miscarried her son at 15 weeks, it hit her like a tonne of bricks.
As she wrote on a recent Facebook post, “I started howling. Like an injured wolf. I couldn’t explain the hurt of seeing my little one lifeless.”
But what the Sydney mum faced after the initial shock was just as bad: the expectation that she just “cope.”
“Today is the due date of my little boy, who I lost in a miscarriage,” she wrote.
“Is it strange that I still feel so devastated by this, is something wrong with me for caring so much more than most conversations allow, or am I crazy?”
Of course, she’s not crazy. She’s just grieving, but unfortunately society hasn’t fully grasped just how difficult the loss of an unborn child really is.
So she feels alone, and she is alone with all of her thoughts, her fears, her worries and her questions.
“What do I do with all the photos of all the landmarks, do they just get put in a box like an awkward memory? Am I allowed to have his scans or is it now creepy?”
Fortunately, she realised that it’s not creepy, nor is the desire to remember and grieve for her child.
“What’s truly crazy dawned on me as I came upon post after post from thousands of women, all in many stages of loss writing across forums and articles, and I realised how ridiculous it is I would actually judge myself for wanting to honour the child I was carrying.”
While it took a lot for Emma-Kate to share her harrowing miscarriage experience with the world, she did so in order to help others going through the same thing.
“This isn’t about my loss, it’s about all of us,” she wrote. “Being allowed to see how amazing we are and how much more respect we deserve to be given to the journey of motherhood, at any stage.”
