A Valued Life: Helping Support Women and Men through their Pregnancy Loss Story.

Although this is a tough issue to discuss, I want to share the realization that so many women and men have to go through on their journey to having children.

No one thinks they are going to be in this club — the club of losing a baby during pregnancy. It can't be me. I did everything right. How will I ever be able to move forward? These are the thoughts that roll through parents’ heads.

Then you reflect back on the routine check-up, the day the world stopped.

You believe that your ultrasound is going to be normal, you go in, get told that everything is fine and go about enjoying your day. Then suddenly, your day turns for the worst, as the tech is trying to look for the heartbeat. The regular small talk feels different, like they are keeping a secret because they know what your reaction is going to be. Your intuition tells you something is not quite right, but they don’t say anything in the moment as they pass the information to the doctor. You feel your overthinking tendencies start to ramp up, and then the anxiety strongly takes over because you realize your life will never be the same. You wait with bated breath for the doctor, praying that there is a mistake on the scan — that this is a joke — but then the doctor slowly and sheepishly walks in, and suddenly you hear the worse news ever.

“I’m sorry, but your baby didn’t make it.”

All of the confusion, sadness, anger, and despair sits on your chest. It presses on your heart as the heaviness weighs you down, and somehow you are trying to figure out how to breathe. Gasping for air, holding on to a loved one tightly, while also sitting with the fact that you won’t be able to take your baby home. You hear the doctor share statistics and give their condolences, but suddenly everything gets blurry. You tune out the news because the complete shock disrupts your system. In the moment, you don’t know whether to throw up, yell, or sit in silence as your brain tries to process everything happening in the room.

And yet, so many couples have to deal with this reality.

You walk out of the office — baby less and unsure of what to do, where to go, and how to share this news with others.

If this is something you relate to, I promise you are not going through this journey alone.

After absorbing the painful news, whether it takes days, months or years, you try to not let fear take over, and start to think about how your future is going to look differently, knowing that losing a baby is possible, but the idea of not trying feels even more frightening.

You have this vision of how you want a family — whether it be one or ten children — and somewhere down the road, motherhood was supposed to be a part of your journey. You just didn’t know the complications that were coming, and somehow you have to figure out how to pull yourself out of a dark space.

You have to learn how to have hope again in a hopeless situation.

No one thinks they are going to have to deal with the tragedy of pregnancy loss, and then suddenly this becomes a part of your story.

My business, A Valued Life, teaches you how to breathe again in a space where it feels like pieces of you left the moment you found out that your baby didn’t have a heartbeat. Let's figure out how to tell your heart to beat again.