The One Where All of Her Friends Were Pregnant

TW: Pregnancy Loss

I am 36 years old. That means that if my friends want to have kids it’s now or never. Unfortunately for me, that means a lot of my friends are having kids now. And I am… not.

It’s hard. I think the main theme of this blog post is going to be that it is just plain hard. It’s difficult to navigate friendships when you’re a loss mom and your friends are pregnant. It is difficult to keep friends when they’re pregnant, to communicate with them, to relate to them, to be happy for them, to be around them, and quite honestly, it’s hard to just see them. Let’s start there, with the bare minimum.

How do you keep a friend when literally seeing a picture of them makes you cry? I remember exactly where I was post-loss when I saw the first picture of my friend and her baby bump. It was bad. It set me off for about three full days. It was not a surprise that she was pregnant, I already knew. It was also not a surprise how far along she was, I knew her due date. But to see that physical proof of something she had that I didn’t have, it was brutal. (Side note: I do not fault her at all for posting a photo, in fact I have a whole blog coming about this.)

I saw her body, and my thoughts started to spiral: Was I ever that big? What did people think of me? Did they ever think I was pregnant? What do people say to her when she’s in public? Do people congratulate her? Give up their seat for her? Can her husband feel the kicks? Do they ask her what the sex of the baby is? Does she already have names in mind?

All of these were things that I never got to have, and they were right there in my face. The hardest part was that when that picture was taken, she was exactly the same amount of weeks I was when our daughter died, but every body is different, and my body never looked like that.

One option to deal with these friendships would have been to stop all communication with my pregnant friends, or as my therapist called it, avoidance LOL. I decided this was not what I wanted for a few reasons: 1. I had lost enough, and I didn’t want to lose my friends, too. And 2. My anxiety NEEDED to know that my friends were ok.

One of the worst parts of navigating these relationships was that my emotions were and are unpredictable. I really didn’t know that seeing a photo would be so triggering. But I knew that if a photo sent me down a rabbit hole, seeing a pregnant friend in person would be even worse. For that same friend in the photo, we were going to hang out a month later, but I ended up telling her a week later that I couldn’t. I just didn’t think it would be productive for either of us if I was crying the whole time. Another month later, I changed my mind again and decided that I wanted to see her, so long as she wanted to see me. My feelings and moods kept changing, and there was no way she could have known.

A month ago, I went to coffee with another friend who was 9 months pregnant. I was SO proud of myself for this, especially for giving her a hug when I left. I thought I might spontaneously break into sobs when her baby bump touched my flat(ter) stomach, but I held it together.

Even when we didn’t physically see each other, it was hard to cut off friends from communication when we were used to speaking constantly. As I mentioned in my blog about small talk, conversation felt extremely meaningless when I knew we were just dancing around and avoiding the big stuff. As the loss parent, it was my job, I supposed, to lead the conversation. Most good friends avoided speaking about their pregnancies to me at all. I knew they did this to protect my heart, but sometimes it felt like they were actually just hiding from me and excluding me. When I most recently heard from a friend that she, too, was pregnant, she told me she wouldn’t talk about it at all on the group chat. For some reason, that rubbed me the wrong way. I knew she was doing it so that the chat would be a safe space for me, but instead, it felt like my friends were afraid to talk about their lives in front of me anymore. I was too fragile for them to share with, and they had to walk on eggshells around me. It made me take a step back and think about what I actually would want, if asked, and I realized that I didn’t know! How could my friends possibly know if I didn’t know.

In my specific case, I had the added complication in my loss that I nearly died. When I think of pregnancy, I think of death. I know too much. I know allll of the things that can go wrong. For example, my anxiety and superstition would not let me publish this blog until all of my friends due in September delivered alive-babies, and all of my friends survived and went home from the hospital.

Recently, I texted another one of my pregnant friends who lives in the same neighborhood as me. I had texted her on her birthday a few months back and she hadn’t replied. I had seen her post a few times on social media, but she never mentioned a pregnancy. I started to get nervous. I texted and asked how she was, her due date, how everything was going. As I suspected, she hadn’t been texting me because she didn’t want to push her pregnancy on me. Once I texted, I opened our communication again, which I was happy for, but then she offered for us to go on a walk. This was one step too far. I couldn’t imagine chit-chatting and walking alongside a 9-month pregnant person. I typically avert my eyes when I see pregnant strangers on the sidewalk! She totally understood when I turned her down for a walk, but I imagine it was confusing for her that I was fine to ask about her due date, but not to see her. I couldn’t explain this discrepancy.

A few months ago, another one of my pregnant friends asked me if I wanted to know when she had the baby. I was adamant that I wanted, nay, NEEDED to know that she had the baby. I explained how I had extreme anxiety keeping me up at night, knowing that so many of my friends were about to go through this mortal and dangerous time in their lives. Of course, my therapist reminded me constantly that many babies (most babies, even) were born fine, and their moms are fine, but all I could remember was what happened with me. My friend told me she hadn’t even thought that I may be thinking about her own safety, but she was so glad she asked me if I wanted to know about the birth, because she was nervous to tell me.

During pregnancy, my friends were uneasy talking to me, but leading up to their due dates, they were even more hesitant. The crazy part was, I had experience with labor and delivery! I used to be someone that people went to for advice, but in this one area, I was cursed. People forgot that I had a kid and she just, unfortunately, died. My friends knew I was pregnant, and they knew I was not anymore, and a lot of them read this blog. But most of them forgot that I was VERY pregnant, that I understood what it was like to be pregnant, that I went through 31 hours of labor, and that I delivered a child. I’ve done it.

I was recently talking with a friend who had an induction date coming up and she was explaining to me a procedure she planned to have to induce labor. She explained it for a minute or two until I interrupted and said, “I know what that is, I had that.” I had it all. They did almost everything to get my baby out of me because she was literally killing me. I had a balloon. I had a membrane sweep. I had multiple (failed) epidurals. I had fentanyl in doses that I thought were reserved for shows like Ozark. I had an emergency operation post-delivery. And then, I was post-partum. I had all of the problems and physical limitations that come along with that. I was doing everything possible to prevent and minimize milk production, I had hormone changes, night sweats, a ban on sex and hot tubs, I just didn’t have a living child. I could relate to my pregnant and post-partum friends (minus the whole “taking care of a living baby” part), but it was uncomfortable to talk about because of the ending. I completely understood that they wouldn’t want to think about my experience because it was scary and horrible, but sometimes it felt like their avoidance invalidated my story.

On the flip side, I couldn’t really bring it up either because who wants to think about possible bad outcomes when they have hope and happiness? While I wanted to text my friends daily and remind them to check their blood pressure at home, I recognized that while I thought I was protecting and looking out for my friends, it could have been viewed as patronizing, not staying in my lane, and projecting my anxiety.

When I first talked with my therapist about my anxiety around my friends’ pregnancies, she asked if a small part of me wanted something to go wrong with their pregnancies so I wouldn’t have to go through this alone. But you know the saying, “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy?” Well, I certainly wouldn’t wish this on my close friends. Not even a tiny little bit. I spent many weeks agonizing over whether to send baby gifts in advance. Even though my friends didn’t send me their registries, I knew where to find them on Amazon or Babylist, I had had them myself! Every time I added things to my cart and went to check out, I imagined them having to return the gifts or send them back, or worse, look at them in their homes and cry. I remembered myself packing our baby stuff on a luggage cart 12 hours after returning from the hospital so my mom could take it all out of our apartment. I thought about my friends having to go through that, and I couldn’t do it. I decided I would wait until all babies were earth-side and I could feel some sense of calm and celebration for everyone. I’m not going to lie, buying items I had looked at for myself, and sending them to someone else, was not easy. At all. But I tried to channel my relief that they didn’t have to go through what I had, and I was able to feel some sense of joy. As a lot of memes say, “happy for you, sad for me.”

It’s hard not to compare. When my first friend mentioned she had a baby at 3 am, I remembered that I had, too. But she was in labor an entire day less than me. How was it fair that she had a living child AND 24 hours less of labor? I thought to myself, “AT LEAST let her go through a tough labor.” But then, a few weeks later, another friend of mine had her baby and her husband talked on Instagram about how strong she was for going through 24 hours of labor. Meanwhile, I went through 31 and no one was singing my praises on the internet. I can’t tell you what it’s like to labor hoping you’ll have your alive baby in your arms soon, but I can tell you what it’s like to labor knowing yours will be dead and I can almost 100% assure you it’s worse. But none of this is fair, and knowing that others went through 4 or 24 hours of labor doesn’t make it any better.

So, PHEW, now they all have living babies and everything is great, right? Wrong. Pregnancy, while temporary, leads to a permanent role change. The best-case scenario of having a pregnant friend, is that they eventually become a parent friend, and they have a living child for the entire rest of their lives. This brings a whole new set of problems I’ll reserve for another post.

A few weeks ago, I was on my way to a baby loss event with Baby Loss Library when I was scrolling through Instagram and saw my third friend who was due in September had her baby. Almost at the same time, she messaged me. She said since it was Sunday, she was planning to “have beer and watch football like a normal person.” I was on my way to an event full of moms with dead babies, and I realized the cold reality that I would quite literally never be a “normal person” again. Yes, I might have my own little family someday and I may also be watching football and drinking a beer, but I’d always have a dead baby. It was impossible in that moment not to compare. I was thankful to spend the day with women who understood, but the contrast of a “normal person” versus me, spending the day talking about dead babies, is my reality now and forever.

When I started writing this, I wanted to give tips. I wanted it to be a “how-to” of navigating friendships while dealing with loss. After free-writing, I realized I can’t give a how-to, because I literally don’t know how to! My main takeaways are for those who are pregnant: You should know that navigating this is hard. While us loss-parents know you are probably scared to bring up your pregnancy, and you are probably scared to even reach out period, please do. It’s a huge burden for the loss mom to constantly reach out. Loss moms are probably anxious, scared, scared to scare you, and lonely. We probably don’t want to bring our bad juju into your space. But we also probably love you and want the best for you. And while we may not be able to be “happy” for you every day because we’re jealous and angry and sad, we also don’t want to lose you. We’ve lost enough. So please, check in. Ask how to be present without showy. Be sensitive but not absent. Ask what we want to hear. What pictures of your babies we want to see. It may change day to day. And hopefully someday, we can all have earthside kids who play together.