#cw pregnancy loss

[ohwise1ne]

Every month is the same. For the first two weeks, I am almost a normal person again. I go about my day the way I always have. I keep up with the laundry and make time for dinner. I stay focused and productive at work. I even think about writing. When I place my hand over my stomach (leftover instinct), I don't think about how round it should be (third trimester next month), or the still-empty room at the end of the hall. I come to believe—truly believe—that things will be different this time. I won't start testing so early, so often. It will happen when it happens. When you least expect it, or so everyone keeps telling us—and so I refuse to expect anything at all. My expectations are in fact so low during these first two weeks I become convinced I am almost okay, almost satisfied with this life and its empty spaces. With the steady, pleasant quiet. With peace.

Then mid-month arrives in two bold lines, and the clock begins its upward count anew. Two days in, I'm already having dreams of tiny feet, kicking in my belly. Four days, and I'm revisiting the half-finished registry from the summer. Five days, and I'm recalculating dates so that I can start testing earlier, earlier, the earliest the data will allow. Eight days, and I'm already up to three times daily, huddled in my bathroom, shining a flashlight on each glistening strip, squinting for a smudge, a shadow, the smallest sign of life. Anything. Ten days. The familiar dread is starting to return. It was eleven days last time, when I first glimpsed that second line—but we all know how that turned out. Does that mean it was too late then? Is it too late now? How many more months of this before it becomes too late for us completely?

Fourteen days. One line. No shadow, no smudge. I don't feel anything when I'm crying anymore. It's purely physiological: the inconvenient throb of a wound that refuses to heal. I place my hand over my cramping stomach, put the tests back under the bathroom sink. Next month will be different, I promise myself. I'll start testing later, and less frequently. Keep my expectations low. It will happen when it happens. It will happen. It will.

For another month, at least, the room at the end of the hall will stay empty.

[ayeforscotland]

Applications are now open for the baby loss memorial book produced jointly by the Scottish Government and National Records of Scotland.

It is available to anyone wishing to commemorate pregnancy and baby loss prior to 24 weeks.

The applications are completely free, entirely optional and historical applications are welcome as well.

More information available here.

[a-queer-crip-writes]

I still think about my last pregnancy a lot.

They’d be at primary school now

if they had survived to become a person.

It’s funny how I picture the heartbreak

nearly as much as the other stuff.

I pictured shaking with exhaustion

when they were a tiny baby

and having cracked nipples from breastfeeding

and worrying about painkillers in the breast milk.

Later, I pictured trying to carry them up the stairs on my chairlift,

juggling them squirming in one arm as I kept the lever down to move,

that horrible, ever-present terror of dropping them,

that bit of my brain that hates me

supplying the sound of

soft toddler bones cracking on carpeted stairs,

Juggling my crutches with their pushchair on good days;

trying to manage carrying them in my lap

while propelling my wheelchair on bad ones.

Would they have been resentful that I couldn’t

run around with them as much

as I wanted to?

Of days I had to lie in bed shuddering for hours

after I crawled to the toilet

or had to wait for their dad to get home for proper food

because my hands were shaking too much

to be safe with anything not microwaveable?

Would I have simply been Mummy

Or tried out a variety of ungendered terms

until we found one that worked for us?

Would their nonbinary parent

suddenly have become a terrible

embarrassment to them

at some point?

Or would it have been so obvious and

central to their little world that

screaming terfs would have seemed

beyond nonsensical to them?

Now I picture

phone calls from their school

on days when my other half is out on audit

and I can’t get out of bed without vomiting in pain.

Trying to call them a taxi

lying down with my eyes shut and

nothing coming out

but a jumble of unprocessed word salad.

Fighting for accommodations

we technically won last term

and yet nothing seems to have changed.

It would have been horrendously hard,

and I still very much wish it had happened

[barkhoffman]

not afraid to admit i had a mental breakdown over amanda and john's relationship😇 they make me SICK istg

that's another one that really gets me going, especially Amanda's tape to Eric Matthews at the end of II

"the second time, I was guilty" hits so much harder after you watch VI and realize Amanda's not saying she was guilty of being a junkie, but of being partially responsible for the loss of Gideon UGHGHHHHG AUUUHGH OOF OUCH like ik a lot of people hate that retcon but I think it added a depth to hers and John's relationship that makes their fucky wucky father/daughter/mentor/apprentice shit even more chef's kiss idk man idk I like it

Amanda "I was partially to blame for your child's death so I'll become the child you could never have" Young did nothing wrong ever in her life

[alpaca-clouds]

The Scars He Hides [Astarion/Tav Hurt/Comfort]

The last story for my @whumpril is online. The prompt for this one was "Why didn't you tell me?" And yes, this one goes a bit into Tav's backstory a bit.

The Scars He Hides

Fandom: Baldur's Gate 3 Shipping: Astarion/m!Tav Genre: Hurt/Comfort

⚠️This story involves some talk about Pregnancy Loss ⚠️

Astarion knows Tav is hiding things from him. However, only a fateful night out, and drunken confessions by one of Tav's friends will reveal the truth to him.

[littleprincessfawn]

CW: grief, miscarriage, pregnancy loss, anniversary of loss

Today is the anniversary of the day I miscarried, I lost my baby. They weren't born yet, but to me they were a baby. I knew I was pregnant, I was excited, I had all the symptoms. I'd just started telling people, it was a little before 12 weeks but I was too excited not to. Then one day I woke up without any symptoms. And something 'felt wrong'. And then I went to the bathroom and there was so much blood and it wasn't a period. I'll never forget the sight of that. Those clumps, that could have become my child. I couldn't flush it. It was horror. It remains etched into my memory in vivid recall. I grew wild with grief. I stared at walls and became fixated on moths.

My ex (husband at the time) said to me it never would have been our baby. He didn't grieve. He didn't care. He didn't even comfort and support me. And then after that I never got pregnant again. He didn't want to. Our marriage fell apart (not because of that, but the way he reacted to my miscarriage certainly didn't help).

So this grief, I do indulge it every year on this date. I do. Because this is the only way I can love that baby. This is the only way I can be their mother. I am the only person in the entire universe who loves that child that never was, who thinks of them, who misses them, who mourns them. If I don't remember them on this day every year, then it's like they never existed, but they DID. They grew inside me. They were alive, in a fashion, they just weren't born. They fell from me. My womb didn't hold them, didn't keep them. I know there's scientific reasons why. My mother said (appallingly) 'you wouldn't have wanted a downs syndrome baby now would you' but I would have I would have I would have loved that baby no matter what.

I know some women have miscarriages and it doesn't impact on them emotionally and that's fine but for me it did impact on me and THATS FINE TOO. I am allowed to grieve them. I will always miss them.

I will see you again, one day, little moth child. There are days I wanted to follow you so badly, but your older brother needs me. But one day when my soul is done I believe we will reunite somehow.

[clunelover]

Random nice kid things - we love Bluey, of course. Yesterday E was reading up on Bluey trivia, and let us know that there’s an episode called Dad Baby that didn’t air in the US (I looked it up and I guess they’re playing pretend that Bandit is pregnant, and then he pretends to give birth in a pool? And it’s not on Disney+ because there was a concern that it "borders on sex education?" For a…presumably cis-male dog to pretend to have a baby?? Okay sure…). Then E said, "oh, and it says there’s a reference in one episode to the fact that Chili might have had a miscarriage, and it’s now been confirmed that yes, she did." Then C asks, "what’s a miscarriage?" So I explained that in simplest terms, and he was like "oh so if she hadn’t had a miscarriage now she’d have three kids instead of two?" And I said yes (even though I guess depending on when it happened, that’s not necessarily true), and then he said "so is that why YOU have two kids instead of three, you had a miscarriage?" So then I explained that no that’s not how that works, and I haven’t had a miscarriage but I know a lot of women who have, and that I wanted to have two kids, and that people decide how many kids they want to have. He said "you get to decide??" Which I guess IS news when you’re 6 and people seem to just become pregnant at random. So I said that yes, people decide when they want to have a baby, and that that’s an important part of freedom, at which point he lost all interest and drifted away. But it was still a pretty cool talk to get to have! Also I love that more things of this nature are being normalized for talking about. I think there was one book I read as a tween that mentioned miscarriage, and I didn’t know what it meant (a character had had one, and nothing was said except it was clear that it weakened her greatly, physically…I wish I could remember what book that was). I asked my mom about it and I don’t remember what she said, either, but she was alarmed that I was asking, and I got the vibe that it was not to be talked about (and, while she certainly didn’t say "that’s gross," the extreme reaction left me with an impression that whatever it was was gross). So thanks to Bluey for this and providing a framework for me to dunk on Jeremy for forgetting important things when going places ("The Pool").

[coffeebanana]

If you're still doing writer asks, 17 and 25!

17. What’s something you’ve learned about while doing research for a fic?

Way too more than I ever needed to know about the french schooling system 😂

LOL but aside from that...I think I either tend to research next to nothing for a fic or fixate on one tiny detail and research it for an absurd amount of time. Like, for This Distance Between Us I spent several hours researching the Ritz London (ie. what it looks like, how the afternoon tea works, the menu, when courses are served, dress code, etc...) because apparently that had to be accurate. And for I Don't Believe In Umbrellas I had the characters taking a Psych course, which I've never taken, so I asked people for old course notes, looked up a syllabus for the actual NYU class, and looked through a few different topics and picked a few to learn a bit more about for some throwaway lines. For that one I went as far as taking attachment style quizes from the POV of the characters--or at least for Kagami, I can't remember if I actually did the ones for Marinette and Adrien.

For a lot of medical things I use Reddit for part of my research--not for the actual medicine, but for the how it feels part. Because you get a lot of first-hand details there that's missing from the more scientific/medical information. And I think that's made me feel a lot more confident writing about those sorts of things, because you start to realize that people will experience/describe having experienced the same thing in different ways. There's not a one-size-fits-all and that means there's lots of room for interpretation! And that's sort of how I've always approached writing things like depression and anxiety because I always knew it's not the same for everyone, but it's cool to see the same thing on the more physical side of health.

Lately I've also been researching PTSD for Marinette in Say Something, and I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've actually pulled up the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for mental health realted things in my writing. And I hadn't added the tag to the fic until recently--because it wasn't something I was explicitly trying to write in yet, even though it was in the back of my mind, and I hadn't written down a list of symptoms for her yet even though I had looked through the criteria a few times. But then I DID write down a list and I recently added the tag to the fic because I realized in my last couple rereads I realized I've actually touched (at least briefly) on pretty much everything there already--except that the symptoms have to have lasted for a month and the fic's only taken place over the course of like...a week I believe? So...it wassomewhat satisfying to find out I'm on the right track ahaha.

25. Have you ever upset yourself with your own writing? Yes! Usually after the actual writing part--when I go back to reread something and I've forgotten a specific line that packs a punch and I'm like...ouch? That happened to me like last week when I was rereading the last chapter of Say Something because a lot of that chapter touches on things that are somewhat personal to me--even though Adrien's circumstances are very different. So that resonated ahaha. And then I was upset I didn't have the ending yet to make everything better 😂

I think the only fics I ever had to step away from briefly in the middle of writing them were talk to me through the Christmas Lights and A Drop In the Ocean--the latter because (cw pregnancy loss, and this might be oversharing askjdbfskjfd but) while pregnancy loss is not something I've personally experienced, it did happen to my mom when I was 8 or 9, and that definitely impacted me too in ways I don't think I really ackowledged or realized for a long time. It's weird to be grieving in a place where people aren't giving you space to grieve--because people were telling me in different ways that they weren't my feelings to have. Which is understandable and also...not really true. And I guess I wonder how it impacted my relationship with my mom. We're not really close, but at the time I think she was actually the one person who did try to make space for my feelings. And that wasn't really what the fic was about, but it still brought up all that for me. So idk, that fic was unexpectedly hard for me to delve into. And it's probably the most nervous I've ever been posting something haha.

Thanks for the ask!! 💜

Fic Writer Asks

[snarky-sims-creations]

My Angel Baby Tattoo (CurseForge FREE)

A simple tattoo design of baby footprints and angel wings to honour one or multiple angel babies. These tattoos are base game compatible.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

2 unisex tattoos; one for the base of the neck and one for the chest

4 swatches; greyscale, pink, blue, and pink+blue

Custom CAS thumbnail

TOU

DON'T reupload or edit

DON'T put behind a paywall

DON'T claim as your own

(Optional) DO tag me if you use them. I love seeing people enjoy my content.

DOWNLOAD ON CURSEFORGE (Free, No Ads)

[rufflet]

I can honestly say I’ve never felt worse in my life as I do right now, physically or mentally.

Haven’t kept down anything since Thursday night and now I’m cramping and basically living in the bathroom on the toilet and now I’m bleeding. I was 9w5d pregnant as of today. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do in this situation. Everything hurts.

[lexigraph]

Had a dream the other day about the 'extended timeline' Jackie/V/Misty OT3.

They each had separate apartments so people could go have alone time but mostly just swapped where they slept together a lot.

I think they were all going to college (!) but

then the dream got maudlin and Misty was killed and it turns out she was pregnant (a trope I would never!) and the rest of it was just Jackie and V mourning their futures.

why is THIS the kind of detailed 2077 dream I have??

[unhingedselfships]

CW : pregnancy loss/miscarriage

The soft whimper on the edges of his consciousness prodded at him.

He didn't want to be awake, damnit. He was sure he hadn't slept for nearly long enough.

The gasp made him twitch.

What was she even doing?

She barely whispered out his name, and he was about ready to snap at her, when she bit down on a yelp.

That, he knew, was a pain noise.

He still wasn't entirely with it, but he was paying attention.

"Kimi? What's wrong?" he asked, keeping his voice low, a mildly irate sigh, "Is it your hands?" 

He knew her arthritis could get especially bad some days.

A shuddering breath, and another, and she whispered out softly, "Kenshi, I'm so sorry. I- I need you to take me to the hospital."

Suddenly, he felt far more alert.

All but throwing himself out of bed, he moved with precise efficiency.

He clicked the lamp on and froze when he caught sight of her in the light.

That… was a lot of blood.

His breath stuttered and she slowly worked on sitting up to better talk to him.

"Don't! Don't move."

"Kenshi it's fine, I'm fine-"

He laughed incredulously.

"Fine?! The sheets are soaked. You're-"

"No longer pregnant. Apparently," she cut him off, sharp, but not harsh.

He froze, and then looked at her, eyes narrowed and brow furrowed, questioning.

She sighed, "This isn't my first miscarriage. They're common in the first trimester. I-" she huffed, a little bitterly, "I hadn't even known-"

She shook her head, as though chasing away the thoughts, emotions, then winced, as another wave of pain hit her.

"I'm sorry, about the mess-"

It was all he could do not to laugh hysterically.

"-this one is, worse than the others, and I don't know why. I should go get looked at. Just in case. But it's nothing to panic over. I'll be ok."

He blinked, breathed sharply through his nose, and focused on getting back to moving, "Right. Is there anything you need?"

"No, I'll be fine like this."

Nodding, he grabbed his phone, he'd call down to have a car readied while he changed, "I'm going to get dressed, shout if you need anything."

Humming she wavered slightly and he worried over letting her out of his sight.

The last thing he needed was the girl dying on him.

The hassle that would be.

"I'll be here."

[a-queer-crip-writes]

CW oblique reference to pregnancy loss

Your plaintive cry

Ringing through the quiet when I am in bed

Calling out

With no expectation of disappointment

Your little soft dark head against my arm

As I turn the shining silver tap to

Produce the tiny perfect liquid stream

For your little deft black paw to shoot out

In reflexive delight of batting play

As your contentment brrrrrrrrrrs through my bones

Your swift leap when your thirst is sated

Waiting for me

Outside the bathroom door

To curl and rub

Your soft vibrating body against my ankles

Stretching out into a confident guiding shadow

That leads my pained and faltering steps

Back to the bedroom

Where you leap

Soft surefooted shadow

To pad pacing me on the windowsill

As I set aside my crutch

And drop bonelessly

Into my bed

Where another tight coil of soft-shadowed fur

Opens dark eyes and curls closer

To lay the weight of her head on my shoulder

Watching for you

To leap across

And pad love in soft heavy steps

And tiny spikes of sharp pain

Over my body

I am so gently weighted down and pinned

Love seeping and vibrating

Deep into my bones

There are times I let myself indulge

Oh so fleetingly

In thoughts that you

Could hold the little

Animal sparks that oh so briefly

Settled in my womb

Which could not cradle and shield

As I so heart-deep desired;

Allow myself to wonder

Might souls travel in groups

Endlessly seeking and

Returning to each other

Across the vast gulfs of moments and centuries?

And then I put those thoughts away

I will not cheapen

The vast and infinitely courageous love

That shines out of

Little bodies

By casting it other

Than what it is;

Your love is chosen

Infinite,

A tender thread across long centuries

Crossing boundaries of blood and flesh

Our species’ ancient pacts

Made endlessly anew and

Each time a tiny miracle

Undeserved blessings freely given

From great hearts.

[enbycrip]

@melgillman Thank you so very much for this comic.

I miscarried foetuses; from my own ova and gifted ones for IVF.

This helped.

Thank you.

The Night-Mother

Under the cut is the comic I drew for this year’s 24 hour comics day/48 hour comics weekend!  This is an adult horror comic, and it comes with some content warnings: miscarriage, child loss, violence, death, and nudity.

If you saw an earlier version of this post and couldn’t read the images, my apologies!  This is real beast of a comic, clocking in at 24 pages, so it takes a little extra work figuring out how to get around tumblr’s image limits.  I think it should hopefully read a little better with all the images under a cut, though.  ENJOY!

Keep reading

[clunelover]

BFF did not go into labor and had to go home. Poor thing. She had been told she would be induced this week if no labor - just shy of 38 weeks, the justification being gestational diabetes, but now her doctor is like “well hm idk it might be good if you went another week, you’re managing diabetes and baby doesn’t seem overlarge” but she’s already got her leave planned to start next week, and she also really just wants to be done - like obviously yea, better to cook longer, but due to her prior loss she has very frequent “omg I’m noticing something new…is the baby dead?” moments and it’s taking a toll and she can’t mentally really work anyway (and her job is a real job unlike mine, where she has to really be on, and people’s wellness and sometimes lives are at stake). So anyway, crossing everything that she just goes in to labor or otherwise gets to be done this week and not drag it out further.

[moonhze]

ignore sage's bizarre costume, but they're expecting!