Hi,
I wanted to post about my experience of coping (or feeling like I wasn’t) with a new arrival in the family. I had a ectopic treated with MTX in July, baby would have been due next Feb (first pregnancy).
In the last few weeks my SIL and her husband welcomed their second child, making their family ‘complete’. Until this point my emotional recovery was going okay, but the ‘happy event’ felt anything but happy for me, and sent me back into a grief spiral. All the feelings that I’d felt early on - unfairness, intense sadness, jealousy - sprung back up so that they were at the forefront of my mind again. I hadn’t expected it to be so triggering, maybe naively I thought that because this baby would always have been the older one it would be okay.
I also felt incredibly guilty and like I was an awful person for not being able to share in the happiness of the situation. I haven’t felt able to visit and probably won’t for a bit longer yet, but I do feel better about the situation now. What helped was reading the EPT material again and feeling like my emotional response was okay (not at all fun) but that I wasn’t an awful person, but someone still experiencing the sadness of my loss.
What might have helped would have been pre-empting the situation and making suggestions to the family about things I might not deal with well, before the arrival. Particularly group WhatsApp annoucements, knowing when to mute those groups would have helped me to avoid triggering comments.
At the time I felt like I was handling it all very badly, but now I think I just reacted more strongly than I expected. If this resonates with you I hope it makes you feel less alone, and as with all healing it does get better with time.
X