I ORIGINALLY wrote this a few months ago, but was not ready to put it out there at the time. Whether or not I am ready now is questionable, but here goes.

It is currently Baby Loss Awareness Week and this is what happened to us.

For some reason the loss of a baby during, or soon after, pregnancy is something many people still feel uncomfortable talking about.

Maybe they worry those listening to them will feel awkward and not know what to say.

But those who have been through it should feel like they can talk about it whenever they need to.

Baby loss is something that happens to thousands of people every day, as one in four pregnancies sadly ends in miscarriage.

When it comes to sharing pregnancy news, it is common for people to wait until after the first scan at 12 weeks.

We did this the first time round and it was a hard secret to keep. I have since learned telling a couple of close friends early on gave me an outlet to share any worries or concerns I had.

Before I continue, I want to stress this is mine and my husband’s story and it cannot be compared with anyone else’s. However a person suffers baby loss, whether physically going through it or supporting a partner, it is their experience to grieve however they see fit.

We consider ourselves the lucky ones, as our son was born before we experienced anything like this.

My first pregnancy and birth were fairly straightforward and I guess we naively thought that would also be the case for number two.

In reality, that could not have been further from the truth.

Falling pregnant a year after my son was born, I noticed I had suddenly stopped feeling sick at ten weeks.

Too soon, I thought, so I had an early scan and my worst fears were confirmed.

Our baby’s heart had stopped beating.

I will never forget hiding in the toilet at the clinic sobbing, until my husband reassured me all the other women in the waiting room had gone.

I did not want them to see me upset in case it worried them, as they had yet to go in for their own scans.

We slowly moved through this strange, new grief, but found some comfort in the fact miscarriage is so common and we could just try again, right?

I fell pregnant again the following year and spent the first 12 weeks absolutely terrified of any signs of miscarriage.

Eventually my scan date arrived and we heard those magical words “there’s the heartbeat.” Relief flooded me, but was quickly replaced with fear as the room went deathly quiet for what felt like an eternity. Something was wrong with our baby.

I do not have the space here to tell you exactly how the next four weeks played out, but we discovered our baby, a boy, had a genetic complication and it was fatal.

He only had a seven per cent chance of making it to the end of the pregnancy and, even then, he would only survive a few hours in the outside world at best.

We made the hardest decision we have ever had to make and terminated the pregnancy at 16 weeks.

My lasting memory of this time is watching buses passing by and life continuing as normal outside when I woke up in recovery, numb from the loss of my baby who had been alive inside me just an hour earlier.

It transpired one of us has a genetic imbalance that we were completely unaware of and this was likely to be the reason for our first miscarriage too.

We were told by specialists that, as we had already had a healthy child, it was possible for us to have another so we could try again if we were brave enough.

We took a year-long deep breath and did just that. That resulted in miscarriage number two and, another year on, pregnancy five resulted in miscarriage number three.

On the advice of our brilliant, supportive GP, we eventually stopped trying. Four babies we never got to hold. Four babies who will always be our children. We marked our losses in our own, private way and our babies’ due dates have become their birthdays, dates we will never forget.

Our son does not know yet how hard we tried to give him a sibling. For the past year or so we have been exploring other options available to us, so the journey is not over yet.

One day we will tell him all about it and, in the meantime we will keep talking about our losses between ourselves and with those closest to us. The more people talk about it, hopefully the easier it will become for others to open up and share their experiences too.