My name is Charlette van Hout and I am mothering the memory of three lost babies.

Our journey began 7 years ago when we were struggling to conceive our first child.

After seeking fertility support and treatment, we were lucky enough to get pregnant 13 months later!  

We were over the moon!

To say I was excited was an understatement, the joy I felt along with the anticipation of expecting our first child was enormous. We were so thrilled and yet so naive. We had no idea that things can and do go wrong, the fact that not every positive pregnancy test results in a live baby 9 months later was a foreign concept.

We were full of blissful ignorance when we turned up to our 13 week scan, eager to see our first baby on the screen and enthusiastically planning our baby announcement to our family and friends, but our world was about to come came crashing down.

Everything was going fine, the banter was cheery and relaxed, our baby was ticking all the boxes, but the mood in the room changed in an instant, the sonographer abruptly stopped talking…I immediately knew that something was terribly wrong and my heart leapt in my throat…’what is it?’ I whispered, not really sure if I wanted to know the answer…he looked at us with pity and sadness in his eyes when he told us he believed our baby may not be ‘Compatible With Life’.

What does that even mean, how could this be… this kind of stuff doesn’t happen to people we know and definitely not to us?

Why me..why us..why our baby..our first little precious innocent baby who was so loved and so wanted.  With glassy eyes and puffy faces we rushed from the ultrasound clutching each other with our heads bowed hoping to avoid the stares from the other hopeful parents awaiting scans. We were never going to be the same again, in a split second our lives had changed and the naïve young couple we use to know were lost forever.
The loss of our first precious son ‘Ashton Charlie’ at 17 weeks was devastating, it sent me into a downward spiral.  I had never been faced with a grief like this before.  We had experienced death within our family before… but this was a piece of myself, something we had created, something within me, our baby, our future.  I felt truly empty.

Due to the scan being done a few days before Christmas, we had to wait for the specialist to return from holiday to confirm the findings, so for 4 weeks I had continue growing this baby like nothing had happened, I had to put on a brave face for Christmas lunch and tentatively celebrate the beginning of a ‘new year’ when we had no idea what this new year was going to look like for us.
4 weeks later I was discharged from the hospital with our precious baby’s remains in a small container tucked safely in my hand bag.  I walked away with no instructions for support and no hand book on grief.  I was left to pick up the pieces on my own and was expected to carry on like my precious little boy had never even existed.

To make matters more devastating, I had to return home to the confronting reality of four other close family and friends whose healthy pregnancies continued to grow and flourish around me, their bellies grew and they glowed with the expectancy and joy of new life.  I felt so isolated, like some sort of alien, I didn’t fit in or belong anywhere anymore, so I hid myself away from the world and grieved in silence.

It was an extremely testing time for us as a couple, desperate to create and build a future together. We thought that infertility was tough, but baby loss was a whole other level of cruelty.

I was determined to have a family and fill this gaping hole in my heart.  So we started out on the gruelling marathon that was IVF!  This is a new language in itself and I take my hat off to anyone who can come away from this challenge unscathed!

We had one private cycle, then one publicly funded round… without success… then on our third and final (private) attempt we finally got pregnant!   I’ve probably made this all sound quite simple, like it just happened: 1, 2, 3 and viola… but any IVF journey is no small feat, it was months and months and months of tests, exams, blood draws, scans, injections, travelling up and down the country, drugs, emotions, mental battles, waiting and hoping, wishing and praying followed by heartache and more loss all while continuing to work and trying to be ‘normal’.  Not to mention the heavy financial costs and the toll it takes on any relationship.  It was an all-consuming and difficult journey where the peaks and troughs were enormous and capable of swamping the most motivated, inspired and positively driven partnerships.

As we found out the hard way just because your pregnant it doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods so the next nine months were long and both physically and mentally exhausting, full of anxiety and fear, but we were lucky enough to welcome our healthy baby girl safely into the world.

I was in ‘mummy heaven’, I was so happy, she is my everything and worth every painful step (and penny spent) on this journey to parenthood!  Every lost embryo and the memory of Ashton was soothed by the joy and happiness that she brought to our lives.  I felt complete, I felt fulfilled, it was my destiny to be a mother and I was in love with every part of it.

Two years later and knowing our chances of a natural conception were less than 1%, we were very surprised to find out that we were pregnant again!

But for some reason I couldn’t help feeling reserved about the pregnancy, like it was too good to be true?  I was reluctant to say it out loud.  We weren’t strangers to baby loss and we’d learnt the hard way that not all pregnancies result in a healthy bundle of joy. But our initial scans went well and I’d almost allowed myself to relax, but… at our 20 week scan we were once again thrown into the grinder when they told us our baby boy had a diaphragmatic hernia.

I almost yelled ‘I knew it’ I knew it was too good to be true, to get pregnant naturally and that everything be ok, I was beside myself but the sonographer didn’t seem overly concerned about it at the time and assured us that our boy would be regularly monitored and the defect could be surgically repaired after birth.  The next four months were extremely stressful, we travelled up country every 3 weeks for specialist monitoring, multiple appointments, ongoing scans, regular tests and blood draws and two invasive surgeries but as we neared the end of the pregnancy our son’s health was in rapid decline.  On our final trip to Star Ship where we had hoped to stay until our baby boy was born and where his repair surgery would take place, all hope was lost when they finally told us there was nothing more that could be done to save our son. I was 39 weeks pregnant when they sent us home to wait for our boy to die.  He passed away on the morning of the 8^th of May 2018 during the beginning of my 18 hour long labour and was delivered later that same day.  Our beautiful, chubby, gorgeous 7 pound brave Little Lion ‘Leo Petrus’ was born.  Still.

My world shattered once again, I felt empty, broken and lost.  Leo took another piece of me with him and I knew I was never going to be the same again.

I was hopelessly out of my depth, searching for anything that might hold me up.  I felt like I was adrift at sea and barely staying afloat.   My mothering instincts were working overtime, my body knew I had been through a pregnancy, a labour and birth but where was my baby?  My milk came in floods just like my tears.  I chose to express Leo’s precious  milk and donate it to the neonatal unit in Christchurch, the pain of my engorged breasts would wake me in the night, I would reluctantly rise and sit crying, listening to the hum of the pump, staring through puffy swollen eyes at the picture of my beautiful boys perfect face, wishing he was with me, wishing I was getting up to a squirmy, hungry and demanding newborn… wishing that the sleep deprivation and exhaustion was because of a hungry baby and not because of the immense pain of grief and loss, I so desperately wanted to nurture my own little baby. 
I had empty arms and an empty heart.

My head knew I had to give my body time to recover from the pregnancy and birth but my heart was too eager and anxious, so 5 months later we bravely and blindly decided to try one of our frozen embryos… and we couldn’t believe it stuck!  But this pregnancy was scarier than any other, so much was riding on this little life. This rainbow baby held the promise to fix my broken heart and fill the dark space that tortured my every waking moment.

We were slowly beginning to feel whole again, tentatively allowing ourselves to feel joy about the pregnancy, timidly letting ourselves look ahead and see what our future might be like with a new, live baby in it. We really believed that lightening couldn’t strike 3 times, we’d had our share of bad luck, our small family had had enough heartbreak to last a lifetime, surely it was our turn for a happy ending.

And just when I was finally allowing myself to believe in this little miracle… we were side swiped once again, it came out of the nowhere… the universe was not done with us yet and our little family was forced to hand over another little angel to heaven, ‘Oliveah Reign’ was taken from us at 25 weeks.

Another labour…another birth…another death…I desperately wanted to go with her, I remember begging the higher power to take me as well, I was done, I couldn’t bear any more sadness and pain, just let me be with my babies.

So many pieces of me were missing now, I didn’t even know if it was possible to hold the remaining parts of myself together or if I even wanted to. I’d devoted so much of myself and my life to growing and nurturing all of my babies over the last 6 years that now I was mentally, emotionally and physically drained.

I was mothering a memory, not just to one baby anymore but to three!  It was too hard, people didn’t know what to do with me anymore, they didn’t know what to say, so they mostly said and did nothing.  They thought that pretending ‘they’ had never existed was saving me the pain of talking about it?  I just wanted people to try to reach in and pull me back, hold me up, help me through this, I couldn’t do it by myself anymore. 

But who was checking in on me weeks later, who was wondering if I was able to get out of bed in the morning, who thought to make sure I wasn’t drowning under the weight of this grief, who came to share this unbearable burden.  Where was my tribe???  I could count my tiny support crew on less than one hand.

After my most recent loss, I wasn’t shocked that once again I was being discharged from a hospital with no support or guidance or follow up appointment, the doors were literally slamming shut behind me for a third time. 

I was totally out of my depth, I needed help, so I began my anxious and lonely search for support, the first thing I found was that there was no entitlement for maternity or post par-tum counselling when your baby is born ‘dead’.  I tried three different counsellors (which is not a cheap exercise) but couldn’t find one I clicked with, I tried naturopaths, homeopaths and doctors, they each gave me some comfort but I was still sinking. So many people don’t know that the symptoms of depression are almost exactly the same as those for grief, so a few (well meaning?) people suggested that I go on anti-depressants to help me to ‘feel better’.  I wish I could have magically medicated my grief away, but I’m sorry to say there is no quick and easy way out of this.  It’s a grief tsunami and you have to hang on for dear life, hoping you’ll wash up on solid ground again one day.

I felt hopeless and alone, I was spiralling out of control and heading into an extremely dark place.   I was incredibly close to calling quits on everything. For the first time in my life suicide seemed like the only way I could see to be free of this trauma and pain, I didn’t want to live anymore, I wanted to be with my babies.

But… I was blessed, I had the unconditional, unwavering love and support of my husband, mum and my dad… and my beautiful living daughter who could somehow still manage to make me smile even through tears.   They took on the gruelling task to stand by me and with me in my grief no matter how uncomfortable and challenging, they bore the weight of the task and they alone saved me from the terrible decision to end my life.  Without them I know I wouldn’t be alive.

I’m not done grieving yet, I’m not ‘all better now’, or  ‘over it’,  I haven’t figured it all out yet, the reality is I will never be the woman I was before and there will always be huge parts of me missing.

I still have days when my arms and heart ache from the burden of my grief, sometimes the terrible feelings can still consume my every thought leaving me drained and breathless.  Some mornings I still struggle to have the energy to swing my legs out of bed, I still getting uncomfortable and avoid social situations, my throat still tightens and my heart still hurts when I hear yet another pregnancy announcement or spot a mother and new-born in the supermarket, I am still learning to listen to my body and mind and to not put pressure on myself to ‘feel better’.   I will bare the scars from this battle of loss until the day I die.

From my journey I have a newfound determination to ensure that other baby loss families’ aren’t left feeling the dreadful hollowed out loneliness that I felt.  Mothers and fathers who have suffered the loss of a baby shouldn’t be left to fend for themselves without kindness, compassion, acknowledgment or support and I want to help in some small way to provide that for them. 

One thing I know for sure is that you NEVER forget any small kindness shown you in your hour of need.