My brother and sister in law's first child was stillborn six years ago. There was a knot in his umbilical cord. This happened before I ever got pregnant and, even though it certainly added to my anxiety level while pregnant, I also had this thought: "This could never happen to me, too. I mean, what would be the odds??" I felt strangely safe. Well, clearly even though the odds were slim, it happened to me, too. (I know-- odds mean nothing once you've become the statistic).

Now I have this overwhelming sense that everyone else is using ME to feel safe themselves. I can't help but perceive this sense of almost smugness with all of my pregnant friends, as if they are thinking: "It happened to her so now I can relax and revel in my joyous pregnancy." I know this probably isn't true...maybe my experience scares people even more. And, please don't think that I say this, wishing that this would happen to anyone else because, god knows, I wish no one had to endure this pain. I only raise this because this thought-- whether it is accurate or not-- makes me feel like some kind of marked woman, like I am the designated unlucky and unfortunate one... so everyone else can rest easy knowing that they'll be safe with their happy and perfect babies.

Does anyone else ever have this feeling? Or am I the only one?

I definitely had a thought like you in the first paragraph. I had a friend who was a week ahead of me in her pregnancy and at her 12 week scan and then following amino, they found out their baby had Downs Syndrome with an associated heart problem. With much heartache, they interrupted the pregnancy. It was totally unexpected as my friend was only 32. At the time I thought and I was nervous about my 12 week scan but thought 'well what are the odds of this happening to us both'. My 12 week scan was fine but my 20 week scan showed an abnormality with a 75% association with Downs Syndrome. In the end, Matilda didn't have Downs Syndrome, she had a different and very rare syndrome. My friend and I still can't believe that come Christmas time, both of us had been expecting to have babies and now neither of us do.

My MIL lost her first daughter the day she was born. I was talking to her last week and she was saying that even after her experience, she was never worried for us when we got pregnant. And I wonder if it's because of this - thinking that surely because I lost a baby, my kids won't have too.

And yes I imagine my friend's could think this - obviously I thought it above. And I hope somehow I have sucked up a big chunk of bad baby luck for those around me but rationally I know that's not how it works.

I know what you mean about stats being meaningless when you're one of them - Matilda's syndrome has an occurence rate of 1 in 14000 but that's no comfort to me at the moment. It'll probably be reassuring in any future pregnancy but it doesn't fix any of the overwhelming sadness.

Maddie x

I remember thinking, at about week 6 of my pregnancy, that to the best of my knowledge none of my friends in the group I used to consider myself part of had had a miscarriage. There are now four with babies, one pregnant with her first and two pregnant with seconds. And I remember wondering - just for a second - if it would be me.

I told myself not to be so morbid. That of course it wouldn't be. That I wanted this baby. That i loved this baby. That everyone always worries, but that the odds were in my favour.

Odds mean nothing to me now, either. It doesn't matter if something only happens one time in a billion. If you're that one, there's no escape.

If out of me, and my best female friend, and my best male friend, it had to be one of us - then I'm glad it was me. I'm the best able to cope. I'm the person in the domestic situation where we can just try again, no biggie (yes, I'm being sarcastic with that last bit...). I'm glad it isn't the friend who sees his baby as his one chance to get his life right, or the one who can't afford any more cycles of IVF and whose husband's vasectomy can't be reversed.

So I hope that my experience DOES protect those two.

I don't know what my friends are thinking. I don't mind so much if it's a guilty secret sigh of relief that they never share with me. But god if anyone is all smug thinking they are safe now because of what happened to me.... they'd better never let on to me.

I've never confessed this to anyone but my husband. But when the female best friend got pregnant two months after me, I was - selfishly - glad I'd got in there first. I wanted to win the race. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly low, I wonder if losing my baby wasn't punishment for that horrible, selfish thought.

After I wrote this post, I tried to distill what I am really thinking here with this thought. I think what it comes down to is: Why me? Why was I, were we, was our child the unlucky ones? Why does it "seem" so easy for others? The truth is, things are just random. Thank god, the whole process works out so beautifully in the vast majority of times. But, sometimes it doesn't... and there are those parents that have to have their lives turned upside down when it doesn't. I think I am just struggling with the notion that people out there consider me some unlucky creature that deserves pity. Really, I am unlucky. I do deserve pity.... but only with respect to my loss. I know that am not Unlucky and Pitiful as a person.

Oh, B., I hate that you blame yourself for having the thought that you "beat" your friend to become pregnant first and that, perhaps, you are being punished for that thought. Trust me, I have encountered reproductive competition time and time again. IThere is so much societal pressure on women to have babies that it is normal to fall into this way of thinking. Please don't beat yourself up for this thought. YOU did nothing to cause your loss. We all have thoughts or actions from our past that we can look to as sources of guilt and shame. I know, I have many: my pregnancy was a surprise and, for a few moments, I felt bitter that a new baby would put my life plans on hold; I secretly wished for a boy; I once had a flirtation with a married co-worker while his wife was pregnant. I have looked back on all of these things and wondered if they were the reason why my daughter was taken from me. Surely these bad thoughts and deeds are worthy of punishment. When I think about it rationally, however, I know-- I did nothing to cause my daughter's death. I loved her with all my heart and did everything to fight for her. The reality is that bad things happen. It is as simple as that. We were just the 1 in 100, 1 in 1,000, or 1 in 10,000 that had to be on the receiving end of the heartbreak.

My friends and I, very recently, decided we were 'cursed' (it sounds like a terrible thing to say, and yet it was rather comforting when we decided this to be true). Irony ABOVE all ironies, is that i'm a therapist who has a sub-speciality in, you guessed iit, late term pregnancy loss. I don't know if I felt that seeing my dear clients was a protective factor, but I'll admit that I often thought "what are the odds of it happening to me?". Well, I guess the odds were pretty good.

I have infertility, and the twins were a result of IVF. At the start of my pregnancy, one of my best freinds was 3 weeks ahead of me. She went in for her 11 week check, and they found no heartbeat. U/S showed her baby died at 9 weeks. I learned this two days before I had a very serious bleeding episode with my twins, that led to a diagnosis of a subchorionic hematoma and 6 weeks of bedrest. We were only given a 50% chance of the twins surviving initially.

As I mentioned in another post, another of my best friends lost her 6 year old precious son a few years ago, in his sleep. A perfectedly healthy boy...they classify his death as 'sudden unexplained death in childhood'. She just gave birth to her son, but was in a serious car accident at 24 weeks pregnant with him, and at 30 weeks they told her he had markers on their u/s for Down's Syndrome. Luckily, he is a perfectedly healthy newborn.

My other best friend is struggling with infertilty. She's had 3 miscarriages, and is currently doing more fertility treatments after having one successful pregnant with her 5 year old.

I suppose in the weirdest of ways, we are able to support each other better in our heartache than most friends could. These friends don't expect me to forget Will or pretend that everything is ok when it's not. They just listen to me and cry with me.

I think babyloss is so much more common than people know...it's just something people pretend doesn't exist.

I don't think others feel safe because of me. In fact, I think they feel quite the opposite. I think I brought great fear to other people, because if that happened to me after everything else we'd been through, then it could happen to them too. I was doing what they told me to do and they kept promising me it would be ok and Gabe was fine until he was born. I'm a horror story, whispered over and over and feared.

I know I thought when I had my first miscarriage that the others I was pregnant with would be safe then. Because I remember looking around at the people I was pregnant with (figuratively, as many of these are online friends), and thinking it would be one of us anyway, just statistically speaking. I felt better, like ok, now my friends are safe. Turned out not to work that way.

I know statistics are crap, I've been on the wrong side over and over and over, but I still catch myself thinking that it has to work out sometimes just because it has to. Even though my stats are terrible, I still turn to them hopefully. Can you tell I am a little disgusted by that tendency.

Since this has happened, I realise that we really are all miracles. There are SO many things that can go wrong. I am amazed that anyone ever brings a living baby to term and gets to take it home.

The thing I feel the most guilt about is waiting so long to try and have babies. D and I have been together ten years this year. We've been married 6 years. I carry such guilt around. That if I hadn't waited so long, this might not have happened. It kills me sometimes.

i'm not surprised you use those things to beat yourself with scm, but it's not your fault. just crappy crappy luck.

Eve, you and your friends have had such bad luck! I'm glad that you can support each other the better because of it, but I sincerely hope that all your bad luck is over now and that your daughter is born safely and your friends don't suffer any more loss, ever again.

Eliza I think that my friends, for a few minutes, were scared by the 'if it can happen to the one who gave up alcohol when she started trying and gave up caffeine and tried to relax and hasn't smoked in 8 years and who's been eating all the right things then shit this could happen to me too' - but that that thought only lasted a minute or two. Then they all put it aside and decided it wouldn't happen to them. I wish I was that confident. But to be honest, I still think it won't happen to anyone else either.

But I have every expectation that this will happen again to me. I just hope that I get to have one baby that lives before I lose another.

"But I have every expectation that this will happen again to me. I just hope that I get to have one baby that lives before I lose another. "

That is so heartbreaking. But I understand. I stopped believing that two lines = pregnancy, let alone that pregnancy = baby. I'm amazed at women who think that, before I realize that for most people, that is how it works and I am the unique one.

We often feel the same way. I said on here somewhere, I think moops' straw-poll, that I tend now to approach everything related to ttc again in terms of the worst outcome and how I'll live with it. Like, if I take this med or do this thing and I have a miscarriage again, how much blame will this carry?

Today is hard. I'm glad there are a few of us around today and yesterday. It's really helped to talk on here.

Irony is - and again, this is something I've only ever told the hubby before - the reason I want to have more than one kid, is that if something happened to one, I would still have another.

And yet I still never expected to lose a child before it was even born.

I didn't even realise I had that expectation before I typed it here, you know.

Anyway. I have been dwelling on this all day and I think I need to stop. To turn the computer off and cuddle up with D for the night. Although he is busy shooting zombies so would probably rather I left him alone! Oh well...

Thank you all x

I'm terrified that something will happen to P. He's not that sick, there's very little wrong with him, but it's just...there were two others. They're not here. What if? He's not grown. I check on him when he's sleeping, have to force myself to let him be out of my sight at times when I'm feeling extraordinarily anxious. That, and my bizarre emphasis on telling a child who is barely entering preschool that he must marry and must not even think about becoming a priest. What? He can't tie his shoes yet, gal, get over transferring your fears to him.

Scm, you've really put your finger on it with this post. I think this idea has been troubling me for a while but I couldn't quite articulate it.

I seem to have great trouble with the concept of randomness. I even tried to strike bargains both ways. That my babies would survive because we had already had a child die in the close family circle. That my babies would survive because I already knew a number of people who had severe problems in their pregnancies. But somehow, the fact that I knew three sets of twins born healthily and at term, well that somehow counted in my favour as well. I could spin any set of facts around to ensure that my babies would be healthy.

Then, I thought that if I fell pregnant again I would be able to carry over some protective effect from the last pregnancy. But, surprisingly enough, life doesn't work like that and I had a first trimester miscarriage.

And I'm still bargaining even now, would you believe it? Like Maddie's MIL I still cling to the hope that because I lost my child, my surviving daughter will not. That thought tears at my heart. Like B, I would like to believe that I can protect my friends and my sister from losing a child, that I could somehow take the statistical bullet for all of us.

When will I ever learn. Random.