WhenChrissy Teigen's black-and- white hospital photo appeared on my Instagram feed, her face etched with the heartbreak of a lost pregnancy, I did not need to read her words to feel her pain. My son Jake was stillborn six months into my pregnancy, on 12 March 2019. Weighing less than 2lb, with a thick head of brown hair and eyebrows that closely resembled his big sister’s, Jake never took a breath in this world.
Model Chrissy and her musician husband John Legend described losing their son Jack this month as, ‘The kind of deep pain you only hear about.’ For me, the experience of losing our son didn’t begin with pain. Days earlier, I’d felt a flurry of movement from my boy but, when the midwife listened for his heartbeat, it had gone. A scan of his still body, floating against the darkness of my womb, confirmed that, at 26 weeks and a day, Jake Ezra Max Mond would not be born alive.
My husband Sam and I had two daughters, Phoebe, six, and Demi, four; some people don’t have any children, I told myself. It’s common, I said; people lose babies all the time. Eight babies are stillborn every day in the UK – one in every 250 pregnancies – and one in five women experience miscarriage (loss before 24 weeks) according to the charity Tommy’s. My labour was induced and I would have to give birth to him. I was in survival mode, I couldn’t allow myself a connection.
Then I held him. He was my child and he had been alive. I loved him. I kissed him. I cleaned him. It felt like I could have taken him home.
‘Driving home from the hospital with no baby,’ Chrissy wrote on Twitter. ‘How can this be real.’ I wanted to tell her I understood and that she would come through it. I don’t need a trigger to remind me of Jake, his loss is a constant twitch inside my chest, but her openness jolted me back to that day.
It was only when I handed Jake over, knowing I would never see this child again, except in a photo, that pain pierced me, creating a wound that would never heal.
Chrissy will have a choice – you can shut down or continue to live your lives. I decided we would survive this by talking.
We never showed our girls sadness; I didn’t want them to carry that. We say his name – just as Chrissy honoured her son, Jack, when she told the world about him using his – and my girls include a little boy when they draw pictures of our family. After I had Jake, people didn’t know how to speak to me. I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me but they’d say, ‘You’re still young,’ ‘You have two children,’ ‘You’ll get pregnant again.’ It hurt. My body still looked and felt pregnant (I got milk) and that was very difficult for me: a physical reminder there should be a baby in my arms.
It doesn’t matter how many Instagram followers you have, nothing will dull the pain Chrissy Teigen is feeling. People have criticised her for sharing such raw grief on social media, but her candid words will help women who might otherwise feel they’re going through this alone. There were days so low I wanted to drive myself into a bridge, that’s why it’s so important to talk.
It’s 19 months since we lost Jake and the pain subsides. There came a point, last year, where I snapped into real life. I always wanted three children and last summer suffered a miscarried at 11 weeks. It’s not about replacing Jake, but filling a void. Life will go on – and Jake will forever be my son. For support for baby loss, visit Sands (sands.org.uk) and Tommys (tommys.org )