Pippa O’Connor recalls the heartbreak of miscarriage for Baby Loss Awareness Week

Saturday marked the start of Baby Loss Awareness Week, a campaign set up to help grieving parents work through the pain that losing a baby can cause. Now in its 19th consecutive year, the week-long event aims to bring people together as a community to give them the space to share their own experiences – just as Pippa O’Connor did over the weekend. 

Posting about what she and husband Brian went through when they lost a child this time last year, the mum of two said that it’s “important to keep these conversations going”. “Today marks the start of #babylossawarenessweek,” she began. “I never knew it existed until I was sitting in hospital last October 9th waiting to have a D&C. I was googling & scrolling wanting to read something I could relate to. Thankfully there’s a lot more information out there & people sharing their stories more than ever before. 

“I think it’s so important to keep these conversations going,” she continued. “You aren’t alone in what you’ve been through and sometimes you just need someone to say ‘I know how you’re feeling’, that feeling like you’ve just fallen through a trap door… I get it & I’m sorry & it’ll ease with time. So, I’m just sending much love to anyone that needs it… be kind to yourself,” she finished. 

Now pregnant again, Pippa is due to give birth to her third child any day now. First opening up about her miscarriage this summer, the POCO frontwoman got visibly emotional, saying that she feels incredibly “lucky” to be able to have another baby. Revealing that they were expecting back in May, she said that the whole family were “on cloud nine”. “Brian and I are just so thrilled. We love babies and we always knew we wanted another baby but it never happened after Louis so we were kind of at peace with that,” she told followers at the time. 

“I’m so happy with what we have and so grateful with what we have that I didn’t want to be always wishing for another but we always said if it happened, amazing. Then last summer I got pregnant which was the biggest shock, I literally could not believe it. And then unfortunately I had a miscarriage in October.”

Admitting that she doesn’t know when she would have opened up about the experience had she not gotten pregnant again, Pippa noted that it’s hard to feel sad and “show vulnerability”. “To be honest, I don’t even know when I would’ve opened up about it if I wasn’t lucky enough to be pregnant again now because I suppose we don’t really want to show vulnerability and I don’t want to feel sad,” she confessed. “But then, I know how I felt at the time and I just wanted someone else to say, ‘That happened to me’. You want to be able to relate to someone.

“I’m so conscious of not wanting to upset people, but I’m just sharing my own story and I just wanted to be truthful about what I went through,” she later added. “You look at Instagram and you see someone sharing their lovely news and it can look like everything is perfect all of the time, but I can guarantee everyone’s been through something along the way.”

Feature image via @pipsy_pie