Actress Eva Amurri Martino announced last month that she and husband, Kyle Martino, were expecting another child. Now, Amurri Martino is opening up about the grief she felt after experiencing a miscarriage last year in a poignant blog post titled "Pregnancy After Miscarriage."
"If miscarriage is seldom talked about, the feelings associated with pregnancy after a loss are even more seldom talked about," Amurri Martino wrote in the post. "I think there’s a misconception that once a woman conceives after a miscarriage, that somehow her miscarriage is erased — that the feelings of loss are replaced by feelings of joy for this new baby, and that everything moves forward as it should be. In my own experience, this couldn’t be further from the truth."
The actress, who has a 21-month-old daughter, Marlowe, goes on to talk of the grief she felt when she miscarried at nearly 10 weeks pregnant.
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"As I grieved the loss of my child, and what could have been, I was also paralyzed by a fear that I would never again have a healthy child. My miscarriage was so sudden, so unexpected. I had been in to my doctor’s office for a perfect, normal ultrasound just the day before. I saw our baby moving and growing normally: its arms and legs, its perfect heartbeat, its size right on track. Then, our baby passed away inside me what must have been only a few hours later," she wrote.
After processing the grief and fear she experienced in the wake of her loss, Amurri Martino says she finally felt ready to try to get pregnant again, admitting that even once she was pregnant, she was overcome with fear and had trouble feeling that the baby — a boy — was safe.
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"I felt so many things," she wrote. "I was afraid of loss, of course, but I also felt fiercely protective, and above all a homesickness and longing for the baby that our family would never get to meet. I didn’t feel like celebrating. I barely spoke of it."
Amurri Martino speaks candidly of the point when she realized she had to choose joy over fear, apologized to the baby she was carrying for being fearful, and allowed herself to feel happiness about the pregnancy.
Now more than four months pregnant, the actress says she's learned to handle her grief and anxiety in the best way she can.
"I still have moments of panic and wariness that my worst fear could once again come true," she wrote. "I allow myself these moments, and try to breathe through them. When I’m scared, I speak to my son — I encourage him to stay with us, and tell him how much we are longing to hold him and to welcome him in to our family."