A big surprise secret

We were being increasingly concerned with the state of minds of the children.  Amanda was not yet able to return to work; her emotions just couldn’t cope with it.  To add to the problems, like so many other families across the UK, we lost the monthly payment made from the Government to Amanda each month for her eldest son who has dyspraxia.  This put us under quite some pressure financially and the reality was we just could not do the family days that the kids deserved based on the horror of the previous few months.  We longed for a baby of our own, I had celebrated my 40^th birthday just before the previous Christmas, Amanda was in her late thirties and simply time was not on our side and emotionally we were a total mess – whatever way you look at it that was not a good combination.  We were for a time living a day-by-day existence and just trying to survive.  Things took a turn for the better when one Saturday morning Amanda was quite excited about an idea that she had.  We knew how important the work done by Group B Strep Support was and we knew that they received very little, if any assistance from the Government and we found it difficult to contemplate others going through pregnancy not knowing about the infection and being at its mercy through being an undiagnosed carrier.  Amanda’s thinking was that we could host a “Family Day” at our local club that would serve several purposes such as raise money for the charity, raise awareness of the infection, honour our daughters’ existence, help our other children and give us a chance to say thank you to the community for all the kindness they had showed us over the previous few months.  Just as importantly it also gave us and especially Amanda something to focus on.

I knew that in theory it was a good idea but other than those in our immediate circle did people care? Did others see what happened as pure bad luck and we needed to move on?  Would people turn up and were we taking on too much?  Did we know what we are doing?  This was going to involve public speaking about our daughters bereavement, could I do that?  All these were questions that were going around my head all the time, in one way they were helping as it allowed me to put my energy into a good cause rather than being over consumed with anger and resentment towards the hospital.  Our local club was a place where we would seek solitude, there was a few people who knew our situation and realised that we needed people to speak to and they listened to us.  As time moves on you realise the importance of this action and we will never forget the caring nature of some of them.  The planning of the event started and we started to receive help from several our friends in the organisation of the day.  We requested and obtained the help of quite a number of local businesses who would provide equipment at a subsidised rate and many outlets helped us with raffle donations.  The day was coming together and was set for Sunday 27^th July 2014 and we were further buoyed by the fact that a good friend who was a renowned children’s entertainer from the local area had offered to put on a show for the children.  Given his popularity and fan base it was a big thing because it meant that the event had a “fun factor” to it and at that time every one of a certain age in the local area would want to come along a see “Mr Mudge”.  His presence also got us around the difficulty of what happened if it rains heavily or is unusually cold for late July.  We wrote to the committee of the club and outlined our intentions and reasons for the day, they agreed to our request and the event was advertised heavily both around Desborough and the local area and on social media.

This was a time, approximately four months after Mia’s death where emotions changed literally from one minute to the next.  One of our children started to get into a bit of bother at school with another child who was mocking him for his baby sister passing away and eventually it all came to a head where our lad lashed out at the other child and properly hurt him.  Obviously, we don’t condone what he had done but children can be so cruel and we understood he finally lost his temper.  We were asked to attend an emergency meeting with the head of the school and was told that if it was not for the circumstances of his provocation he would have been excluded.  The other children were dealing with things in their own way, it must have been terribly hard for them seeing their parent literally falling apart.  Each of them had this terrible thing put on them at such a young age but each of them dealt with it all admirably and definitely held Amanda and I together at times when we really couldn’t cope.  That said, occasionally today we look at the photos of the children back then and you can see the pain etched in their faces.  Again, I had so many mixed up feelings of what we wanted and what was for the best.  We discussed another attempt at parenthood but we did agree that it would be better to wait a while even if time was not exactly on our side.

I returned home from work late in the evening on Wednesday 14^th May, Amanda was in the bath and I waited for her to return to our bedroom.  I could see anxiety in her face and I asked her what was wrong.  Typically, she told me she was fine a couple of times but I knew she wasn’t.  Too be honest I thought she was going to tell me about a large bill that needed paying or the event had hit a snag.  She eventually told me that she wasn’t sure but she might be pregnant.  This knocked me back because we had agreed that it wasn’t in our best interests for time being but obviously if she was pregnant then that would be great, not planned but great – it just meant that we were probably a couple of years ahead of the plan that we never got around to making.

The next week was about pregnancy tests and trying to keep calm – on Friday 21^st May Amanda confirmed that she was 100% beyond any doubt, pregnant!  I spent so much time down the cemetery talking to Mia about what was happening.  The cemetery cat was invariably sitting there by her side each time I went down and I was talking to the cat also.  It does perhaps does sound crazy but it was just a way of getting out what I wanted to say when I had literally nobody I could speak to.

The weeks that followed were very much about thinking about our other children.  As excited as I was I couldn’t help feeling like we had acted recklessly.  We had already turned our children’s lives upside down once and we really didn’t know whether we or indeed them could cope with another loss.  We did however conclude that this time the odds would be in our favour following the events leading to Mia’s death surely we would be looked after incredibly closely.  The event was getting closer day by day and a lot of effort and energy was required to make it all happen.  The children seemed really up for the event and they enjoyed assisting us with the preparations where possible.  It would be a number of weeks before we would even need to mention anything to the children or family members so we kept it as our perfect little secret.

Amanda decided that it would be in her interests to return to the shop for a few hours a week.  I was a bit sceptical about it because she was understandably still very up and down, now she was pregnant and if I had my way I was going to wrap her up in cotton wool.  She returned to work in early June and was happily combining motherhood and assisting in the shop.  Now she had returned though it was clear that she was going to have to tell her boss and supervisor that she was pregnant which I suppose was not an easy conversation considering she had been off work through being grief stricken through a neonatal death.  I wanted to be present when she told her boss but she wouldn’t let me get involved.  He took the news OK but to be fair, Amanda worked on a zero hours’ contract therefore did not receive any sick pay and returned under the same contract so he didn’t really have grounds to make an issue out of it.