'Sharenting' after loss

Once you have a living child - to post or not to post?

Photo by The Dark Queen on Unsplash

It’s been almost a year since I shared a picture of my son on social media. It’s been more than two years since I posted a picture with his face in full view.

This is unlikely to change any time soon. Right from when he was born, I struggled with how much to share online about my life with this new, long-awaited baby, whose pregnancy  – and the four miscarriages preceding it – I’d documented online.

Knowing what to share online as a parent is fraught for many reasons, but, before Edward was born, I was primarily on social media to share my writing about recurrent miscarriage. To then segue seamlessly into posting daily baby photos felt…off.  

Yet, saying nothing at all didn’t feel right either. I felt twin pressures: One was to show that I was making the most of it, that I knew how very lucky I was. At the same time, I felt a responsibility not to rub other people’s noses in it. After all, not ten months previously, I’d have given almost anything to be in this position. Even the difficulty of not knowing how to post about my ‘rainbow’ baby, felt like a luxury problem in itself.  

And, of course, underscoring all of this was something else: the joy I found in my new baby. The fact of him! The way his fingers moved. His feather-soft hair. I was obsessed, besotted, fascinated. I was desperate to talk about his birth, how much he weighed, how alert he was, the sheer terror of clipping his tiny toenails for the first time...

I was intensely proud of him and I wanted to share him. Yet, I often found I didn’t quite know how.  

The paradox of social media after miscarriage, infertility, and baby loss is that while it can sometimes be a gauntlet of unexpected pregnancy announcements and (mis)targeted ads for maternity wear, it can also be your life-raft. ‘The online community has a potentially important role and function in helping with the complex aftermath of a miscarriage,’ agrees Julia Bueno, a psychotherapist and author of The Brink Of Being: Talking About Miscarriage. ‘There’s such a dearth of mental health support and far too many bereaved just do not get given it, or given it in time,’ she adds.  

Social media, by comparison, offers immediate, round-the-clock access to ‘a potentially reliable pool of people who just get it,’ Julia tells me. ‘It works well when you’re all in sync. But it can quickly do a U-turn.’

And how. Before Edward was born, short on optimism and answers, there was a particularly shadowy corner of my feelings reserved for people I’d previously connected with over our struggles to have a baby, who announced a pregnancy and then seemed to dive headfirst into baby-bliss, without so much as a backward glance. The closer our stories in detail and dates, the worse I’d feel. Whether it was tiny outfits or weaning updates, as well as occasional spasms of rage and jealousy I’d feel – irrationally – betrayed.  

Photo by The Dark Queen on Unsplash

I didn’t actually begrudge anyone their happiness (or the online appearance of happiness). I just envied them. I wanted what they had.

And it didn’t entirely go away once Edward arrived, either. Instead, this comparison took on a new edge. I couldn’t help thinking of those other people, who seemed so much more at ease with sharing baby photos, milestone cards, or nursery décor plans than I was. Why couldn’t I be more like that? Why was I so hesitant? My brain kept telling me it had to mean something: I wasn’t grateful enough for my rainbow baby. I wasn’t very good at motherhood. Or, worst of all, I didn’t deserve motherhood.

Of course, it didn’t mean any of that. Not even close. But I was navigating this in a relative vacuum.

For Elle Wright, a blogger and author, finally having a living child has made her even more determined to write about how it feels to lose a baby. Elle and her husband Nico brought home their daughter Olivia in summer 2020, after their son Teddy died in 2016, when he was three days old.

Rather than sharing every step of new motherhood with her 170k Instagram followers, Elle says: ‘It’s made me realise just how much I need to shout about that other narrative of motherhood – the bereaved mother – which does not get enough airtime. Because I now know the polarity between how I’ve felt post-partum both times: That of complete devastation and of overwhelming happiness and love.’

In between losing Teddy and having Olivia, Elle also endured years of secondary infertility, several IVF cycles, and the loss of two further pregnancies, all of which she candidly shared online and in a book A Bump In The Road.

But while Elle has written about Olivia’s birth, and shared a few pictures from when she first came home, for the most part she does not post about her daughter. ‘Welcoming Olivia has brought so much happiness back into our lives –  a happiness I thought was gone forever, after Teddy died – but, in a way, it’s like it’s so precious and we waited so long for it that we want to keep it for ourselves,’ she explains.

She adds: ‘I think there’s a common misconception that when another child is born, you are fixed and all of those other things that came before are no longer relevant. But having your child here doesn’t erase that trauma.’ 

Like Elle, I was – and am – wary of playing into a narrative that now I have Edward, everything is fine, undermining the fact that pregnancy loss can cast a much longer psychological shadow.

Contrary to what people might expect, research has suggested that depression and anxiety triggered by pregnancy loss – at any point of gestation – often persists after the birth of another child. And, of course, there’s the question of what such a history can mean for having any further children, when medical issues remain unknown and unresolved.   

That said, not wanting to play into this narrative can also be the exact reason some people choose to share their parenting reality on social media after pregnancy loss, posting about the difficulties and the things they weren’t prepared for – a secondary kind of taboo, when you’ve yearned for motherhood for such a long time.  

This is the case for Shema Tariq, a doctor and trustee for the charity Tommy’s. Having found solace on social media through infertility, recurrent miscarriage, and the death of her firstborn son, Altair, at 21 weeks of pregnancy in 2017, Shema says her posts on Instagram took on a new purpose when she developed severe post-natal depression and anxiety following the birth of her son Faris, now five.

‘I really struggled with the guilt: how could I be depressed after what I’ve experienced?’ she says. ‘I became a lot more conscious about what I was posting because, actually, people need to know that you are allowed to feel like that: to suffer, to find motherhood hard, and to be depressed, even if it’s something you’ve really longed for. Even if you’ve lost a baby.’

Having gone on to have a daughter, Lyra, now nearly 4, Shema aims to share ‘honest stories of motherhood: the good bits and the bad bits’. ‘I love sharing my children,’ she adds. ‘I’ve been through a lot of heartache and I think I deserve to celebrate them in a way that other people do without thinking. Why should this be yet another thing I have to do differently from everybody else?’

For others, sharing their version of parenthood can feel important because they are from an under-represented group already – and therefore visibility feels doubly important.

And, of course, being a parent and experiencing baby loss and infertility are not mutually exclusive categories: Before and after. Many who go through these things already have other children at home. Kate Meakin, a digital creator, says she struggled at first to know how to balance sharing online about her life as a mum to her son Austin, alongside her subsequent IVF cycles and miscarriages.

‘I felt a fraud in the infertility and baby loss camp with a living child, but also struggled to fit in with the “mummy bloggers” as my story as a mother felt very different,’ she tells me. ‘But, as time went on, I realised that my voice doesn’t need to belong to a side, one doesn’t negate the other.’

In 2020, Kate brought home a long-awaited sibling for Austin – a baby girl named Autumn, who she now proudly posts about on her Instagram page. ‘I’m not sorry for sharing my children after eight rounds of IVF and six miscarriages,’ she says. ‘And that’s a personal choice I hope doesn’t come across as uncaring. I realised it wasn’t my responsibility to take care of the feelings of everyone within the internet. That’s far too much pressure on anyone’s shoulders.’

Psychotherapist Julia Bueno points out that rather than always being a source of pain, ‘some people might find it inspiring and hopeful’ to see baby-related posts from others with a history of pregnancy loss.

‘I encourage people to take as much care and responsibility as they possibly can for their own mental health online,’ she adds. ‘That might mean swerving accounts they know are going to provoke certain feelings – although these feelings are completely natural and should be honoured. I also encourage people to rely on reading respected (peer-reviewed) medical opinions, such as Tommy’s or the Miscarriage Association.

‘It might also be a good idea to take time out of social media completely – and some really benefit from the calm this can bring.’

Without necessarily planning it this way, this, I think, is what has brought me some peace around the question of what to share – or not. It’s a cop-out maybe, but I’m simply on social media a lot less, full-stop.

As the social media landscape has shifted in recent years – as platforms seem less interested in the ‘social’ part of parasocial relationships – it’s become less of a place I want to share much of anything personal at all, so it feels less conspicuous that I don’t share the parenting part of my life. Accordingly, I no longer get that prickle of something not unlike grief at yet another thing I don’t get to experience the ‘normal’ way.

During Edward’s babyhood I experimented with various ways to fulfil my many contradictory (and entirely self-imposed) standards for posting online – from ‘sensitive post’ warnings to reminding people it was OK to hit mute or unfollow – but I never found a way that felt entirely natural. None of it ever quite felt like I’d solved the Rubik’s Cube of anxieties about the potential impact of my posts.

Though, with hindsight, I don’t know if it was as much about other people as I perhaps thought at the time.

Really, what I was struggling to reconcile was my own changed and changing identity. Becoming a mother is a seismic shift, by any standard, for anyone. But perhaps the crack between who you have become and who you once were pulls that bit wider when not being a mother was once such a direct source of pain.

By not posting, I wonder if it was her – that other version of myself – I was trying to protect, as much as anyone else.

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