Getting pregnant is not as straightforward as it seems, as anyone who has struggled to conceive or carry will tell you. Author Elle Wright (aka Feathering the Empty Nest on Instagram) knows this only too well.

Elle's new book, A Bump in the Road (Lagom; out 29th April) charts her difficult fertility journey. She experienced miscarriages, secondary infertility, and IVF; all following her baby son passing away at just three-days old.

Elle's book presents an honest experience of getting pregnant, particularly shown through the lens of the grief that is prevalent when struggling to conceive or after losing a child. Something that is still not talked about openly.

Pregnancy announcements on social media can be particularly difficult to navigate when you're struggling to conceive. Here, Elle shares the ups and downs of trying when your feed is filled with gender reveals and pregnancy news...

Seeing another announcement pop up as you scroll can be hard. Gut wrenching sometimes. Often enough to make you feel the sudden urge to bury your phone deep in your handbag or delete that pesky app altogether. Pregnancies, births, gender reveals; all of those posts can hit hard.

I have often said that I don’t think we give those emotions of sadness, anger, jealousy even, enough airtime when it comes to baby loss and trying to conceive.

It’s almost as if the pain and anguish of travelling that road is already too much to shoulder, let alone adding those other feelings into the ever-confusing cocktail.

Because then you face guilt, perhaps the heaviest of all of those emotions when you are already treading that path. The idea that you begin to feel guilty for feeling that way when you learn of someone else’s happy news. Surely someone else’s happy can’t really make you feel sad? Oh, but it can.

Seeing someone else achieve the very thing that your heart aches for every day can feel like the air suddenly disappears from your lungs; you get pulled under so deeply that you cannot think/breathe/or begin to articulate a well-deserved congratulations to them.

Knowing that someone else has made that look so easy, so effortless. All the while you flounder to get through day to day, wondering whether you’ll become one of the "lucky ones".

I found social media and trying to conceive a minefield of these emotions. Perhaps it’s because other people’s daily lives, which in an ordinary existence before Instagram and Facebook were a mystery, are now thrust in front of our eyes. Seeing mainly their peaks and rarely their pits of life. The things they are proudest of; their big life moments, all presented with a filter to boot. Suddenly our faces are pressed to the glass of someone else’s life.

Typing out another 'Congratulations. Lovely news'. While tears sting at your eyes and you try your level best not to let them begin free flowing down your cheeks. But they do, hitting the screen of your phone and messing with your carefully considered emoji selection (Because nothing shows true happiness for someone like an added emoji).

It’s a scenario I know only too well. One that played out often in the years between our son dying at just three days old in May 2016, and the safe arrival of our daughter last summer.

There were days when I couldn’t bring myself to look at social media for fear of more happy news. Days when the IVF drugs had me walking around in a fog and I couldn’t face someone else’s joy; desperately clinging to the hope that one day soon would be our time too.

My camera roll of what I posted to Instagram bared very little resemblance to the injections, scans, worry or appointments that most weeks held for me. The months of drugs slowly ticked over into years, and with each piece of happy news, the tears became more frequent and the guilt even heavier to carry. It can be hard to smile through those tears sometimes, even when the smile is as genuine as the tears, which it often is.

I rarely give advice to anyone on this road; I don’t feel qualified to. But I wish I could go back and sit with myself then, a hand around my own shoulder and tell myself what I can see far more clearly now I find myself at the end of that road, looking back in the rear-view mirror and wondering how on earth I made it through.

I’d tell myself not to look; or at least not so often. Focusing on someone else’s happy won’t make yours appear any faster. I spent a lot of time in those years trying to become an expert in my own fertility, not anyone else’s. I read books that focused my mind on getting to know my body, not someone else’s; and that was enough. I was doing my best, but I wish I knew that at the time. That, and the mute button on Instagram; I would have told myself to use it far more freely, to quieten the noise, allow my heart to hurt when it needed to, and not feel guilty for that.

I would have put my phone at the bottom of my bag more often on those harder days. I would have taken that guilt and drop-kicked it into a parallel universe, because it really was the very last thing that needed to be added into the mix of an already impossibly isolating journey.

When you are going through fertility struggles, and perhaps losses within that journey too, navigating announcements – or seeing happy families plastered all over your social media feed daily – can be an incredibly tough pill to swallow.

Not because you’re a bad person. Not at all, and not because you aren’t happy for them. Simply because we are all human, and it is entirely possible to feel happy for someone else, but still a little heartbroken for yourself; and that’s ok. Just remember to protect your own heart, if you can.

 read mre  redonline.co.uk