It’s been three weeks since my miscarriage. I’ve not been pregnant as long as I knew I was pregnant, if that makes sense?

It feels like so long ago now. The nausea, the tiredness, the needing to wee every ten minutes. The worrying, the bleeding, the scans, the crying. It seems a lifetime ago. But it was only three weeks ago.

Physically, it was all over and done within a few days. I’d been bleeding for around 5 days before it all actually happened, and then another five days or so afterward. Other than the labour like pains in the twenty minutes or so around the pregnancy actually ending, I was really lucky (I think, if you call any part of it lucky), I had no pain, and the scan and pregnancy test a few days later showed that everything was clear and it had passed entirely without the need for any surgical intervention. I thank god for that – dealing with the trauma of it happening was bad enough, but for there to have been any complications would have been horrendous.

Emotionally, it was tough. Really tough. The day after the miscarriage was my birthday and having people, who didn’t know what was happening at the time, wishing me a happy birthday and telling me to have a lovely day was horrible.

We had told a fair few people that I was pregnant – some friends at school, my best friends and our families. I hadn’t announced it on Facebook – not because of the risk of miscarriage, but because we wanted to make a lovely announcement at Christmas. I’m so glad we had told people though because it wouldn’t have felt real, and despite it being an anembryonic pregnancy, it was very real to us.

I had written the post when it was al happening, not knowing if I was going to share it. Just writing it helped, but sharing it helped even more. Miscarriage is so common, but when you’re going through it, it feels like you’re the only person in the world. Knowing I wasn’t, that friends and followers on social media had quietly gone through it very recently, helped. It really did prove to me that talking about things to someone, even if it is a complete stranger, is so important.

One comment in particular really stood out to me; that the raw pain would ease eventually, although the sadness doesn’t completely go. I clung on to that because, at the time, it felt like my heart would be broken forever. Three weeks on, I know what she meant. I’m laughing and smiling again, and I don’t feel like I want to scream and cry all the time.

But the sadness is still very much there. Every Wednesday, which was a new week, I think ‘I should be xx weeks pregnant now’. A few days ago, a baby toiletries set arrived for a gift guide. I took it on when I was pregnant, naively believing that next summer, I’d have a baby to use it on. A crate of alcohol-free beer turned up. I thought I would be drinking it over Christmas. Each little thing is a reminder.

The biggest stab was when I was sorting out my blog and in my drafts, found a blog post I’d written a day or two after I found out I was pregnant, about being a mum of four. My finger hovered over the delete button, but I have kept it. It’s not showing in my main blog feed at the moment, because I’m not sure I can deal with seeing it at the moment, but if you do want to read it, you can click here.

I’m going to say what so many people told me three weeks ago: if you are going through a miscarriage – it does get better, I promise.