I feel really honored to have been a part of documenting Hayley and Tim’s story! These photos have been taken at an exciting time in their pregnancy as they are now 13 weeks along and the images have been a perfect way to announce the news to their friends and family! Leading up to this moment in their journey it has been a whirlwind of emotions. Talking about their two previous miscarriages has been an important part of overcoming heartbreak and finding hope. I admire their honesty and bravery, I hope their story inspires others who are or have been in similar positions.
“After a tough road getting here, when the time came to share our news we wanted our pregnancy announcement to be really special. This is why we decided to have Jaymee take some professional photos so we could truely capture and remember this special time in our lives and thought it would be a beautiful way to special share our news with those close to us, especially those who knew about the heartbreak we had gone through in getting to this point.
Despite being young and healthy, our pregnancy journey has been harder than we originally thought it would be. While we were lucky enough to get pregnant relatively quickly, unfortunately, this was short-lived and we had our first miscarriage last year at 6 weeks while on holiday in Australia. Before this happened to me, I’d honestly underestimated how hard it was to lose a pregnancy so early on. We were devastated and felt so alone not being able to share with those around us what was going on. We remember seeing other people we knew announce their pregnancies and while we were so happy for them, it hit us hard because we wondered why it seemed so easy for others and why this had happened to us.
After a rough couple of months, we decided to try a second time and once again got pregnant straight away. Yet again, the 6-week mark rolled around and we had another miscarriage right at the start of the NZ covid19 lockdown. We were crushed and once again felt so isolated and alone. We were left wondering why this kept happening to us and thinking that surely more people must be going through the same situation given how common our doctor had assured us miscarriages are, yet very few people seemed to talk about it.
We took so much comfort in those few stories we did come across of those who were brave enough to share their experiences - we clung to those stories with so much hope that things would eventually work out for us too and we knew that when they did, we too would be open about our own journey in the hope that it could hopefully bring comfort to others who are going through the same thing. Thank you Jaymee for helping us share our story!”