This picture was taken minutes after we found out we were expecting our first child
Hello!
My name is Mariana, I am a Venezuelan living in London since 2007 who was lucky enough to meet and marry the most amazing man in the world, Pierre. Up until 2015, the things that defined me were an intense love for food and a very positive outlook on life.
On Saturday November 7th 2015, my husband (Pierre) and I had the best news ever delivered to us by a positive sign on a stick: I was pregnant! That's the day when everything changed and my journey through motherhood began. I can honestly say, that besides the inability to sleep on my back from the third trimester, I had an amazing pregnancy and I loved every second of it. During the 37.2 weeks that I was pregnant with our daughter Olivia Landriau Saraceni, I found an inner hippie that I didn't know existed and lived by the motto women are built to make and deliver babies, I just need to trust my body.... Little did I know that my body had other plans in mind for us.
I don’t know if I’ll ever share the details about Olivia's birth story and the day we met, but I will encapsulate some for the purposes of why this blog exists: June 2016 was the month when I learned something I wish I didn't: Babies can die at term, and it happens a lot everywhere in the world. This bastard of a situation doesn't discriminate, it doesn't care that you are an insanely healthy person and that your pregnancy is described as "textbook". It doesn't care if you've never heard of it, it can arrive to your life uninvited and slap you with the hardest words a mother can hear "There is no heartbeat".
I have no particular agenda with this blog, I just have a lot to say about my life and my journey and I think that there might be someone somewhere that might want to read this. The week after Olivia was born I found a mother just like me, she too started a blog to share her journey and in the darkest moments, before I was ready to speak to anyone, she spoke to me. I've said this to her repeatedly, but she made me feel like I wasn't alone and she made me believe that I wouldn't die of sadness. So actually, I do have some sort of an agenda by sharing my story: I hope it helps someone that is also walking the halls of a grieving mother's life.
Yes, I hate life a little bit every day when I wake up to an Olivia-less life BUT I wouldn't change my journey even if I had known the outcome. I love my daughter, she made us parents and she, along with her two little sisters, is my biggest achievement in life. Time will never heal the Olivia shaped hole in our hearts and we won't even try to patch it because that would be making her less important. Instead, we hope time will help us understand how to carry Olivia with us and how to balance deep sadness and enjoying life. Pierre and I feel that the very least we can do for our amazing daughter is live life to the fullest, because she doesn't get to.