For months after Liberty’s death, whilst I was, (unusually), walking around my neighbourhood during the working week daytime, I would encounter and sometimes be run off the road by ‘Moody Mum with Pushchair’…

It seems clear that if your dead loved one is your child, it’s not going to be within your gift to ‘move on’. I didn’t know about this whole concept of ‘Continuing Bond’, when I wrote ‘I Can Love You From Here’, but I had already figured out that finding a way to actively continue my relationship with Liberty was my only option.

If you don’t know about baby loss and you don’t know about complex grief, you would expect yourself, or parents whom you know have lost a baby, to display and experience grief in a different way. I think it would be helpful if everyone considered this whole topic of grief following baby loss a little further.

I have noticed that it is helpful for me to explain that things can be different for me and my family, after losing our eldest child to stillbirth. Life is not fair. In my opinion, it is certainly better when you take control of the things that you can, and when you are not afraid to share.

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about how mothers who lose their babies to stillbirth, miscarriage or neonatal death, feel and behave. It is almost all nonsense and very misleading and patronising, not only for the mums themselves, but also for those trying to support and interact with them.

The truth, of course, is that I do not know what lies ahead for you, and neither do you or anyone else. But I do know that you are stronger than you think. I do know without a doubt that you can survive this loss..

We can’t ‘be good’ at grief, and yet it’s hard not to focus on ‘doing well’. This whole thing takes on a different level of complexity when it comes to anything baby related. Truth is that, like with much of life, a lot of what happens is not within our control.

My description of stillbirth is that it is to experience and try to cope with both birth and death at the same time in one go. Birth is exactly like death – just the opposite. One moment no one is there and then there is your child. I think that is why many mothers experience so much emotional and mental difficulty after birth – it is a ridiculously challenging thing to take in, and confronting about mortality in exactly the same way as death.

I’m afraid I also think that this is a useless, untrue and unhelpful statement. Not one that people tend to say very often to bereaved parents (although I have had it said to me), but I do believe it is another common misunderstanding at the heart of people’s thinking...