This time last year, during Baby Loss Awareness Week 2020, Myleene Klass went public with a painful trauma she had been carrying in silence. The presenter revealed in a devastating Instagram post that she’d suffered four miscarriages whilst trying for a baby with her fiancé, Simon Motson.
At the time, Myleene, who has two daughters with her ex-husband Graham Quinn and eventually went on to give birth to a healthy baby boy in 2019, couldn’t utter a word about the children she had lost without bursting into tears.
To this day, she’s still processing the agonising moments that changed her forever, as she works through the emotional repercussions of a gut-wrenching grief felt by the one in five women who suffer from a miscarriage every year in the UK.
Now, in a new documentary for W titled Myleene: Miscarriage & Me, Myleene Klass tackles the topic so often brushed under the carpet by health systems and society, using her own personal story to spotlight the dark and unfiltered realities of losing an unborn baby and the damaging effects it can have on the mental health of women around the world, in hopes of changing the narrative for good.
But reliving the trauma has been far from easy for Myleene. “I don’t think that I’m ever going to be out of the woods with this,” she tells me, with tears in her eyes on the other end of our Zoom call. “It’s that wound, once you open it up again you remember how painful it was the first time. It never goes away. How can it? I knew from the very moment I had my first miscarriage that I’d never be the same again.
“It’s not a feeling you can put into words,” she continues. “If somebody dies who’s lived their life, you can look over their memories. You’ve got something tangible, not to say that it makes their death any easier to cope with, but there is some comfort in looking at their things or smelling their clothes. With the death of a baby that never took its first breath, you just feel the saddest thing in the world and you’ve got nowhere to go with it. ”
Throughout the documentary, Myleene meets with women from different backgrounds who share their experiences with miscarriage, whilst recounting her own by reading through a series of diary entries she wrote to help make sense of her emotions when going through the tragedy. She speaks to her aunt – who admits her miscarriage put her off ever getting pregnant again – and creates open dialogue with her daughters around the topic, both of whom candidly share their sadness for the siblings they never met.
With the death of a baby that never took its first breath, you just feel the saddest thing in the world and you’ve got nowhere to go with it
In one of the most intimate scenes, Myleene also has a poignant conversation with her partner about their shared grief for the first time. “We’d never spoken about it before this. Not because we’re not open with one another, we talk about everything. We just didn’t want to bring up that pain for each other,” she says. “When you have a family and a job, you have to just crack on with life. You have responsibilities at home, at work – you can’t just stay in bed and sit with your sadness, and frankly I didn’t want to because if I did that I’d never get up again. A lot of women suppress their grief after a miscarriage because that pain can destroy you. Yet still, we’re told by society that we’re being dramatic or that our pain isn’t valid. ”
