There are no words adequate enough to describe the joy on discovering that you are pregnant – especially after years of unsuccessfully doing your best to conceive, with the clock mercilessly clicking non-stop.

I found out that I was pregnant, five weeks, on the last day of 2013. I couldn’t believe the positive pregnancy test, and rushed back to buy more from the pharmacy. I’ve been feeling “sick” for a couple of weeks, exhausted, with all sorts of symptoms that I couldn’t logically explain. The only diagnosis that made any sense, yet made no sense at all, was that I had to be pregnant.

Of course, upon confirming with a blood test at the hospital, I had to tell the entire world at once. I was so happy that renting a megaphone and driving through the main road of town seemed like a good idea. I know women fall pregnant every day, but to me this was just such a wonderful momentous occasion that I wanted to tell the world.

Less than 10 days later, the happiest period of my life, I found out that not only had I suffered something called a “missed miscarriage”, I also had large tumors in my womb.

I knew there was something wrong when my HCG levels weren’t rising like it should. My doctor prescribed progesterone, and I did everything I was supposed to. Took it easy, stayed in bed as often as I could, changed my diet, took the necessary vitamins.

Yet, it all went badly wrong. And there is no satisfactory answer as to why. I don’t want to hear about a large amount of “early pregnancies” never making it beyond the first trimester. I’m not interested in hearing that everything happens for a reason. I am in pain, with a sadness to intense that it hurts to breathe.

I know most women hide their pregnancies in those first months, terrified that something is going to go wrong. They wait before making any announcements, in case… I didn’t believe in an “in case”. I never even thought that anything could go wrong.

Although having a miscarriage is one of the most intimate losses a woman can experience, this is almost a taboo topic. There is no accepted grief period, there are no sympathy cards, there is no funeral, no real closure. I am told: “It happens all the time”, as if this line is supposed to somehow make me feel better, put my loss into some kind of perspective.

Suffering a miscarriage is not just about losing a child, it is about losing all the dreams you created for that child. The dreams you created for your life as a mother. It is about the sun disappearing from your world, and everything turning into a dark colourless void. A world where you no longer wake up in the morning with your hands protectively on your tummy. A world where you have to hide your grief because the earth hasn’t stopped turning for everybody else, and hey, life goes on.

With an apparent one in seven pregnancies ending in an miscarriage, there must be a lot of people out there in mourning. It is unacceptable that our miscarriages should be swept under the rug, and we are expected to just get over it. As another mom-who-was-not-to-be said: “Because the only thing worse than losing something that meant the world to you is pretending that you lost nothing.”