‘It doesn’t matter what your job is – miscarriage affects everybody’
Myleene Klass opens up about her experience of miscarriage in a new documentary
During Baby Loss Awareness week last year, Myleene Klass posted on Instagram, detailing trauma she had never spoken about publicly before.
The Norfolk-born musician, 43, revealed she had suffered four miscarriages while trying for a baby with her fiance Simon “Sim” Motson. The presenter, who also has two daughters, Hero and Ava, with her ex-husband Graham Quinn, went on to give birth to a healthy baby boy, Apollo, in 2019. But now, in a new W documentary, she is opening up about the children she has lost, in the hope of breaking the taboo that surrounds the topic of miscarriage, and encouraging people to start honest conversations.
What made you say yes to this documentary?
I kept saying, ‘I can’t do this’ – but that’s why you do have to do something, because you are so scared of it.
There’s a scene where you discuss your miscarriages with your daughters. Why did you decide to include that?
I wanted to show you’re not reckless bringing your children into these conversations. My girls are learning if you have sex, you get a baby; that’s not how it works at all. We are misinforming our children. Ava went into school when they had the lesson about babies, and it ended up being a conversation about miscarriage. Her friends shared how it had happened to their mums or aunties; that is groundbreaking. They feel part of something. You are empowering them.
One of the most emotional moments is when we see you reading your diaries…
If you’ve been through miscarriage, you’ll know you have to write down the date it happened, the date that you conceived. You write down all this information; it becomes the most awful diary of dates. And it doesn’t stop there. Those dates don’t stop turning, whether you physically write the diary, or the diary is just in your head, or you just think, ‘I wonder what they’d be doing. I wonder who they’d be’.
How did it feel to talk so frankly about your miscarriages with Sim for the first time?
You almost have this dance, as a couple; you dance around each other, trying to protect each other with your love, rather than trying to trigger something. When he says, ‘I was thinking about it all the time’, I was definitely thinking about it all the time. Normal life does resume, and that’s what’s so beautiful about it, and so cruel about it.
What do you hope viewers take from this film?
It doesn’t matter what your background is, it doesn’t matter what your job is – this affects everybody. And we are not talking about it. This conversation [about miscarriage] is not going on! And ask yourself why? Because it makes everybody uncomfortable. There’s just no way out of it, and maybe that’s what it is – it’s just uncomfortable. You can’t make a death better, but you actually can acknowledge a life.
● Myleene: Miscarriage & Me airs on W on Thursday, October 14