YDGM Ep 018: Professional Singer and Performer Lara Martins

[This episode is about miscarriage. Please understand that it may trigger sensitive emotions while listening, although the purpose of this episode is to spread the information about this topic so more women can learn about how common miscarriage is.]

Lara Martins is a principle in the London production of “The Phantom of the Opera”. Lara is from Portugal, and studied theatre in the UK, and has been living in the UK for the last 20 years.

I’m so happy to have Lara here with me for this episode. In searching for more topics revolving motherhood and pregnancy, I believe that it’s important to talk about all possible events relating to our experiences as women becoming mothers. One of them is miscarriage, which, for many people who do not know, it is quite common. Many women have experienced a miscarriage, and because of the sensitive emotional pain involved, most women do not know how to share their experiences.

When Lara accepted my invitation to be on my podcast, she was very open and generous in sharing her story about her miscarriage.

“When you have a miscarriage you don’t really think that because obviously miscarriage is quite a sensitive subject, and not many women talk about it. So you have no idea that having a miscarriage is quite common. It happens a lot. When you are confronted with a miscarriage it is very traumatic. It’s definitely one of the hardest things I had to deal with in my life. You know, the first thought you have is ‘what have I done wrong; did I provoke this’ and even though everybody tells you it’s nothing you have done, it’s nothing to do with you, it’s just your body maybe rejecting something that was not viable’. BUt you just try to find the reason. You just want to know why; what have I done; What could I have done differently to have a different outcome’.”

“It gave me great comfort when I was trying to recover from my miscarriage to know that actually this is so common, and talking to other women who had the same experience. Because then I didn’t feel like some kind of freak, or that I had some kind of problem.”

“I think when you have a very easy pregnancy, and obviously, and all the women that have never had problems in their pregnancy and never suffered miscarriages, pregnancy can be a very naive thing in the sense that when you look at that pregnancy test and it’s positive you think, ‘Oh great, I’m going to have a baby,’ because you just had a pregnancy that was completely normal, nothing happened, everything was great, so you think, oh, this is going to be the same thing again. It’s not until something goes wrong that you understand that actually quite a lot of things that can go wrong, and then becoming pregnant again it’s actually very very stressful.”

To reach out to Lara Martins, check out her website and send her a message: https://www.laramartins.com/

To hear another woman’s experience with miscarriage, have a listen to episode 10 with Maryellen Stephens. http://traffic.libsyn.com/youredoinggreatmom/010-23-05-20172C14.53.mp3

Be sure to check out You're Doing Great Mom online. http://youredoinggreatmom.com/blog/