Ava Miscarriage Awareness Campaign

Back in October, I received an email from the company Ava, who makes the fertility tracking bracelet that I use. Their head of content and social media, Lindsay, emailed and asked if she could call and chat with me. Based on my answers to a user survey regarding miscarriage, she was interested in hearing my story.




I gave her my number and we made a time to chat on the phone. It was a great conversation; Lindsay wanted to know about my experience with a miscarriage, because Ava was discovering that many of their customers were women who had experienced at least one miscarriage.

We spoke for about 45 minutes, and at the end of the call, Lindsay asked me if I would be interested in taking part in a miscarriage awareness campaign that Ava was putting together. Taking part would mean filming an interview with a videographer sometime in the next month. I was thrilled to have such a cool opportunity, so I said yes, and we set a date in November for the film shoot.

Ava sent an awesome local(ish) videographer (I say local-ish because he came all the way from Salt Lake City) to the ranch in November, and we spent a few hours filming an interview and some B-roll footage. I appreciated having the chance to talk about our miscarriage experience, because I think there's something really powerful in sharing stories with one another. There is still something that clouds miscarriages in a fog of don't-talk-about-it, and I think that's a dangerous reality. And if sharing my story can help someone else deal with their own loss, that's awesome.

We filmed on a chilly November afternoon (during which I was fighting a horrible cold). Our videographer filmed the interview inside first, which required a lot of lighting equipment and a pretty major rearranging of our living room (it made me glad I had vacuumed under and behind the furniture the day before!). Jon was a great sport about being a part of the B-roll footage--film that's taken for purposes of layering into the interview. We walked outside, played with the dogs, took my horse Jet for a walk, and tried not to feel awkward doing all of it with a video camera moving all around us.

But all that resulted in two really lovely short video clips for Ava, which they released in early April, right after Huxton was born. You can see the original posting here, but you can watch both video versions below:

I also had the opportunity to write two different guest posts for the Ava World blog, which turned out to be two of my favorite pieces I've ever written about my miscarriage and fertility journey.

The first, titled Why I Can't Imagine My Life without My Miscarriage, talks about the ways that miscarrying changed my life, and though I wouldn't want to do it again, I wouldn't take it back either.

And the second was all about why Jon and I decided to announce our pregnancy with Huxton before the typically advised 12 week mark, which tends to make people nervous.

I'm so thankful to have had the chance to take part in Ava's miscarriage awareness campaign. It's a cause near and dear to my heart--my own experience shaped my life and my subsequent pregnancy in profound ways. I know the heartache and devastation of losing a much wanted pregnancy, and it's an experience that I want more people to understand and be aware of, so we can help other women navigate it when it happens to them. And in case miscarriage hasn't touched your life, let me tell you this: yes, it has. Someone you know and love has experienced a pregnancy loss, even if you don't know about it, because miscarriage is incredibly common.

Let's talk more about miscarriage, let's normalize and understand how it affects women (and men!) so we can help one another more effectively.