Welcome to Kim Crossman’s brand new column, Pretty Pregnant! We’re very excited here at Capsule to have Kimberly join us every fortnight as she brings us along for the ride of her very exciting pregnancy.
TW: Miscarriage
Kim really needs no introduction – she’s such a familiar face to so many of us due to her acting projects (Shortland Street, Step Dave, Deathgasm, Funny Girls to name a few!), her incredible podcast (Pretty Depressed), TV hosting gigs, radio hosting and more. Last year, Kim married her love – cameraman Tom Walsh – who she met on the set of Snack Masters. While their wedding was like something out of a beautiful storybook, just five months earlier they’d been dealt a crushing heartbreak when they suffered a miscarriage. It’s been a hard fought battle to get here – as Kim will share – but she is now pregnant with their much-loved and much-wanted rainbow baby.
Kim is a wonderfully open book, and we’re so thrilled to be on this journey with her. And here in this column, she’s happy to share a warts-and-all approach to what she’s enjoying about pregnancy, what she’s struggling with and how things are progressing.
If you’d like to get in touch with Kim about her column, please drop us a line at [email protected] with ‘Kim’ in the subject line, or, you can find Kim here on Insta!
‘Welcome to My Second Trimester‘
Before I dive into where I’m at now, I thought I’d better rewind and catch you up on how we got here.
At the end of 2023, not long after Tom and I got engaged, we found ourselves very surprisingly and excitedly pregnant. This was my first pregnancy. And to be honest, I’ve always carried a quiet fear of infertility. I never had a pregnancy or even a pregnancy scare in my twenties. After growing up thinking that you only had to look at a boy or sit in a spa pool to end up pregnant, the fact I never had anything close to a scare was always slightly concerning. So when I did get pregnant, I was ecstatic.
Shortly after the nine week mark, that joy started to turn into concern. Our baby was growing and the heart rate was increasing but not following the pattern doctors consider normal. What followed was a few weeks of blood tests, scans, more testing, and a lot of waiting.
Sadly, when we went for a scan a few weeks later back in Auckland, there was no heartbeat. Our little girl was no longer with us physically.
I’ve spoken about that experience before so I won’t dwell too much here, but it was followed by a few operations as I had retained tissue and then a year of not trying but definitely trying. You know what I mean.
In December, 13 months after miscarriage, I found myself in a meeting with Fertility Associates, wanting answers. The results from my testing was confronting. I was told I have dangerously low AMH and that IVF would most likely be my only option. We were told to skip other fertility treatments entirely because of how low my levels were if we wanted the best chance at conceiving.
It’s always interesting when stress enters the fertility conversation. You get told how harmful it can be and how it can prevent pregnancy and affect treatments, but the entire situation is stressful. A grim diagnosis is stressful. Trying to not be stressed becomes stressful.
Whilst IVF was an option we were very open to, we couldn’t afford it immediately so we decided to spend a month in LA, leaning into all the amazing advice people had shared with me online about how to support your body and mind with low AMH. We tried to approach the month with curiosity and a sense of play rather than fear. To lean in to all the woowoo LA had to offer and boy did it deliver!
And when I say we tried it all, we really did.
I met with a naturopath named Caitlin who has since become a dear friend. She helped match me with supplements that were right for my bloodwork. Tom and I both did acupuncture, NET therapy to release stored emotional trauma (spoiler alert, there was plenty, especially from childhood and the miscarriage).
We did breathwork. I met with witches. I seed cycled. I ate better than I ever have and more than I ever had.
I focused on warmth. Warm food, warm environments. I took a bath at four each afternoon, which sounds dreamy but honestly I don’t love baths. I love the idea of them more than the reality. I often feel trapped and don’t really know what to do in there. But I’m working on it. You will see a common thread of an inability to relax coming through in a lot of my behaviour. Something I am working on haha.
We played specific frequency music throughout the apartment from YouTube, ate breakfast every day, stopped drinking coffee, and ended the evenings with a ceremonial grade mug of cocoa. These rituals became small daily acts of healing. They helped me let go of shame and frustration around my body not doing the thing it is meant to do.
And then, in the most magical and unexpected way, I conceived naturally.
Which brings us here.
Pregnancy after loss is a complex cocktail of joy and fear. It wasn’t until very recently that I stopped checking for blood every time I went to the bathroom. The anxiety before a scan is stronger than the excitement of getting to see the baby. The fear that any cramp or weird symptom could be something bad is often louder than the joy of what is happening.
I have been working to shift those thoughts through therapy and the tools I picked up during the trying to conceive chapter, but there is still fear that creeps in. I have had a beautiful baby journal sitting next to my bed for weeks, one I imagined documenting this journey in from the very beginning, but it remains unopened. There is a quiet fear that if I write down my excitement, it will somehow be taken away.
So this project, sharing my journey with you here, is both personal and practical. It is a way for me to process and document the experience, the struggles and the joy, but it is also a way to build a little community where we can all share advice and encouragement.
I would not have the privilege of being here and being pregnant if it wasn’t for the generosity of so many amazing women and men who shared what worked for them and supported me in ways big and small. I feel a responsibility to keep the conversation going.
So, now that I am stepping into the second trimester, I’m starting to feel the weight lift a little. I can peel myself off the couch, I don’t feel sick all the time, and my body is starting to change in ways that make this feel more real. I am finally able to start imagining what life might look like at Christmas, when our family grows.
To kick things off, I would love to ask you something. If you are reading this and have been through pregnancy, what is one thing you wish you had known at fifteen weeks? Or something that helped you as you stepped into the second trimester?
Send me your advice, your stories, your thoughts. I’ll be back in two weeks with a more real time update on how things are progressing now that we’re all caught up.
x