They’re the bubbly country couple who have won the hearts of the nation on the new season of House Rules. Small town parents Katie and Alex are early favourites to take out the competition, thanks to their early high scores and hard-working nature.
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However, behind their bright smiles lies a secret pain.
“We lost twins in a miscarriage,” Alex, 32, tells New Idea.“We were just going for our first scan. We found out that they were twins and that we’d lost both of them.”
The brave country NSW couple want to share their heartbreaking journey of miscarriage before having their 1-year-old daughter Hallie. They hope to raise awareness of miscarriage and help other couples through the difficult time.
“We were amazed how many people didn’t talk about it [miscarriage] until after it happened to us,” Alex reveals. “We couldn’t believe how common it was and how it’s almost taboo to talk about.”
Katie, 29, adds: “That’s why we want to talk about it now.
So many people don’t know how to approach the subject and there’s probably people out there who don’t want the subject to be approached. It’s quite a difficult situation to navigate for each individual. So many of our friends told us it happened to them and they’d never felt like they could tell us until it happened to us.”
The former midwife admits that even she didn’t realise how common miscarriage was and the effect it can have on someone. “Personally, I didn’t talk about it for so long because it was the pity I didn’t want,” she says. “I didn’t want people to think I was talking about it to get attention. I just didn’t want people to pity me. I was so averse to that, so we didn’t talk about it very often.
“I imagine a lot of women probably feel the same.”
But the ever-positive couple reveal even the darkest clouds have a silver lining.
“We didn’t realise even at the time how much it would impact us or change our lives,” Katie says.
“We went through a lot with the miscarriage and as that was happening it was like, ‘OK, now we know exactly what we want’. We knew that we want to have kids and we want to have them now and so we set ourselves up so we could get to exactly where we needed to be.”
During the weeks following the miscarriage, the couple say that their entire lives changed.
“I couldn’t be in the house we were living in anymore,” Katie recalls. “It’s just all relative to that house so we came out for a drive to Gundaroo, which is where
I grew up, and there just happened to be someone selling a house that we knew and we bought it off the market.”
According to Federal Police officer Alex, the move was “exactly” what they needed.
“We had to change everything because we couldn’t be in our old lives. I was surprised how much it devastated us. We had to change lifestyles, perspectives, everything.”
The country couple admit they didn’t realise how unhappy they were in their lives before the miscarriage.
“We had so much stress where we were living before, and it was probably the way a lot of people live,” Katie says.
“You just wouldn’t think about it until you went through something like that. I was running a business that I was sort of in over my head with.
It was going really, really well and I was really consumed by it, so we gave up the business straight away and I went and got a desk job at the hospital and that was the beginning.
And then we bought this house and everything started to slow down for us from that moment.”
Now, more than two years on, Katie and Alex are proud parents to 1-year-old Hallie.
“We call Hallie our little unicorn baby,” Alex says.
“This journey brought us to here so that’s what we tell ourselves every day.
“If we can help one person then that’s the dream.”
House Rules Sun., 7pm and Mon. – Wed., 7.30pm
For more, see this week’s New Idea, out now!
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