Photo: Shawn Johnson/Instagram
Shawn Johnson Eastis about to welcome her first child any day now, but she won’t forget her previous loss — or the guilt she had surrounding it.
On Friday’s episode ofJamie OtisandDoug Hehner‘sHot Marriage. Cool Parentspodcast, the former Olympic gymnast, 27, opens up about losing her first pregnancy two years ago and how she blamed herself at first even though the doctor told her right out the gate that the miscarriage was not her fault.
The athlete and her husband,Andrew East, previously revealed in October 2017that Johnson East had suffered a miscarriageshortly after the couple learned they were expecting.
“And [the doctor] just kept saying, ‘It wasn’t about being around a smoker or eating the wrong thing or accidentally having a glass of wine because you didn’t know you were pregnant,’ ” she recalls. ” ‘There is nothing you did that was wrong.’ ”
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Shawn Johnson East in 2008
And the guilt went even further than just short-term actions Johnson East thought could’ve caused the loss. In her mind, the blame went as far back as her gymnastics years,when she competed as a child and teenagerbefore retiring from the sport in 2012, at the age of 20.
“That was always my fear — that I had put my body through so much and done so many extreme diets and delayed puberty and all of these things, that it would cause me to have trouble getting pregnant,” she reveals.
However, “I had had testing done and blood work done and [doctors] said everything was good, which was a good reassurance. But again, at that time ofmiscarriage, I couldn’t help but thinkI did enough damage to my body at a young age that it was almost, like, payback.”
The couple firstannounced that they were expectingin April (a year and a half after revealingthey’d suffered the miscarriage) in a sweet Instagram photo shoot.
“Ihad these guilty feelings of if, ‘I can’t even take care of child for a week in my stomach, I can’t raise a child on my own,’ ” Johnson East said later, in an interview published in June 2018. “Ifelt guilty to Andrew thatI had lost his child, and I felt guilty to God that I lost his child.”
The couple cited both the support they received from those around them as well as their personal faith as paramount in helping them through their feelings of loss.
“No matter what you go through, you will always come out of it,” said Johnson East. “And I think if you believe in Him and have faith in Him, you’ll come out stronger than you were before.”
source: people.com
