Photo: Courtesy of Sean McEnroe
Sean McEnroeand his wife Niamh are opening up about finding strength in each other after she suffered a miscarriage.
Earlier this week, Sean — the artist son of actress Tatum O’Neal and tennis icon John McEnroe — revealed on Instagram thathe wed Niamh in September. The 32-year-old tells PEOPLE they held off on sharing their marriage news as they dealt with a personal tragedy the same month as their nuptials, Niamh’s miscarriage at the end of the first trimester.
“It was a huge shock,” he says. “It played such a huge role in how we got closer and how our bond became stronger. That was to me one of the reasons why I felt like I had to share it. It’s such a pivotal part of our story now.”
“For me,” adds Niamh (pronounced “Neeve”), “it was a big lesson in acceptance. … If this is meant to happen, it’s going to happen. Do I feel prepared? No, but will I accept it and understand that if it happens I am ready for it. Then we obviously had to get through the emotional depth that comes with that too, because obviously it does hurt. We had just gotten married.”
“Once you’re really committed and you start preparing for the future, you get really excited,” he says. “You’re building this energy, and then all of a sudden, once that happened, it really came crashing down.”
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Courtesy Sean McEnroe
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“We’re committed to acceptance and surrender to wherever our path is meant to take us,” continues Sean. “We never want to resist something, especially that big. So it was important to us to immediately accept that this happened for a reason that we didn’t need to understand, but that we needed to trust. That kind of foundation of belief that we had in that moment made the healing process so much faster, and it really did bring us closer.”
“We had to just go through this emotional rollercoaster,” he recalls, “but we had that belief in our minds the whole time. We were able to not let the emotion spiral into a more nightmarish scenario where we really could have gone into a dark period and questioned everything.”
Niamh says she’s made “peace” with the miscarriage, ultimately finding a newfound perspective.
Explaining their decision to share their heartbreaking experience, Sean says they hope to lessen the stigma surrounding the subject of pregnancy loss.
source: people.com
