Football has taken Charlie and Bianca Austin to many places throughout the former’s career, but there’s been one constant in recent years: Charlie has taken care of the school runs.
Every day Charlie collects daughter Avabella and son Hunter from school, and drops them off each morning when his football schedule permits.
It’s a routine which has continued since the family’s relocation from London to Brisbane ahead of the 2022-23 Isuzu UTE A-League season – and one of the small joys of parenting both Charlie and Bianca have cherished ever since “the worst heartbreak” of delivering their first child, Tayton-Grace Austin, stillborn in 2010.
“I think we’re the parents we are because she was here, and we lost her,” says Bianca, sitting alongside Charlie to recount the devastation of their first-born child’s story as part of this week’s episode of A-Leagues All Access.
“It changed everything. It changed how we parent the other two, I think. We’re very protective and we cherish every moment, because we know how quickly they can be taken away.
In that aspect, she’s present every day.
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It was late into Bianca’s pregnancy when it was discovered Tayton would be born with severe cerebral palsy. Specialists told the couple Tayton would be born blind, in a vegetative state and had no chance of survival beyond days – potentially just hours, if not minutes. If she did survive, wrote Charlie via instagram, Tayton “would have had non-stop seizures until her life came to an end.”
Together, Charlie and Bianca made the agonising decision to have a Termination For Medical Reasons, or ‘TFMR’. Austin describes it as “a decision made out of love.”
“There have been ups and downs, of course there have,” Charlie tells A-Leagues All Access. “There’s been heartbreak, the worst heartbreak – I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy what we went through at the start, me and Bianca.”
Charlie continues: “The pregnancy was going well… we were going for the scans and stuff and it came to 32 weeks and the doctor said: ‘Look, your baby is not growing. We think she’s got cerebral palsy – but extreme cerebral palsy’. We decided it was right for ourselves, but more importantly it was right for Tayton, because she’d have no life.”
Bianca adds: “It feels like such a long time ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
I remember having her like it was yesterday. It was the worst day of our lives.
“We were so scared at first, we didn’t even want to look at her… there was just something so frightening about her not being alive. But the midwife was so good. She was like: ‘You really need to look at her, she’s so beautiful’, and then once we had a peek, we were just fine then. We didn’t want to let her go once we had her in our arms.”
“She was our beautiful little girl, wasn’t she?” Charlie says.
Charlie used social media during Baby Loss Awareness Week to detail the impact losing Tayton at birth had on his mental state, and the difficulty he faced attempting to lay his emotions bare and deal with them. Instead, he “hid his pain” – and found solace in football.
“Football was the biggest escape for me, so I could get away from it,” he says. “It weighed on me, but I didn’t want to show it to Bianca, I was there 100% to help her.
“Charlie would have a good run for ages, and then a breakdown – whereas I was broken every day,” Bianca replies.
Bianca then speaks directly to Charlie: “You would be okay for a certain amount of time and then lose it. I got it at the time, you tried to be brave for me, and you tried to just crack on.”
Eventually, Charlie found Sands, a UK charity for pregnancy and baby loss supporting those affected by the death of a child, through a free helpline, an online community, and local support groups.
Click here to find out more about Sands, a UK pregnancy and baby loss charity.
Opening up was what helped a father confront his grief. Charlie says there’s still a stigma attached to TFMR’s, but he’s eager to use Baby Loss Awareness Week as an annual opportunity to share his story and spread awareness of the sheer weight of the decision, and the impact it can have on a family.
“Years passed and I found Sands United, and spoke to fathers there who had experienced loss like I had,” Austin wrote on Instagram.
“Talking suddenly felt easier, and instead of staying strong, I opened up, I grieved. I still didn’t feel comfortable opening up that we had a TFMR, the stigma around it still remains, but that’s why (Baby Loss Awareness Week) is so important. For awareness, for change and for breaking taboos to make talking and getting support for any kind of baby loss easier.”
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