Mother's Day real life: 'My mum is just amazing, she's kept me strong'

When we arrive at our local cafe to meet Tiffany Tuccillo-Wassell, she greets us with a beaming smile. Six-month-old baby boy Reggie does too, and we grab a drink and take a seat with the pair.

Tiffany is different from our usual interviewees. She's got no award-winning movies out, has starred in no ground-breaking TV shows and isn't here to promote her latest album. In fact, she's just a 29-year-old mum-of-three from Wolverhampton.

And this Mother's Day, we can't imagine anyone better to star in Weekend. You see, Tiffany is an inspiration in many ways.

At just 20-years-old, Tiff gave birth to her first child Lola Mae, who was stillborn. She's since brought three energetic boys into the world, but has sacrificed her education and career to bring them up as best she can with husband Neil 'Checka' Wassell, a roofer.

The pair met when Tiffany was 20 at the Holly Bush Inn, Penn, where she was working. Very quickly, things became serious for the pair.

"Me and Checka hadn't been together long when we first fell pregnant – we'd been together for six months. It was totally unexpected!" Tiff tells us while feeding a very jolly little Reggie. "There were questions when we found out about what we'd do, it was all so new for us both. But we decided we'd have the baby and the pregnancy was just fine. We moved house to get somewhere a little bit bigger to start our family.

"Lola Mae was due on August 20, 2008. But on June 27, a Friday, I hadn't felt her move for a while. I tried poking and prodding, drank cold drinks and ate chocolate, but couldn't feel anything. It felt like we were in such hardship at the time – I'd had to sell my car because we hadn't got much money and my mobile phone had been cut off that day too, so I ended up scrabbling some money together and going to the phone box to call Checka to ring the hospital so someone could call me back.

"Losing Lola Mae really knocked her about and it still does to this day. Everything she does, from the time she wakes up to the time she goes to bed, Tiff puts her family and friends first.

"When my mum sadly passed away, Tiff was my rock and kept me focused so I didn't go off the rails. You could say she's taken my mum's reins in a way. She still keeps me in touch and is always on hand in any circumstances.

"When it comes to our three boys George, Stanley and Reggie, there's no one else in the world I would rather have as their mother. Most people take loved ones for granted sometimes including myself, but I know I'd be completely lost without her.

"I was a little bit worried at the time, but part of me thought 'well it's my first baby and I don't know what to expect. I'm sure it's fine. Maybe baby is just having a really long sleep?'

"I went to the day assessment unit and the midwife, Noma, who has been with me through all of my pregnancies, tried to find the baby's heartbeat but couldn't. I still didn't know what was going on, but Noma took me to the scan room and came in with me.

"The sonographers words were 'I'm sorry, sweetheart, there's no heartbeat'. And that was that."

Tiff tells her story with such strength that we're surprised. She continues: "I was given three options at that point. Checka was at work in Leicester and my mum was away on holiday in Tunisia. They took me into a room and said I could go straight up to the labour ward then and there and be induced, I could go home and wait for it to happen naturally. Because baby had died, I'd naturally go into labour within two weeks anyway. Or I could go home and go back the next day to be induced.

"I didn't know what to think. I asked for another sonographer to come and double check. Your mind is just racing. You think, well, I don't understand? Before it'd happened to me, I hadn't even heard of stillbirth. I didn't know what was going on.

"I went home to return the next day and carried on. That night, we went out for dinner with our friends. They were pregnant too, just five weeks behind me. That was difficult. It was so strange – I was sitting there and thinking 'she's sitting there with her baby in her belly and it's alive and I'm sitting here with mine and my baby is dead'. I don't know how I did that now, looking back at it. I was just in shock, on autopilot."

Tiffany smiles at a grinning Reggie as he's sick on her scarf. We're inspired by her super-mum strength.

"We went in the next day and I was induced," Tiff tells us. "I was put straight on to a morphine driver and I didn't have her until the following night. Checka was with me, they brought a bed into the room so he could stay with me the whole time.

"When I had Lola, she was only 1lb10. I thought she'd come out and surprise everybody, that she'd cry and be breathing. But she wasn't.

"She was very, very tiny. It was a severe case of intrauterine growth restriction that hadn't been picked up. Because she was so small, they got her some clothes from neonatal and a tiny little doll's moses basket. They said she could stay in the room with us overnight, so she did. I'm not particularly religious, but the hospital vicar came and she was Christened in hospital on the morning she was taken away.

"On some maternity wards now there are cold cots for these situations so the baby can stay with you. But this wasn't available to us then, so she was taken.

"There was so much paperwork, I wasn't discharged until the Monday evening, because there was so much to do. I didn't want a post mortem, but I did agree for pictures of Lola Mae to be put into medical journals, to help medical students learn more about the condition.

"After that was done, that was it. The care at the hospital was finished. Of course, we'd got all of her stuff in her room, and I don't even know what I did with it. I think I gave some away. We couldn't have a funeral for four weeks.

"The funeral came around, and I'd had some bad days in between. It almost now feels like it didn't happen to me. Whether that's my mind subconsciously taking things away, I don't know. But honestly, you can't keep going on about things that happened years ago. Don't get me wrong, it never goes away, but you've got to carry on. Because if you don't, you'll just end up wallowing in self-pity for the rest of your life."

Tiff's own mum, 53-year-old Anita, along with Checka, helped Tiff through the terribly difficult time: "My mum has been there all along – she's buried one of her children too. She had a little boy called Billy who was older than me, and he was severely disabled after complications at birth. The cord was around his neck, so he developed severe cerebral palsy and very severe epilepsy. He was three, and died the day before I was born after suffering a seizure.

"My mum is just amazing, she's kept me strong – been there when I needed her and gone away when I needed that too. She's a little person of big love. She's been through some really tough times herself these last five years, she's had breast cancer several times and is still undergoing treatment. But despite that, she's still been there."

After Lola Mae died, Tiffany took her maternity leave but decided not to return to the pub. Her mind, she admits, was on one track.

"I was just desperate to get pregnant again. It's all I could think about, and it didn't happen for a very long time. I didn't want to replace her, but I did have a void. I struggled to get back into full-time work after that."

After four years, Tiffany fell pregnant with her first son, now five.

"As a mum usually does, the boys always come first in every aspect of her life.

"She has had to struggle so much to better her education and was so upset when they've had to go to childcare.

"I think Tiff goes above and beyond to make her boys happy, loved, content and well-adjusted little men. They are her world.

"Tiff had a heart-breaking time when her firstborn, little Lola Mae, was born asleep. I was in Tunisia at the time and couldn't get a flight home immediately but when I finally got to the hospital I found Tiff just sitting on her hospital bed cradling her child.

"She was broken. It should have been such a happy time for her. She showed maturity beyond her young years. She was amazing and she hasn't changed her attitude to her children one little bit.

"It was a surprise when we got pregnant with George, because we'd been trying for such a long time. People asked if I was worried, and my honest answer was no. People were shocked by that, but I thought I'd cross that bridge if I came to it. There was no point in worrying about it because I wouldn't be able to enjoy my pregnancy.

"The care I received having George was impeccable. I took aspirin from 12 weeks to keep blood flowing through the placenta and from 26 weeks, I had a scan ever two weeks. I was induced at 37 weeks as after that the placenta stops working as well.

"After a hard 19 hours and lots of being sick and a failed epidural, George came along. He was quite floppy at birth, he wasn't breathing, so he was whisked to the side of the room to receive oxygen. I looked over to him and I thought 'he's alive!' It was the only thing I could think of. He was 6lb15."

Tiffany then went to university to read law, but after having her second child Stanley, now three, she couldn't afford to study and keep the boys in childcare, so she made the decision to leave her course. It's something that she says she was sad about, but she was glad of the opportunity to spend her days looking after her babies.

But she made use of any spare time she found. When Tiffany and Checka got married in 2014, Tiff got thrifty, making her own satin flowers. All of the evenings she spent crafting when the boys were in bed paid off, and people began to ask her to make flowers for their weddings too. She's since set up The Satin Flower House, making specialist decorations in-between taking care of her boys. She also sneaks off into the garage on a Saturday morning to read Weekend while having a quiet cuppa.

"It sounds cliché, but losing Lola Mae made me very, very strong. Now I'm a person that very rarely gets upset about anything at all. I can talk about it like it happened to someone else, and I think that maybe it's made me too hard-faced. If someone was to come to me now and tell me their story, I wouldn't know what to say to them, even having been through it myself.

"The one thing I would say to anybody that's pregnant is if you feel the slightest change in movement or have even a tiny feeling in your gut that the baby hasn't moved for a while, or you've got a concern, you absolutely must go and get checked out. You're not wasting your time, or the hospital's time.

"At the end of the day, it's your life and the life of your child. No matter how many times it happens, phone them and get it checked out. Or at least speak to someone."

For support following stillbirth or neonatal death, visit charity Sands: www.uk-sands.org