2017 was not a great time for the Baltierra family.
And that’s a pretty huge understatement.
Lots and lots of things happened for Catelynn Lowell and Tyler Baltierra last year, and it seems like not a whole lot of them were great.
Tyler’s father, Butch, kicked off the year dealing with his lifelong drug addiction, but thankfully he did check into a longterm rehab.
As far as we know, he’s still doing well, so that’s something.
Amber, Tyler’s sister, checked into rehab too with problems of her own.
Hopefully she’s doing as well as their father is!
As far as family stuff goes, those are clearly some pretty big ups and downs.
But nothing affected Catelynn and Tyler as badly as her miscarriage did.
As we saw last season on Teen Mom OG, the longtime couple made the decision last year to try for another baby.
They already had Carly, the girl Catelynn got pregnant with when they were teenagers, the one they placed for adoption.
And in 2015, they welcomed Nova, another darling little girl.
But after Nova was born, Cate suffered from severe postpartum depression.
It eventually got so bad that she checked into a treatment center, but even after leaving there, her depression persisted.
At some point early last year though, things started to turn around, and like we said, they decided the time was right to have another baby.
She got pregnant pretty soon after they started trying to conceive, and they quickly shared the news with family.
Then the miscarriage happened.
We didn’t see too much of it on the show, which is good.
As reality stars, they share a lot of themselves, but some things should stay private.
During one segment, we did see Tyler explaining what happened, and he was clearly broken up about it.
Catelynn, however, began contemplating suicide, so she checked into that treatment center once again.
We all know what happened after that — she completed six weeks of treatment, went home for a bit, then went back for six more weeks of treatment.
As difficult a time as she had then, things are looking up now.
She’s pregnant again, and she and Tyler both seem to be really excited about it.
But in a new interview, Tyler got really, really candid about how difficult things got last year, particularly with the miscarriage.
And man, is it rough to hear.
He calls the miscarriage a “traumatic loss” and admits that it was “very emotionally intense,” but he says that his first reaction was to tend to Catelynn.
“I ran to her, held her,” he recounts. “We cried. We just held each other for probably two hours and cried.”
“That was our way of kind of letting go and accepting reality for what it is.”
“From a guy’s perspective,” he continues, clarifying that he doesn’t mean “to sound sexist,” but “it’s almost more acceptable for a woman to break down and be emotional.”
“But I swear, as a man, when I walked away from Cate and I didn’t have to be so strong, I was breaking down every single day.”
When she went away to get treatment, he says “I was taking Nova to school and just crying every single day.”
“I’m assuming a lot of women do the same thing. It’s just not really talked about a lot with men.”
It’s heartbreaking to hear all of this, but there’s one thing that helped him cope, and that was his daughter.
Tyler says that “Seeing Nova and realizing that I can’t sit here and sulk in my pity” got him through the difficult time.
“I’ve gotta be strong, engage with my daughter, play with her, take her to the park.”
“I still had a job to do of raising her around the happiest environment I could make for her,” he explains.
“I kind of felt that she was my motivation to keep strong, looking at her and saying, ‘I did lose this child, but look at this beautiful child I’ve got now."”
As touching as it is, he adds that Nova “helped me push myself forward and keep going.”
During that time, Tyler says that he’d put his daughter to bed, then “go in my room and cry about it.”
For him, it was important not to hide his emotions from her, but it was also important not to break down in front of her, either.
From where we’re sitting, it looks like handled the situation well.
In the newest clip of Catelynn and Tyler on Teen Mom OG, the one where they tell Nova they’re having a baby, she looks like a very happy little girl.
Hopefully, in other scenes, we’ll see more happiness from them.
After all they’ve been through, they definitely deserve it!
