A Letter To My Rainbow Baby

To my rainbow baby,

Rainbow baby – I only learnt the term after your birth and it felt so apt. I smiled to picture you as a rainbow. That is exactly what you are  – a colourful beam of joy, appearing at the end of a dark and dismal time.

I’ve talked about my miscarriage before. Finding out I was pregnant with you not long later was one of the most emotional moments I’ve experienced. Happiness and fear all mixed up in one. That line on the cheap paper test indicating you were here and my life was about to change forever. Yes it’s faintness simultaneously communicated your evasiveness, you weren’t quite here yet. I couldn’t take you for granted. I should never take you for granted.

During the pregnancy is was so hard to allow myself to love you. I was so scared you would be taken from me. I was scared that I was unable to carry a baby to full term, I’d never done it yet. I was scared that if I loved you as I had loved my first born it would have been an insult to her. It would have been saying that I had forgotten her. That she was not my firstborn. It was such a confusing time.

I remember going to the dentist and telling her I was pregnant. She asked me if you were my first. I stumbled for a moment. I wanted to say no, to acknowledge the child that I had carried, however short that had been, to acknowledge the child that I’d given birth to, despite her miniature alien like features. I couldn’t. I didn’t. I knew that is not what she wanted to know. She wanted to know if I had an older child at home with Nanny (your Nanny), or perhaps at nursery. Maybe I’d even dropped off a little girl at the school gates just that morning. But I hadn’t, and my fear was that I may never do so. To everyone out there you were my first child. And in many ways now you are here I think of you as my first. But after my miscarriage and during the pregnancy all I could think of was that I had lost my first born.

Now I know I have two first borns.

Each week during the pregnancy with you felt like a huge achievement and I willed my body to get me through another one.

Please.

As I approached each significant milestone (12 weeks, 20 weeks, 24 weeks…) I thought that I would begin to relax, but I didn’t. Not until around 30 weeks could I really enjoy the moment and believe that you might make it safely into my arms. Yet then there were other things occurring in our lives which meant I couldn’t really enjoy anything.

Every twinge scared me. I didn’t want to tell people about you at first, not because I wasn’t proud, but because I didn’t want to have to tell them if I lost you.

I could hardly feel you move. It felt like such an injustice to be denied that experience. I had so looked forward to the reassurance of your movements. Your way of letting me know you were there and you were safe. I remember one midwife being genuinely shocked that I couldn’t feel what she could hear with her Doppler – you turning somersaults in my womb. I felt like I was inadequate, why couldn’t I feel you? It turns out it was because of where your placenta was.

There were moments when I felt a bond like no other. I remember one day, a particularly difficult day. I sat in the spare bedroom, the room that would be your bedroom, and looked around me at the half painted walls. I sat against the luke-warm radiator and held you in my womb. I talked to you. I stroked you and I told you how much I loved you as tears fell down my face. We in the home straight by this point. I was starting to believe you would make it. When my mother asked me to come and sit with the rest of the family, I declined; ‘you shouldn’t sit here all alone’, she said. I told her I wasn’t. I was with you. And I’ve been with you almost every moment since.

It was during my antenatal classes that I began to realise that I had actually experienced labour before (during my miscarriage) and it gave me an inner strength. I’d done it once, my body would know how to do it again. As I got nearer and nearer to my due date I became more relaxed that you would make it into this world. When I started labour, even though it was a little early, I didn’t feel fear, just anticipation at finally meeting you.

When you came tumbling out of me I screamed, “Oh my God, it’s a baby. Oh my god it’s my baby”. The midwife and your father both looked at me like I was deranged. Looking back those words reflected how little I’d allowed myself to believe I would have a baby. The genuine shock and delirious happiness at your arrival was unreal. Your fathers look told me how little he’d understood about how challenging those nearly nine months had been for me.

Since that day I’ve never been alone. Even if I’m not literally with you I have you in my thoughts. On my way to work I turn to say ‘it’s a nee naw*’ and then realise that you aren’t there.

I love you more than life itself. If it wasn’t for you I would have given up a long time ago; you make life worth living. I’m so very grateful for you. Imagining a life without you is to imagine a life of constant rain.

My rainbow baby, I love you.

Love,

Mama Xx

 

 

* my son loves nee naws, otherwise known as ambulances, fire engines and police cars. I’ve become used to pointing them out everywhere I go.

 

 

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Support

If you or someone you know has been affected by baby loss or miscarriage(s) there are lots of support structures out there. You can contact the Miscarriage Association or Sands for stillbirth and neonatal deaths.

Count the Kicks is a great resource for pregnant women, especially those carrying rainbow babies. Pregnancy after loss can also offer lots of support for people in this situation.