I’ve always disliked “lingo.” I remember chuckling when a fellow music student at uni referred to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 as “Tchaik 4”, only to then realise that all the students called it that. So began four years of being completely crap at the lingo of the music world. Things on this front only got worse when I joined the NHS – man, the acronyms! If there’s one place that can make your brain feel a little bit funny from all the jargon, it’s the public sector. Ten years in and I still come across brand new acronyms all the time. Personally, I prefer a bit of plain English. Lingo can be helpful, a shortcut, a way for people to identify with each other and talk about their common ground. But it can also be alienating and a little grating to hear the same terms and phrases repeated. Not to mention damaging; researching an undergraduate dissertation in the Linguistic Appropriation of the Third Reich told me everything I needed to know about the power of language in shaping our culture, society, what is acceptable and even what we think on an individual level. A few years ago I got embroiled in a debate with a Partner from a firm of solicitors on a training course. She kept referring to all the leaders in the case studies as “he” when a gender had not been specified. I pointed it out, in what was intended as a light touch sort of way but did spark a reaction. Five minutes later she was hotly declaring that women didn’t need pandering to with such nonsense and she hadn’t got where she had in her career by caring about such stupid things, while I just as vehemently asserted the importance of language in shaping a paternalistic/feminist/egalitarian culture (delete as appropriate). Thankfully we broke for lunch and that was the end of the discussion.
The world of pregnancy and parenting forums is rife with a baffling array of abbreviated lingo, most of which I’ve never bothered to learn. If you’ve never come across this, go and spend half of an hour of your life (that you’ll never get back) just bouncing around mumsnet. Make sure you take a glossary. If your head isn’t entirely spinning by the time you’re done, I take my hat off to you.
The world of baby loss also comes with its own lingo. In a way it is entirely harmless, it brings people together, bonds us in our pain and saves us from having to say or write twenty times a day the brute fact that our children died. Sometimes though I do wonder if the lingo truly serves us as a group if we want to mainstream the conversation around baby loss. And sometimes the lingo can feel alienating to those already “in the group”, so to speak. I particularly struggle with the labelling of various children depending on the order of their birth in a family. Any children born prior to a baby dying are referred to as “sunshine” children. In a way that’s fair enough – M has always been our sunshine, long before we even thought about trying to have another child. But to those parents who lost their first child, it can’t be nice to think that none of their children can be labelled “sunshine” babies. It’s a term you only apply to your child after tragedy has struck, which doesn’t sit comfortably at all. M’s worth has always been her inherent worth, we have adored having her in our lives from day one and her inherent worth does not change because we lost her sibling. She has always been as precious to us as she is now.
The child that died is called the “angel” baby. Now I’m not religious and I don’t believe in angels. I don’t think of Kaitlyn as an angel, up in the sky with wings and a halo; I think of the energy of her soul all around us in the atmosphere, no longer bound here by her body. The idea of her growing her angel wings sends the uncomfortable kind of tingles up my spine. So I struggle with the angel baby label, and the accompanying ‘angel mama’ label for mums. That said, I have utterly failed to come up with anything better. If we’re not angel mamas, what are we? Loss mums? No. I guess I tend to stick to ‘bereaved parents’. Not exactly snappy, but passes my plain English test. I’m not altogether sure Kaitlyn needs a label per se. If I’m explaining to someone for the first time who Kaitlyn is, I would never use the term angel baby, and if I’m talking to someone I know then they already know who Kaitlyn is. But I do wear my angel mama clothing with pride. It raises awareness and opens up conversations about Kaitlyn and baby loss; despite my plain English preference, I cannot very well go around wearing a t-shirt that says “My baby died.” Maybe one day society will be sophisticated enough at handling grief for that to be ok, but today is not that day.
A child that is born after the child that died is referred to as a “rainbow” baby. This is the one I struggle with the most. Having miscarried a much hoped for rainbow baby, I can’t bear the sound of anything hopeful or redemptive, it quite literally makes me want to scream. Right now I find it hard to believe that the “storm” of losing a child ever ends, and the birth of another child can’t possibly remove the loss of the unique and loved child that died. This is the term that I fear must strike the most sadness and alienation into the hearts of those who never go on to have a living child after their loss. It’s a term that hurts when it feels like there is no rainbow on the horizon.
It doesn’t put Kaitlyn in the right context either. Kaitlyn is not my “storm” and her death isn’t a storm. Storms pass, and afterwards the weather clears, the devastation is surveyed and rebuilding efforts begin. That doesn’t at all describe our experience. When Kaitlyn died, I shifted forever onto a different plane of existence. There is no rebuilding – things can never be rebuilt to be what they were before. There is no feeling of moving forward – we move because time gives us no choice, and M has a life that she deserves to live to the fullest. Kaitlyn’s death wasn’t a storm, it was some sort of strange sci-fi device that knocked me into a parallel universe, where I can still see everyone, I occupy the same space as them, but my experience of the world is forever altered, the feelings in the very core of my being are forever altered. The world has lost its colour and at the moment I could well believe that it will stay in both monochrome and monotone forever.
Kaitlyn is also her own rainbow. Her death is what shattered us, but Kaitlyn herself – her presence, my pregnancy, holding her in my arms – brought sunshine and rainbows into our lives. Every time I see a rainbow I say hello to Kaitlyn, because every time I see any form of beauty I think of Kaitlyn. My pregnancy with Kaitlyn was the most contented time of my life. M became a big sister and I saw a side to her that I could not have witnessed without Kaitlyn’s presence. S and I have two wonderful little girls, and we could not be more proud of that fact. My pride in Kaitlyn is fierce, that she thrived for so long despite a dodgy placenta, that she brought beauty and ignited a fire in me that will burn forever. Even the uplifting beauty of a brilliant rainbow in the sky cannot come close to describing what Kaitlyn brought to our lives; she is brighter than the diamond that shines amongst the mud and graft and quagmire of living with her death.
Perhaps this language has been created to counteract the awful medical terminology we are confronted with on the death of a baby. Anyone who has ever been asked how they would like the “products of conception” to be “disposed of”or been told that someone is very sorry for the “fetal demise” definitely needs to resist a strong urge to start talking about angels and rainbows. But I wonder sometimes if softening what happened is really right. My baby didn’t grow her angel wings. She died. In our case she died because once a pregnancy is labelled low-risk it’s barely monitored, because capacity problems overtook a woman’s need for support and because socially we seem happy to accept that these things just happen sometimes or that things weren’t meant to be. I’m not sure that talking about angels and rainbows is going to help change these systemic and cultural issues.
Plain English is what’s needed. I did not miscarry – my baby died, or did not manage to live in the first place. I would like my much-loved baby to be laid to rest in a caring and respectful way please. I did not “have a stillborn”, I had a beautiful baby and she died. It is tragic, it should be talked about, it is not just “one of those things.” My baby’s life was meant to be. If we cared about babies dying as much as we care about Brexit, we could one day achieve a world where only the smallest minority of babies died under a small set of circumstances. Some people would argue that’s the case now – they are wrong. I have yet to tell someone about Kaitlyn without hearing “it happened to me / my sister / my best friend too.” Almost everyone seems to know someone who has lost a baby later in pregnancy. I guarantee everyone knows someone who has lost at least one baby earlier in pregnancy, even if they don’t know who that is in their circle.
I owe it to Kaitlyn to speak the truth and to not shy away from the facts. She lived. She is loved. And she died. I will say the phrases “Kaitlyn was born” and “Kaitlyn died” until people no longer run away from them. We have to shape our culture and influence society by speaking the facts in a clear, non-medicalised, unambiguous way that others cannot hide behind.
A Keepsake for Kaitlyn 