In the moment my first child was born I felt relief. My life was simple and uncomplicated in those days, and my relief was mainly that the labour was over. At 39 weeks and 6 days with a “natural” (urgh) birth that could have graced an NCT poster, it had never occurred to me that my daughter would be anything other than ok. Looking back now I am forever thankful that I got to experience her pregnancy, birth and babyhood with the heady mix of overwhelm, happiness, tiredness and first time mum worries, but entirely free from crippling anxiety, grief and trauma.
In the moment Kaitlyn was born I felt the most overwhelming love at exactly the same moment as my heart shattered forever. The silence was deafening. In that moment the person that I was, that I had been all my life, died as well.
In the moment my son, my third child, was born, all my worlds came crashing together. It was the most medicalised, surgical birth experience you could imagine. I had been warned that he might not cry straight away and that was normal. But he did. I heard his startled little cry and the floodgates opened, every emotion I had been too scared to feel in pregnancy flowing out of the little box they had been shoved into in the back of my brain. The most intense relief at his safe delivery; I could hear it for myself, he really was alive! An intense joy. And a tidal wave of grief, the desperate grief and sadness and longing for Kaitlyn that I had spent 8 months blocking out, instead feeling numbness seep over me when I thought about my darling girl. Lying on the theatre table I sobbed so hard that I briefly wondered whether it was possible that my insides could come out where they hadn’t even started stitching me back together yet.
I held my beautiful boy in my arms and the duality continued; so much love and yet the ghost of past experiences laid over the top. Remembering holding a baby that didn’t cry, didn’t wriggle. The same exclamations over the full head of dark hair. A complex feeling of simultaneously being in the present and being in the past.
Over four weeks later and that duality is still very present, and will be for a while I’ve realised. I am overjoyed to have my baby boy and I am grateful, I snuggle him close and stare at him in wonder every day. And I miss Kaitlyn. Those simple words don’t even come close to describing a grief that sits on my chest like a bag of rocks, that washes over me and catches me out with no warning. Musical toys gifted to my son have me sobbing over the memory of winter 2018, coming home without my baby and boxing up her beautiful things. Every little thing he does, I wonder if Kaitlyn would have done the same. I search his face hoping to see a resemblance to Kaitlyn, then cry because that resemblance is definitely there. I often feel as if I am right back at the start of my grief, before I had ever learnt to even partly carry it. I feel like I will need to relearn to carry it all over again. My heart aches and still I sob, for Kaitlyn, for my eldest daughter, whose life has been so deeply affected from such a young age. For the person that I used to be, for the loss of uncomplicated joy in my life. And for my son, who will never know the person I used to be, and with whom my bond is as strong as any of my children and yet so entangled with grief.
I’ve never liked or really used the term “rainbow baby”. Kaitlyn is not a storm, and her death isn’t a storm – storms end, but her loss never will. Alongside the darkness of Kaitlyn’s death sits the everlasting flame of my love for her and the beautiful memories of my pregnancy, when she was alive in me. My son brings light and joy into my life but the gaping hole in my heart still remains. All three of my children occupy unique and separate spaces; they are individuals that each bring their own wonderful gifts. My baby boy hasn’t healed my heart, but please don’t take that to be more negative than it is. I adore every fibre of him and whilst I haven’t yet relearnt how to feel joy, really feel it as an emotion, I can at least now envisage a day when that could happen. Even that seemingly small statement is a huge shift for me. But I am still Kaitlyn’s mother, with a mother’s love for her dead child and so my heart will never be healed from what we have lost. Just as Kaitlyn did not replace her older sister, so her younger brother does not replace Kaitlyn. Any parent understands that one child does not replace another, but somehow when it comes to baby loss this is how we talk, as if a new baby makes up for a baby that has gone before. It isn’t so. This is why the rainbow doesn’t work for me – I don’t think of my son as emerging out of Kaitlyn’s death. That isn’t the backdrop that I want for his life. I have nothing at all against others using the term for their own families, I just prefer not to label my own children as sunshine, angels and rainbows. (However I will still dress my baby in rainbow stuff because there is an awful lot of it about at the moment and some of it is gorgeous!)
My challenge now (or perhaps one of several challenges in this postnatal, new third-time-mum phase) is to find the space and time, amongst the hecticness of life with a new baby and a 4 year old during an ongoing global pandemic, to experience my grief again. Soon after Kaitlyn died I realised that if I boxed my grief away it would destroy me from within, but then in order to survive this pregnancy I had to box it away. Now I must let it back out, bit by bit, allow myself to feel it again without fear of punishment and without it overwhelming me to the point where I can’t function for my family. I must continue to parent Kaitlyn in amongst her older sister and younger brother. Grief is born of love, and my love for Kaitlyn will burn brightly forever. She is worth all my tears and my attempt at words. And one day, when he is older, her little brother will know all about the special sister that changed our lives forever and taught us all a whole new kind of love, a love that no words can truly describe.
A Keepsake for Kaitlyn 