Hello from the other side.

I wasn’t going to do a post on Miscarriage awareness month. I have not experienced infant loss first hand;  I’ve never had the horrible experience of losing a wanted pregnancy. I can only imagine the pain people go through.

But I have been thinking about Rainbow Babies.

For those who don’t know, a Rainbow baby is a child born after a child is lost. I guess it is the ‘pot of gold’ at the end of the rainbow. It is the beautiful thing that only comes with the rain. I have mixed feelings about this analogy, because I am a Rainbow Baby.

My mother has said she was pregnant for a year before I was born. She was. She miscarried my older sibling and conceived again so quickly she didn’t really have time to mourn. So what that means is if that pregnancy had not failed, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.

Chew on that.

I cannot be happy that my mother went through the unpleasant experience of miscarrying a much wanted baby. But I wouldn’t be here now if she had not. And, you know, I like it here.

I have read a lot of posts about lost babies over the past few days, some of them are pretty emotionally devastating.  I am so lucky to have never lost a child. But I’m also lucky that my mother did.

Mixed feelings.

I don’t know if my parents still think about that child that was never born. We’re English; we don’t talk about such things. But I have to be grateful that my sibling didn’t make it, because if they had I would not have.

So, I want to take a moment now to acknowledge that life that was not lived, and say thank you to my lost sibling.

I remember you.