My Rainbow Connection

I have heard a lot recently about rainbow babies. Babies born after the loss of another through various means. It's an interesting term and not one that I heard being used twenty or even ten years ago.

Although in some ways is seems a beautiful concept, it is also kind of disturbing. Disturbing that the subsequent child is saddled with the responsibility to fill a hole in the lives of their parents. Also that parents seem to be romanticizing the lives of their new babies.

Admittedly, if I had heard the term many years ago, I too may have clung to it, considered that perspective a gift. I was, however, given a different gift and a different perspective which I would like to share.

At 26, I was nine years into a relationship which included two years of marriage. Together we felt ready to reproduce. Two months into the decision when the home pregnancy test I took came back negative, I somehow still believed that I was pregnant. It would be three weeks later that I had the pregnancy confirmed by a Dr., which, ironically would be the same day that I found out that I was losing my first chance at motherhood.

Nine weeks is what they told me I was. Like a lot of miscarriages, mine involved a lot of poking and prodding and appointments crammed into a short period of time and a lot of guilt over what I could have done differently. For me, it also involved a lot of raging at the universe for choosing to bless so many parents who I felt were more reckless and less dedicated to the craft of family creation than I was. It didn't help that the miscarriage took place a few days before my birthday or that I chose not to share it with most of my friends but rather suffered through it virtually alone.

Fast forward 18 months and, low and behold, lucky me! I am19 weeks into what most believe is my first pregnancy. It is April 18^th... the day of my first ultrasound and I have arranged to arrive at my public service job late to accommodate the early appointment.

In the ultrasound, however, I was told that there was “something wrong” and that I should “speak to my Doctor.” Luckily, the Dr.'s office is kitty-corner to the hospital where I had the ultrasound so I booked it across the street and waited for her to arrive and provide clarification. Though she was surprised to see me sans appointment, she left me to call diagnostic imaging and get my diagnosis.

An hour later I left her office armed with a genetic counseling appointment and the news that my baby was “not viable.”

In the week between the diagnoses and Matthew's stillbirth, Anencephaly was a term I became uncomfortably familiar with as were the “you'll try agains” and the “it doesn't always work the first times.” To make matters worse, I was making arrangements with the funeral home for his cremation when I felt I should have been making shower arrangements, the platitudes all evaporated in the heat of anger and injustice.

Fast forward thirteen months I was holding my first healthy child in my arms. Zoe, I named her, LIFE – what we had each given to the other.

Fast forward another 22 months and I was holding a baby boy. I would go on to have two additional healthy children.

What's my point?

When my second child was three-and-a-half, I did something I had heard about others before me doing, I asked him what it was like to be born.

As we sat talking, my son told me an incredible story of how Zoe had been in my tummy and, wanting to be born first, he pushed her out. He went on to say that he then got in me and she then pushed him out. That was when he decided to let her be born first.

Although there was no way of knowing the gender of my miscarried child, my stillborn had been a boy.

At that age, my son had no earthly way of knowing that I had been pregnant twice before I birthed his older sister.

I now talk about it openly with the kids and they sometimes mention their “missing” brother. I hear today's prolific use of the term Rainbow Baby and ask myself if I believe Zoe is the rainbow after my stormy beginning to motherhood or if things are as Antonios told me, my kids inadvertently causing me pain and grief as they played their juvenile game.

Either way, as I type this, I think of the photo below which I took the morning after we buried Matthew's ashes under an olive tree in Greece and the unexpected rainbow which appeared when it was developed.