Recently, it was International Bereaved Mother’s Day. Unless you are a bereaved Mother yourself, or someone very close to one – chances are you’ve never heard of it.
Prior to last year I certainly hadn’t. You won’t find the shelves of your local newsagent straining under the weight of sentiment-heavy cards; your local florist won’t be carrying signs beseeching you not to forget – in fact, it’s quite the opposite- forget or at least ‘find peace’ is exactly what society encourages a bereaved mother to do.
Almost 16 months ago, after a perfectly healthy first pregnancy, I waddled into my maternity hospital concerned that my baby wasn’t moving much. I was 41+3 weeks pregnant and due to be assessed for induction the following day. His room was decorated, his car seat was fitted, his crib was attached to the bed ready for the 3am feeds. There was no part of me prepared to do anything apart from strap my baby into that car seat and take him home to rock in his beautiful nursery. I felt like a paranoid first-time mother walking into that hospital that Sunday evening. I waited for the reassuring swoosh of his heartbeat, but the swoosh never came. His heart was still and silent.
I went into labour in the early hours of the Monday morning and at 5.21pm on 12th January 2015, Max was born. He was 7 pound 5 ounces, and he was perfect. I will forever be profoundly grateful for the days that followed where we got to spend precious hours with our baby. There were tears – we could have filled buckets, but mostly there was love and pride and awe at the beautiful little person we had created. People were incredibly kind – they were shocked, they were stunned into silence or platitudes or attempted explanations but all of their attempts to reach out, to remember Max, to comfort us, buoyed us through those early days.
As the first year without him has inexplicably merged into a second I feel a change. I feel a barely perceptible shift towards impatience, towards a pressure to ‘move forward’ to ‘find peace’ to ‘get back to my old self.’ The truth is, I am no more ready to move on from loving my Son with every breath in my body than the woman who was giving birth in the labour ward next door. Her labour might have been punctuated with the reassuring beep of machines and concluded with the wails of a newborn. Her life might be focused on celebrating first steps, exclaiming over first words and cleaning up after toddler destruction. My life as a mother is inextricably intertwined with my identity as a bereaved mother. I do not love Max any less than she loves her living, breathing, growing child. I do not think about him less. The person I was before losing the most precious thing in my universe is gone forever.
I get why people want to shield themselves from the saddest parts of life. I have been told by enough people that ‘they can’t even imagine’ to know that what they mean is that they won’t even allow themselves to try. I understand that while people are pregnant, or have children, they can’t wrap their heads around anything other than spending the rest of their lives watching their children grow. Feeling repeatedly pushed into silence is incredibly isolating. Being forced into conversations where Max’s life is ignored is devastating.
The knowledge that children can die doesn’t mean that yours will.
It would be great if we can all think about the women who bear an identity that none of us wanted. Reach out to them with a willingness to embrace their messy grief. Be prepared to ask them how they are and listen to the answer. Talk about their children, speak their name, write it in the sand. Our babies and toddlers and children and teenagers and adult children deserve to be remembered. They deserve to be celebrated. They deserve to be loved.
Below is a video we made of all of the places us and other people wrote Max’s name in the first year after he was born. My husband wrote and sang the song.
https://vimeo.com/151512737
Anne Marie is a very proud mother of Max, who unfortunately was stillborn in the 42nd week of a very healthy pregnancy in January 2015. She originally wrote her blog to help those who knew her understand her loss and her ongoing love for her Son, and is now passionate about the rights of bereaved parents to talk about their children, and about the importance of lifting the veil of stigma and discomfort that surrounds the subjects of baby loss and infertility.
