The photo album I never got to fill

To the baby I didn't meet.

A little word of warning here. This is a raw and sensitive piece about processing the reality of my first pregnancy, which ended in miscarriage. These are my own feelings, my own experience, and my own beliefs — as such they are to be intended as deeply personal, potentially flawed and not universally shared. I hope that in reading no one will feel offended or judged: that is not my aim. This is just my story from my perspective — my own way of unravelling this episode and what it has left me with.

You came at dawn. Just like your sister would, almost two years later. You came at dawn, six months too soon. So I never got to fill a photo album with your pictures. Because I never got to meet you.

Elowen has gone down for her afternoon nap. I can hear her coughing softly from her room down the corridor — I can already tell it won’t be a long sleep. I’m also in bed, coughing, too clogged up to even contemplate lying down and trying to sleep.

So I took out the stash of half-categorized photographs and one of the photo albums I bought to keep her memories. It’s handmade, with an ultramarine blue satin ribbon, and covered in rice paper decorated with finely pressed leaves and wildflowers, all in pale moonrise shades, the kind of colors you see when you turn your back at the glorious flames of sunset — on the other side, where the moon ascends, the sky is a symphony of chalky pastels: airy lilac, seashell pink, hazy azure.

Of course, she proceeded to peel off the paper-thin petals as soon as she caught her first glimpse of it, so now this album lives hidden and far from her reach. I can work on it only when she’s not around. And I don’t have long left to do it — I’d like to finish before the imminent arrival of her sister. Your sister.

I run my hand over the rice paper — it feels smooth and grainy at the same time. And I wonder what color I would have felt drawn to for you. What shade would your ribbon have been? How would I know — I never got to know you. I can’t even dream up a face for you, my raincloud child. Someone told me your sister is called a rainbow baby because she was born after you. If she’s my rainbow, then you must be my raincloud. And every cloud has its silver lining.

Yes, I never got to meet you. Still, I loved you. I loved you from the moment you were just two pink lines on a stick. I loved you for the three months after that. I loved you all through the agonizing night it took for you to leave me. And I have loved you ever since. Silently. From a distance. But faithfully. Like one loves the shadow of a dear memory or a surrendered dream. And I still do. Four years on. I still love you, even if in this lifetime we were meant to cross paths only once and so very briefly. I love you because, even if for just a while, you were my baby and I was your mother. Dare I use the present tense? Somehow somewhere, maybe even in this reality if I believe it deeply enough, you are my baby and I am your mother. Is there another way to describe us?

Your sister looks back at me from the photograph in my hand. She’s got a cheeky grin on her face — a hint of her signature crinkles on her nose. Two tiny teeth and two huge brown eyes. She was just a baby then — probably not too dissimilar from what Hazel will look like a few months from now.

Frame after frame, I witness her growing into the quicksilver toddler that she is today. She has got many more teeth now, but her eyes are still huge. Her nose still crinkles in the cutest way when she smiles. I will see Hazel grow and blossom in the same way. Soon enough they will often share the same frame.

For a moment I spin off into an involuntary quantum leap. You were expected to come in April, just before my birthday. I would have welcomed you and turned 27 holding you in my arms. Instead that April, just before my birthday, I discovered I was pregnant again, with your sister. She came into my life at the exact time you were supposed to arrive. In another life you would be almost three by now. And Elowen? Would she be part of that life too? I just can’t imagine a life without her in it. Even if there is still something unsettling about the strange sense of peace I feel looking at her photographs — about the way I seem to have accepted the way things went. Like it was always simply meant to be like this.

Truth is, it wasn’t easy — I wasn’t immediately able to see your silver lining. For a long time, the memory of you was something I desired only to forget. The feelings that arose were those of shame, abandonment, and guilt. I pushed our story aside and forced myself to move on — I put my aching heart under ice, sat on my tank, and proceeded to bulldoze my way through life pretending that my soul wasn’t still bleeding. I didn’t tell anyone for months. I didn’t even take time off from work that day — in the morning I lied to my colleagues on my way back from the E.R. to justify why I was going to be late.

I only really understood long after I fell pregnant again. It was an otherwise unremarkable afternoon in late November. Your sister’s due date was drawing closer and I had been called in at the hospital for a routine monitoring session. There was another couple in the waiting room outside the maternity ward — she looked young, maybe a little older than me, and distressed. We waited, lined up in the same row of plastic chairs, for a while — to her it must have felt like a lifetime. She was fighting to hold up a brave face, trying hard to keep it together and not make a scene in front of a stranger — a very pregnant stranger. But she knew what had happened inside her. And so did I. Just like I had, all those months before her.

I watched her walls crumble down slowly. A single tear. A sharp, half-choked breath. Then apnea. She started crying silently — face in her hands, head on her thighs. Bent and broken, just like I had been. I knew exactly what was awaiting her beyond the closed door of the ward. A dry conversation in a harshly lit room. Then a scan. The dreaded words — “There’s no heartbeat”. Her own heart would stop for a moment too, responding with silence to the noiseless void on the screen. For an eternal minute she would feel alone as never before in her life. She would feel hollow. Abandoned. Her body would move her automatically back out into the corridor, where she would wait empty-eyed for her paperwork watching healthy babies roll by in their transparent beds, mentally chanting “Why not me? Why not us?” to herself. Then two options, “scheduled surgical removal” or her body’s “physiological purging process”, whatever would happen first. Physiological purging process — how I had loathed those clinical words. When you came, after half a night of labor, I called it birth.

I don’t know how I found the courage to do it. I got up, sat on the floor in front of her chair, and took her hands. We looked at each other for a long instant, our guards completely lowered. “I lost my first baby too. Last summer. I was sitting in this room, exactly where you are right now. They’ll tell you it’s normal. They’ll tell you it’s nothing. They’ll say it happens all the time. They will give you figures to show you how infinitesimally unimportant your loss is. But we both know that this one baby that you leave behind today is everything. There is no other way — that’s how it will always be. So let go and cry. There’s no shame. No scale can contain the measure of your pain right now. But please please don’t blame yourself, don’t blame your body. There is nothing wrong with you. Trust yourself. And trust your baby. Even now. Even through all this. And trust the baby that will arrive someday. Please don’t lose faith.” We both surrendered to our sorrow — hers in the present, mine an aching memory from the past. We cried quietly for a while — our hands clasped together — as our partners watched in silence. Two perfect strangers. Two women surrendering to the same unbearable knowing. Two hearts torn apart by the same pain. Two mothers who had birthed blood. “I’m already on the other side. You will be too.”

By the time I came out, she was already gone. Looking back, I realize I only found the courage to speak those words to her because I believed in them myself. Those were the words I needed to hear. I knew them to be true in my heart. I held their undeniable truth in my own womb. I had made it to the other side.

I remember the pain that I had been through with you — emotional first, physical later. It was still fire-branded in my brain during the night I prepared to welcome your sister. The memory of your birth gave me the strength to believe that I would do it again, that I could do it again. I had done it before. For you. With you. Because of you, I knew that no degree of pain would be too much to endure — and this time I would emerge from its depths holding a baby in my arms. This time there would be light. This time there would be a rainbow.

I don’t know how that young woman in the ward would have called the baby she lost that day. I don’t know if she ever gave them a name at all. I know I did — that day I called you Faith. I chose your name in the moment when somehow, in a completely irrational and inexplicable way, it all fell into place. That day I understood. And surrendered. I had lost you, Faith. But through that, I had found faith.

Faith in myself. Faith in my willingness to try again, even at the price of fear. Faith in my ability to endure again every degree of pain I had known so far.
Faith in my body — that same body that I had been told too many times it would struggle even to conceive.
Faith in the baby that I would carry out into the world at dawn a few days later, alive and healthy, one December night two years ago.
The same faith that still lives inside of me as I approach the moment when I will welcome your second sister earthside. My third baby. Because you, raincloud, were my first.

I don’t know if there is a higher plan woven for me somewhere in the cosmos. I don’t know if things were divinely meant to go this way. But they did. I like to believe that souls choose the mothers that will carry them into each lifetime. For months I had wondered what you had found lacking in me, why you had changed your mind — the skeletons of old fears and deep-rooted insecurities resurfaced like buried ancient ruins after an Earthquake. For months I wondered what I had done for you to abandoned me. For months I blamed myself — for I had failed you. For months I felt guilty of a crime I couldn’t name — for guilty and inadequate I had to be if you had chosen to leave me behind without even having a chance to meet me.

I never got to hold you. And this regret will never leave my heart — maybe it will fade, the wound will heal. But it will never be the same again — the scar will always feel more sensitive. I am glad of it, I want to carry a trace of your passage in my body — a mark of your existence. It feels right this way.

I never got to hold you and I never will. But only now I realize how tenderly you’ve been holding me all along.