At the end of the darkest day I have had for a while I bring you a rainbow of hope.

A Count The Kicks rainbow of hope.

When I lost my son Toby half way through my pregnancy the need to conceive again was almost immediate. When I was first pregnant with Toby I had the common fear that I wouldn’t love him as much as I loved my daughter. But then I read somewhere that you don’t have a set amount of love that you have to divide among your children, you grow a whole new pool of love with every child. As soon as I first saw Toby on the scan I knew exactly what they meant. I didn’t love my daughter any less, I just developed a whole new surge of love for this new baby. When he died unexpectedly I had no where for this love to go. I loved my daughter as much as I possibly could, it wasn’t possible to give her any more. I couldn’t give all this love to a grave. I knew I needed another baby to shower this love on. It was like a dead weight on me while I had no where for it to go. We were told not to conceive while we waited for post mortem results and it was a horrendous time. But 4 months after losing my son Toby I found out I was pregnant again. A rainbow. Some light at the end of the storm.

But a rainbow pregnancy is a unique experience. Something I’d never really considered before. As well as all the usual worries, it comes with a whole new world of emotion and fears. And it wasn’t just my pregnancy I viewed differently, but everybody elses. Sitting in the waiting room for scans and seeing the excited, expectant faces. I would get so frustrated at their naivity. Did they not know what could happen? Did they not realize they may never take that baby home? It was a horrible dark world to be in. I so wanted to be back in their world, back in the innocence, but I knew I would never be able to go back.

As my rainbow baby approaches his third birthday it seems like a great time to reflect on that pregnancy and what I learnt from it.

Guilt Guilt Guilt!!
The overriding emotion when I found out I was pregnant was definitely guilt. Guilt that I may one day smile again. Guilt that Toby may feel replaced. Guilt that This baby would be second best to Toby.

I had just found out I was pregnant when we buried Toby’s ashes. I wanted to bury them myself so at the grave they handed me the urn. I bent down so close, I just wanted to be close to him. I knew this was the last time I would ever hold him and couldn’t let go. Having never buried ashes before I did not know what to expect. But as tipped the ashes into the grave, a plume of fine ash billowed up to my face. I was too close and I was choking on the ash, choking on my son. I took this a sign from him, a sign he wasn’t happy with my pregnancy. This just added to my guilt. I felt guilty that I had gotten pregnant so soon. From this point on it was just one feeling of guilt after another.

3 years later the guilt is something that’s never really left me, but not in the way I first felt. It’s the same guilt I have going about day to day life. The guilt of letting one child have the ‘good’ TV seat. The guilt of giving one child the bigger piece of cake. The guilt of telling them Tesco’s had forgotten to deliver their favourite chocolate bar when really I’d just demolished it within 2 minutes of it arriving! I live with it because I know it will balance out in the end. As soon as I realized this, long after my rainbow was born, it all became more manageable. I don’t feel guilty if I cut short our trip to the park to go and visit Toby, because I know one day I won’t go and visit Toby because we’ve stayed too long at the park.

Guilt is part of parenthood, rainbow or not.

“I might lose this one, I don’t want to bond with it”
This took me a long time to get over. As soon as I found out I was pregnant everything was different to before. There was no fun announcement (or any announcement for that matter), no planning, no shopping. Just sitting and waiting. Waiting for the kicks to stop. Waiting for the bleeding. Waiting for the pain. At around 30 weeks I had a panic that he had stopped moving, and then it started to slip into place. I went into intense panic, shock, crying, but how could I possibly feel that about a baby I hadn’t bonded with?! I then realized I had bonded with him. I just wasn’t allowing myself to accept it. If I had been given bad news that day, I wouldn’t have shrugged it off and walked out unperturbed. I would have been devastated. I would have gone back in to my pit of depression. I realized “not bonding” would in no way make losing him any easier. So I threw myself into my pregnancy for the last 7 weeks (My rainbow kindly arrived 3 weeks early!) . I posted some of my 3D scan pictures on facebook. I allowed people to know I was pregnant. I was happy to talk about him, make plans. I knew nothing could ever make the experience of losing him any better so I may as well make any time I did have with him the best it could be. I even had a baby shower!

The pregnancy…
Part of me wanted to just let go and do whatever I wanted. I did everything right with Toby, I didn’t drink, eat the wrong foods, smoke, and he still died. So what difference would it make if I drank and ate all the wrong foods now? If it was going to happen it was going to happen. But I couldn’t. Toby could not have been saved. There was nothing I could have done differently. That is the only thing that gets me through most days. If anything happened to my rainbow and I had had one glass of wine or a bit of brie, would I always wonder what if?! A rational mind would say these things would have had no bearing on it, but I’ve been in the mind of a bereaved mother, rationality has no place. I needed to make sure there was no ‘what ifs’ so everything was done to the letter.

Those horrible horrible words…Everything will be fine
This is the worst thing to say to a mother pregnant with her rainbow (or any pregnancy for that matter!) You do not know this unless you have actually mastered time travel and come back from the future with this message (in which case please tell me the upcoming lottery numbers while you’re at it)

The truth is it may well be fine, but it also may not. It has become my most hated phrase in life as it is completely meaningless. Hearing them during my rainbow pregnancy just made me want to scream! Someone had said it to me as I was leaving for the hospital to find out Toby had passed away…if anyone said it to me during my rainbow pregnancy I snapped.

Car seat, pushchair, baby bits
As pregnant friends around me were looking at which brand of car seat to buy, I was wondering whether to invest in one at all. We had the one we used for my daughter, we knew it hadn’t been in an accident and I knew you couldn’t return car seats so if anything happened and we didn’t need it, what a waste of money. Money we may need for headstones, flowers, funeral costs. I didn’t want to buy lots of clothes, just a couple of nice outfits, something timeless that he could sleep in forever if he died. As I look at him now playing with his train set this all seems ludicrous but at the time it made perfect sense.

“A replacement for Toby”
This was the most common misconception about my rainbow baby. That I had lost one baby and now I was replacing it with another. Like I would with a lost set of car keys or a misplaced DVD. It wasn’t possible to replace one with the other. Toby was Toby. Joshua is Joshua. They are not interchangeable. If you had two living children which one would you go without? If you lose a parent do you just go to a friend and use theirs? No, your parents are irreplaceable and so are your children. Toby is and will always be part of my family. On my stairs I have a picture of Emily, Joshua and Toby’s name written in the sand. There are 3 children in my life and none of them will ever be replaced

“boy or girl?”
While I wanted to find out with my daughter whether she was a boy or a girl I didn’t have a preference. And the same with Toby. But somehow with this rainbow pregnancy, gender became VERY important to me. I wanted a boy. I needed a boy. My father in law had always made his desire for a grandson quite clear. Id lost that grandson. I was going to miss so much of Toby’s life. Watching his dad take him to football matches. Giving him advice on girls (or boys if that was his preference). His dad taking him to the pub for his first pint. Suddenly it became very important to me that even if I didn’t get to do these things with Toby, I still wanted to do them. There is no way that having a girl would have been a disappointment, my priority was always that my baby was alive. People say “it doesn’t matter as long as its healthy” but what constitutes healthy?? I would have happily had Toby with diabetes, Downs Syndrome, Asthma… I just wanted him alive. “Healthy”, just like gender was a preference but my only priority was alive.

Other people would forget Toby.
Toby was and will always be my first son. Nothing will ever ever change that. But I couldn’t be sure anyone else would be the same. Now that I had my boy all was fixed surely? I would be better. That was so far from the truth.

When my rainbow was 6 weeks old a friend made the best faux pas she could’ve made. She was introducing Joshua to her husband and said “this is little Toby” she very quickly corrected herself and was mortified, She could probably see the tears welling in my eyes but she had no idea they were happy, grateful tears. You mentioned my son. We all get names wrong from time to time. But this one meant Toby was in her mind. She hadn’t forgotten him. There would be a million opportunities to call Joshua Joshua but on this occasion having him called Toby was the best feeling in the world. She remembered.

As time has gone on people do talk less about Toby, but I’ve learnt to live with that. I have a tattoo on my back, a tattoo to remember him. I have always been quite anti-tattoos but after losing Toby I knew I wanted to commemorate him somehow. My other two children were constantly leaving scars on my body, be it stretch marks, cuts from flying train sets, burns from cooking tea on 1 hours sleep…I wanted Toby to do the same. I waited 3 years to have my tattoo to make sure it was what I really wanted and a benefit I hadn’t considered when I got it done was that it was a talking point. A way to mention Toby. To bring him up in conversation. For people to know I hadn’t forgotten him and it was ok to mention him.

People may not think about Toby very often but then they probably don’t think about Emily and Joshua that often either. Emily and Joshua take up nearly all my time, I’m on duty 24 hours a day and Toby fills as much of that day as he would if he was here. I doubt my friends are sitting at home wondering what Emily and Joshua are doing so I don’t mind that they aren’t always thinking about Toby. The truth is I am and that’s OK. My friends all send their best wishes on Toby’s birthday so I know he is remembered. I still love to hear my son’s name, and when I do it really lights up my day.

I will never forget my angel baby Toby but my rainbow baby really is the beauty at the end of the storm.

A stunning and emotional post from the CEO of Count The Kicks. A charity who are keeping me sane through my own rainbow pregnancy.

Please take a moment to visit their site and support this important pregnancy charity if you can.