The parts of losing a newborn that no one talks about…
It’s two days after giving birth and I’m on the toilet.
The simple human act of using the restroom is excruciating.
I wipe with a witch hazel pad to try and ease the itching and burning.
After my shower, I make sure to add nursing pads to my sports bra so as not to leak on my clothes.
“Why do I even bother?” I think.
My abdomen looks like a deflated balloon.
What was once swelling with life is now an empty sack of skin.
This is familiar territory.
I know that, in a few months, I’ll start losing clumps of hair so big I’ll be wondering how I’m not completely bald.
I know, because I've been here before.
Every person who’s birthed a child has.
The only difference is that the child I birthed is not in my arms.
“The only difference?”
Is the child not the main event; the whole thing?
“How did I get here?”
We allow our bodies to stretch and ache and be stripped beyond recognition so that we can create life.
Life that we get to nurture.
Nurture that begets love.
A love so vast that we sustain amnesia from the pain.
At least, that’s how it should have been.
This is not my story.
My first child, a daughter, was born at 26 weeks due to a premature membrane rupture.
For nearly 60 minutes after her birth, she fought hard for her life. But she did not succeed.
Less than two years later, my son was born at 37 weeks. He had a rare genetic disorder that only allowed him to live 5 hours after birth.
He passed away in my arms.
Here I am now: bleeding, leaking, shedding, weeping.
My body aches to hold the child it worked so hard to build for the last 9 months.
The child that was wanted by both parents and so many others.
A child that was dreamed about and longed for.
The cries of a newborn infant are replaced by a silent house and the muffled sounds of distant wind chimes.
There’s an acute sense of wrongness and alarm within my body.
My body that is searching and searching for the child who hungers for a mother’s breast.
But in the child’s stead is a smelly frozen cabbage leaf that’s meant to curb the supply of milk.
“Here’s a hand pump in case the pain is too much and you need to release some tension,” I vaguely remember a nurse saying at the hospital.
I barely heard her.
I was handed pamphlet after pamphlet, but most I never read.
There’s no roadmap for this.
I thought I’d be going home and facing the typical challenges of a first-time mother.
Sleepless nights.
Sore breasts.
New routines.
Mood swings.
Sleepless nights I do have—but not from the tears of a newborn—from my own.
My breasts are sore—but not because of a suckling infant—because of the milk that came in with no child to satiate.
I do have new routines—but instead of early mornings and power eating—I stay in bed past noon and struggle to consume a single meal.
My mood does swing—but it only vacillates between immobilizing depression and panic attacks.
Yes, I still show up to my 6-week postpartum appointment.
The nurse asks, “Do you have more bad days than good days?”
I blink back at her, baffled by such a question.
“Of course,” I say.
The doctor asks me if I have “good support” and confirms that I have a therapist and SSRIs on standby.
I do.
Nothing can fix this.
There are no words, no drugs, no professional, no religious trope that can ease the pain of losing a single child; much less two.
Those who have lost babies face every single physiological obstacle that all birthing mothers do, but we do not get the perpetual reward of having a living child to love.
It’s inexplicable and it’s lonely.
We love our children–deeply and desperately.
Their absence is loud and it’s monumental.
It makes a person feel crazy–having birthed a child that is nowhere to be seen.
But then I see the elongated scar on my abdomen where she was excavated from my body and am reminded of the sliver of cut ground where she was placed extremely too soon.
I see the maternity pants hanging in my closet and remember how they held him so close to me in a safe cocoon. Now, he is cradled by the earth where I’ll never get to feel his warmth.
As we long for our children to be remembered, our pain longs to be witnessed and our bodies to be tended to.
Don’t forget them.
Don’t overlook us.
Sincerely,
A broken-hearted mother.
This essay was written by Liane Cooper in Denver, Colorado.
Liane found Baby Blues Postpartum Hair Vitamins after experiencing hair loss after newborn loss.
You can find more of Liane’s writing on her Substack @lianecooper
