Just as the name would suggest, the message was clear: Rainbow babies are magic. I wanted that. I wanted to feel that type of deep, full-to-the-brim joy once again. Slowly I started to imagine what my own rainbow redemption might feel like.
Almost a year after my second miscarriage, I took a look down at my positive pregnancy test, took a deep breath, and waited for the euphoria to wash over me. This is it, I thought—this is going to be your rainbow baby. But instead of joy, all I felt was terror.
I’d like to say things improved from there, but the absolute truth is, my rainbow baby experience never felt magical. Instead it felt more like trudging my way through thick, gray concrete. Each and every day since that moment has felt like a downright battle most of the time.
It started with debilitating morning sickness, coupled with intense, overwhelming anxiety that left me bedridden and feeling like the world’s worst mother to my four other kids for months. Then there were the nightmares. Night after night I woke up from a terrifying dream that my baby would die.
I was exhausted and physically drained when, at 35 weeks, I started gushing blood in my kitchen just hours before my midwife left for a week-long cruise in Alaska where she would be unreachable on a literal freaking glacier.
It turned out to be a partial placental abruption, a condition in which the placenta begins to tear away from the uterine wall and can cause serious complications, including stillbirth. With my background as an OB nurse, I knew exactly what was happening and I was terrified, believing that I had managed to summon my worst fears into existence and my baby was going to die.
I had allowed myself moments during my pregnancy to picture myself giving birth like a warrior, a fight song playing like a movie soundtrack as I pushed her into the world, the tears of joy that would stream down my face when I finally saw her, the perfect missing piece to my broken heart, and the bliss that would envelop us as we snuggled at home with her siblings. Instead, the whirlwind of a frantic rush to the hospital and anxiety-laden labor left me sitting bewildered and alone in a quiet hospital room as my daughter was whisked to the NICU from my arms minutes after she was born. She stayed in the NICU for a week before we got to bring her home.
Just like my entire pregnancy, my rainbow baby’s birth felt deflating. When we brought her home, she refused to nurse. I got up every hour to try to breastfeed her, then ultimately pump and bottle-feed her. Our nursing struggles led to seemingly endless bouts of mastitis, an infection that can occur while nursing, and I was bed-ridden yet again with crippling fevers. She struggled to put on weight and was diagnosed with acid reflux.
I'd had four kids in six years all by the age of 28 and I still had no idea this to-the-bone level of exhaustion was possible. I felt helpless, like a failure of a mother.
Giving birth brought up the stuffed-down emotions I had over my miscarriages; I found myself grieving them all over again, as if I was apologizing that they could not have been born too. As if in celebrating her, I was failing them. None of it was like I thought it would be. None of it was like I thought it “should” be.
The truth is, I had internalized the message that a rainbow baby experience “should” be wonderful and magical and joyful to the point that I felt guilty for feeling anything other than pure happiness. I struggled with the thoughts that I wasn’t being grateful enough or that I simply didn’t try hard enough. I felt ashamed that I was struggling.
