It's Pregnancy and Baby Loss Awareness Week, a week where people who have lost babies and pregnancy are encouraged to share their experiences, and where we're all asked to contribute to a campaign for better support for bereaved parents. If you'd like to commemorate a loss, you can light a candle and share it online with #WaveOfLight on the 15th October.
The first time I saw a picture of a candle on an Instagram feed, with the #pregnancylossawareness hashtag, it was posted by a girl who I went to school with. I hadn’t seen her for the better part of a decade, and I’d almost entirely forgotten about her. But there it was, a statement completely amputated from the rest of her life, saying (without writing anything other than the hashtag) that she had lost a pregnancy. I didn’t know she’d been pregnant; I didn’t know she was trying for a baby, I didn’t know anything about her life as it stood, other than that she had had a miscarriage.
There are two main ways that women are invited to communicate online about pregnancy loss if they don’t want to, or don’t feel able to discuss it in words. In October, by sharing a picture of a candle, and throughout the year by using the rainbow emoji. The rainbow emoji is a shorthand for something beautiful coming after the rain – usually a healthy pregnancy after a loss. It’s the kind of sentiment that even I, the most cynical, anti-cute person, can’t help but be floored by.
As my twenties wore on and more of us were in relationships, getting married and settling down, those rainbow emojis and candle pictures became a little more frequent.
I had always known that miscarriage was common, but these symbols enabled me to see that pregnancy loss is all around. And when it eventually happened to me, one of the few comforts I could reach for was knowing that I was not unusual, or alone.
When I lost my pregnancy earlier this year, the women who’d silently posted a picture on Instagram of a candle in October, or used the rainbow emoji when their healthy baby was born, were the first place I found support. Some of them contacted me, offering to talk about our shared experience. Others liked my posts in a silent show of support. Women who’ve struggled with pregnancy often describe it as being in the ‘best club with the worst members’, and it’s entirely true.
As a woman who has opinions on the internet, I’m used to social media being a combative place filled with aggression. But during the height of my grief it was a direct line to other people who felt the exact same way, people who made me believe that I’d feel better one day.
When I see a rainbow emoji next to a birth or pregnancy announcement it reminds me that it is possible to find lightless after loss and that the majority of people who lose a pregnancy go on to have a healthy baby. Not only is using the rainbow emoji a way of acknowledging your loss, it’s a beacon of hope to other women who are struggling.
You might wonder why we need a designated week to post these pictures and emojis. It’s because grieving for a pregnancy loss is a strange kind of grief. It feels embarrassing and personal to admit to it, and it often makes people extremely uncomfortable when you do. You get used to saying nothing or following the words ‘I had a miscarriage’ with ‘It’s fine, honestly’ – even if it’s not.
Even if you can get past how uncomfortable it makes everyone in the room, it’s hard to find the language to grieve for what might have been. When you grieve for a person who you knew you talk about who they were, what they loved and hated and laughed at. You can’t do that when you grieve for the loss of a pregnancy. All you can mourn is the loss of potential to have those things. And as such it’s almost impossible to talk about. So that’s why we need to roll the red carpet out and invite women (and men) to grieve for their loss.
In a perfect world there would be no stigma about miscarriage, and we would be able to talk about it as openly as we do about anything else which is hard and painful in life. We don’t generally keep other types of bereavement a secret, yet because this kind of loss is so private and personal and intimate (and probably because it’s gynecological) it’s normal for women to suffer in silence. There’s every chance, if you lose your pregnancy before the 12-week mark, that your friends and family didn’t even know that you were expecting to become a mother. Until we reach a place where women feel they can openly talk about their pregnancy loss like they would any other loss, these symbols will continue to represent a much-needed code, a way for women to say ‘I have lost’ without actually having to say it.