As I perused endless websites and message boards about what to expect before, after, and during a D&C, I kept coming across the term “rainbow baby”. At first, I took a knee-jerk liking to this term due to my natural affinity for and fierce allegiance to gay culture. I learned however that in the “online miscarriage world” (to which my first response, if i’m honest, was: “please kill me that I’m part of this”), it actually refers to a baby conceived following a loss. I shied away from the cheesiness of the term in that context initially, but as I read more about it I found myself completely moved in spite of myself. As a drama therapist (read: metaphor junkie), I suppose it should not come as a surprise that it began to really appeal to me. I love the idea that a rainbow doesn’t erase the pain and destruction of the storm, but rather is evidence that something beautiful and light can emerge after the darkness. In a perfect world I will end up with a little double rainbow baby (and i don’t mean more twins--just a darling little homosexual son to soothe my heart with his winning tiny fashion sense and delightfully sarcastic world views).
As an added bonus to finding out I had miscarried, I was told that there was evidence I had a uterine septum--a condition that would make future, continued miscarriages an inevitability without surgical intervention. This fact took the liberty of snatching away the last shreds of positivity I had been gripping for dear life. Every time someone would say, “you’re young, you’ll get pregnant again” or “people are often more fertile after a miscarriage” I would think, “yeah, but it's going to be a bit more complicated than that for me”. I suppose I could have been much more hopeful than that, but I was just not in a “glass half full” place at the time.
However, despite my newfound (and in hindsight, temporary…or at least not consistent) negativity, I set the idea of a rainbow baby on a shelf of very precious and private hopes for the future and decided on some deep hidden level I would move forward toward this magical little unicorn.