Rainbow Babies

Jack and Maya – Rainbow Babies

On launching Footprints and sharing my story of baby loss, Mona, mum to Maya, a girl in my son Jack’s class, approached me and shared her own personal experience of baby loss. Her first baby, Leo, was stillborn. She went on to have her daughter, Maya. During our conversation, we realised that both Jack and Maya are our ‘rainbow babies’ – the term often used to describe a baby born following the death of a baby or babies.

For me, Jack, who is now 10, has always been aware he is my rainbow baby and over the years he has asked various questions about that… he has at times wondered if he would still be here if the twins had lived. None of us know the answer to that for certain but I have always reminded him that he was such a special baby for me… helping me to heal in my grief in some ways and reminding me what it was to feel such joy again. Somewhere for all that love to go.

Jack and Maya have found a little bond between them, connecting the fact that they are both rainbow babies. It has made us mums, as well as Jack and Maya, realise the importance of finding someone, a peer, who is ‘in a similar boat’. It is uniting, helps those siblings with their identity and maybe feel less alone in their own thoughts and grief around the loss of their older sibling/s. I don’t think it is something they talk about often, following their initial first chat, but they are both safe in the knowledge that they have this shared experience in life.