The Complicated Reality of Expecting After a Loss

The paper sheet on the examination table crinkled with a sound so violently loud it seemed to echo off the drab walls of the University College Hospital fetal medicine unit. It was a Tuesday, it was raining in that relentless, fine London drizzle that ruins your suede shoes, and I was staring intently at a peeling poster about gestational diabetes just to avoid looking at the ultrasound screen. The cold gel was already on my wife’s stomach. The sonographer, a woman named Helen who wore aggressively thick-rimmed glasses, was moving the wand in silent, terrifying circles.

We had been in this exact room, perhaps even on this exact terribly uncomfortable chair, eight months prior. That was the day the screen had shown a big, devastating stillness. Now, we were back, holding our breath, waiting to see if this new pregnancy—which, in a plot twist I'm still recovering from, turned out to be twins—would stick. When Helen finally clicked a button and the room filled with the rapid, galloping rhythm of two tiny heartbeats, my wife sobbed, and I promptly forgot how to inhale.

That's the precise moment you realise that expecting a child after a loss isn't the blissful, pastel-coloured redemption arc Instagram promises you. It's an exercise in absolute, white-knuckled terror.

The internet jargon that haunts my search history

In the weeks following our first loss, my wife fell down the rabbit hole of online parenting forums. If you've never been on Mumsnet at 3am, I highly suggest avoiding it unless you enjoy a potent cocktail of medical anxiety and confusing acronyms. I remember peering over her shoulder as she scrolled through threads full of women talking in a code I couldn't decipher.

People were referencing their "baby m" (which I eventually worked out was shorthand for a baby lost to miscarriage), and endlessly discussing the pursuit of a "w baby" (a wish baby, or a win baby, or perhaps just a typo from someone typing through tears). The terminology was endless. But the phrase that kept appearing, plastered across banner ads and stamped onto aggressively cheerful maternity t-shirts, was "rainbow baby."

I spent an embarrassing amount of time obsessively searching for the precise rainbow baby meaning while sitting on the edge of the bathtub. The metaphor, supposedly, is that the new child is the beautiful, colourful rainbow that follows a dark and destructive storm.

I absolutely hated it.

I hated the implication that the baby we lost was a "storm." Our first baby wasn't a natural disaster; it was a child we loved and wanted and grieved intensely. And placing the burden on two tiny, developing fetuses to be the "rainbow" that fixed our grief seemed like an incredibly tall order for people who didn't even have kneecaps yet.

The relentless pressure to just be happy

Once you make it past the terrifying 12-week scan and actually tell people you're expecting again, the toxic positivity descends like a thick fog. People mean well, they really do, but their desperate need to tie your grief up in a neat little bow is exhausting.

Suddenly, every relative wants to buy you merchandise covered in primary colours. You're supposed to feel #blessed. You're supposed to emanate a serene glow, completely ignoring the fact that every single time your partner goes to the bathroom, you both experience a micro-panic attack checking for blood.

People love to tell you that "everything happens for a reason," which is a phrase that should frankly be illegal to utter to grieving parents. If I had a pound for every time someone essentially told us that the arrival of the twins meant we should stop being sad about the past, I could have fully funded their future university tuition.

Here's a deeply incomplete list of things you should probably avoid saying to someone expecting a baby after a loss, based entirely on my own quiet seething at dinner parties:

• "See, it all worked out in the end!" (It hasn't ended; we're still terrified and also I haven't slept in a week.)
• "At least you know you can get pregnant." (A biological fact that provides zero emotional comfort.)
• "God just needed another angel." (Please, immediately stop speaking.)
• "You must be so relieved!" (I'm currently vibrating with anxiety, please pass the wine I'm not allowed to drink in solidarity.)

Just tell your friends you love them, acknowledge that being pregnant right now is a terrifying exercise in vulnerability, and drop off a massive carbohydrate-heavy meal they don't have to cook.

Monitoring the kicks until you lose your mind

Our midwife (a wonderfully blunt woman who told me off for reading too many American parenting blogs) mentioned that tracking fetal movement in the third trimester was important. I took this passing comment and built a fortress of neuroses out of it.

I read some vaguely terrifying statistic on a crumpled NHS pamphlet about how many pregnancies end in loss, and my brain decided that the only way to keep these babies alive was through my own sheer vigilance. I became a human stopwatch. If Twin A hadn't kicked the left side of my wife's ribs in a two-hour window, I was ready to call an ambulance.

My wife, heavily pregnant and profoundly exhausted by my hovering, finally had to ban me from asking "Are they moving?" more than twice a day. The medical science on kick counting is apparently quite solid for monitoring health, but filtering that through the trauma of a previous loss means you don't just count kicks; you rely on them for your basic sanity. If they're kicking, they're alive, and we're okay for the next five minutes.

People also call the child born before a loss a "sunshine baby," which frankly sounds like a defunct 1970s cult.

The aesthetic problem with typical baby gear

When the girls were finally born—arriving with a dramatic flair that involved an emergency C-section and me wearing sterile scrubs that were tragically too short for my legs—we did want to acknowledge the journey we’d been on. The whole rainbow baby meaning might have annoyed me in theory, but in practice, I did want a nod to the hope they represented.

The problem is that most rainbow-themed baby items look like a unicorn exploded in a primary school art class. We live in a small London flat. I was already losing my mind to sleep deprivation; I didn't need our living room to look like a chaotic soft-play centre.

This is where my borderline obsessive research actually paid off. We found the Alpaca Play Gym Set with Rainbow & Desert Toys.

It's, without exaggeration, one of the only pieces of baby equipment that didn't make my eyes twitch. It has a beautiful, muted crocheted rainbow that nods to the babies' significance without screaming it at you in neon. The wooden A-frame is minimalist, sturdy enough to withstand Twin B's aggressive batting, and the little alpaca toy is objectively charming. It provided the girls with a calming, tactile sensory experience that didn’t involve flashing lights or tinny electronic music, and it provided me with a piece of living room decor that didn't scream "A TRAUMATIZED PARENT LIVES HERE."

I'd set them beneath it on a soft mat, clutching my lukewarm coffee, and watch them stare up at the gentle, earthy tones of the rainbow. It felt peaceful. For five minutes at a time, anyway.

(If you're also trying to preserve a shred of aesthetic dignity in your home while keeping a small human entertained, you can browse Kianao's wooden play gym collection. It's infinitely better than the plastic monstrosities at the big box stores.)

The silicone disappointment

Because I'm a sucker for a theme once I quietly commit to it, I also ordered the Llama Teether Silicone Soothing Gum Soother when the teething apocalypse began around month six. It had a little heart and some rainbow packaging, and I thought, "Brilliant, matching the play gym."

Look, it's fine. It's food-grade silicone, it doesn't harbor bacteria, and you can lob it into the dishwasher when it gets covered in dog hair. But as a magical teething cure? Twin A gnawed on it for exactly three minutes before deciding my left thumb was a superior chew toy. Twin B preferred to use the llama strictly as a projectile weapon to launch at the cat. It does the job if your child actually likes silicone teethers, but don't expect it to single-handedly save your sanity at 4am when the molars are coming in.

The lingering shadow in the nursery

They don't tell you that the anxiety doesn't vanish the moment they place the slippery, screaming infant on your partner's chest. I was entirely unprepared for the collision of big relief and sudden, intense postpartum dread.

I recall reading an article by some clinical psychologist suggesting that parents of a baby born after a loss are at a significantly higher risk for postpartum depression and anxiety. My deeply scientific reaction to this was: well, obviously. You spend nine months waiting for the other shoe to drop, training your nervous system to anticipate disaster. When the baby arrives safely, your brain doesn't just receive an "all clear" signal and shut down the panic machinery. It just transfers the panic to a new set of variables. Is she breathing in the Moses basket? Is the room too hot? Did that cough sound like croup?

You find yourself standing over the cot at 2am, watching their chests rise and fall, trapped between overwhelming gratitude and the terrifying knowledge of exactly how fragile it all is.

The girls are two now. They're chaotic, loud, entirely unreasonable miniature dictators who refuse to eat anything green and insist on wearing wellington boots with their pajamas. The house is a mess. I'm constantly tired.

But when I look at them, I don't see a rainbow that magically erased the storm. I just see my daughters. The grief of the baby we lost still exists right alongside the joy of the babies we've. They don't cancel each other out. And honestly, realizing that you're allowed to hold both of those completely contradictory feelings at the exact same time is the only thing that genuinely helps.

If you're preparing a space for your own chaotic little arrival and want to keep things as calm as humanly possible, explore our collection of soothing wooden play gyms before they sell out.

Questions people whisper to me at playgroups

How did you really cope with the anxiety during the pregnancy?
Poorly, to be perfectly honest. I ate an unforgivable amount of biscuits and annoyed my wife. But eventually, what helped was forcing myself to stay entirely in the present tense. Instead of spiralling into "what if this happens again," I'd look at the scan photo and say out loud, "Today, we're pregnant, and today, they're okay." It sounds like cheap therapy nonsense, but when you're vibrating with fear, stating the obvious facts in the room genuinely grounds you.

Did you buy lots of rainbow-themed baby items?
Absolutely not, because most of it's incredibly loud and I get migraines. I preferred subtle nods to our journey. We had the wooden Alpaca Play Gym with the muted crochet rainbow, and a few organic cotton blankets in earthy, natural tones. You don't have to dress your baby like a Pride parade float to acknowledge their significance unless you genuinely want to.

Will you explain the "rainbow baby" meaning to your twins when they're older?
We will tell them about the baby that came before them, yes. I don't think we'll use the storm metaphor, because I never want them to feel like they had a job to do in fixing our sadness. We'll just explain that they had an older sibling who couldn't stay, but who we love very much, just like we love them.

Is kick counting really helpful or just stressful?
Both. It's a medically sound way to monitor the babies' health in the third trimester—our midwife was adamant about it. But if you've trauma from a previous loss, it can quickly turn into an obsessive compulsion. If you find yourself holding a stopwatch and crying, it’s time to call your maternity unit for a check-up just to ease your mind, rather than sitting in the dark spiralling.

What's a double rainbow baby?
I learned this during one of my late-night Mumsnet deep dives. It refers to a child born after a family has endured multiple consecutive losses. The sheer amount of resilience those parents possess is something I literally can't fathom. If you know someone expecting a double rainbow, buy them dinner, clean their house, and don't ask them any invasive questions.