The mothers that never were:

This Liminal space that we exist in...

I read about a college classmate’s sibling who just had a baby, a daughter. They named her Emilia.

I read that. And I got teary.

I was going to name my daughter, Amelie.

Maybe it’s PMS, that I feel under the weather, or the residual grief—

Perhaps a combo, the trifecta, as my best friend affirmed to me today.

So, today, yes again, I sit with the lived, embodied experience of losing a baby, of miscarrying, and never having any other children:

We non-mothers, un-mothers, mothers that never were—

We exist in a liminal space. That in-between location.

In that our identity was forever changed and formed by a life-changing experience that we were never able to have.

I learned about liminal space when studying post-colonial theory and reading Spivak in college. I understand that ethnographer, Arnold van Gennep, is also recognized as coining the term, understanding it as disorienting, a disillusionment.

I certainly can’t understand or explain that from a post-colonial perspective, as a non-indigenous and non-BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color) viewpoint.

However, it also speaks to the condition of mothers who miscarried.

I know that mothers who miscarry never forget their children they lost, especially when/if they wanted them.

And yet, it is also a different experience to have lost children and then never to have gone on to have another, to experience your miracle ‘rainbow’ baby—

We are the mothers that never were.

We experience this loss and we grieve differently. Not more than, no—

I’m not saying that.

But mothers who go on to have children then are/become/are recognized as mothers. Those of us who don’t—

We remain in that purgatory of liminal space. We carry that grief, that loss within my bodies.

Sometimes my body screams at me, that it remembers, it knows this loss, even when I think I have processed, grieved, moved on.

The body remembers. My womb recalls. I get emotional and teary. I have to cry for my babies.

I imagine what my children would look like. What they would be like. Their personalities, talents and struggles.

I wonder who they would have become and how they would have moved through the world and the differences and impacts that they would have made.

My best friend also referred to this experience as feeling “maternal failures.” I know what she means:

We feel that we failed our babies to have lost them. That they died. We feel that we couldn’t keep them alive.

I don’t agree with that, logically, cognizant, I know it’s not right or true, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t also experience those feelings of guilt. I understand that often times the body shuts down the growth of the embryo or the fetus because of some issue with its development, some genetic mismatch or birth defect, etc, etc.

Still, as a mother’s job is to protect, to grow and nurture, even if we are mothers for only such a short period of time, many of us embrace that identity and start to shift in every possibly way, mentally and emotionally.

I can’t speak for everyone. Maybe not everyone experiences new pregnancy, nay—new motherhood like this, but I did.

And yet, that false sense of failure, really fucks up mothers’ mindsets. Not only do we have to mourn the loss, to grieve, but we also have to swallow/address/deal with the guilt, the shame.

I have a relative’s spouse who—after several losses of miscarriages—referred to herself as “a baby-killer.” That’s the sort of internalized mindset many of us have after loss of a child.

We may know that doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t much matter if we feel that way.

And there are reasons why, of course—

It’s undoubtedly the effects of hundreds of years of social conditioning, that women and we alone are responsible for bearing healthy children, the gender of the child, etc.

As inaccurate as we know that to be…

All of that to say, I guess—

I feel the loss of my children, of lives that I (started to) create/d, even though my child was never fully developed, never entered this world, he and she never lived and breathed and existed in it….And even though I never held my baby, watched them grow and made memories with them.

But I also feel the loss and the entangled identity of how it changed me: who I was, who I am, and who I was never allowed to be—

It’s complicated, this liminal space.