Guest Blog by Nancy Slinn

Detoured Parenthood by Nancy Slinn

My name is Nancy. I was born in Vancouver, Canada, in December of 1961, the only child of Italian immigrants. My parents didn’t believe in hiring a babysitter, so I was usually taken along to whatever it was they were participating in. Whether the joy of a wedding, a birthday, or the sadness of a funeral, little Nancy could usually be seen tagging along with her parents.

Nancy and Peter Slinn

I watched closely how the adults in my world dealt with grief. I noticed small cues, like adults who seemed ‘over the top’ in their public grief, but who acted differently in private.

As a child I experienced losses – the death of grandparents who lived thousands of miles away from me and were related as memories passed down by my parents; the loss of a pet due to death; or my puppy given away because my father wanted a “real dog” (an adult German Shepherd rather than the small mixed breed I was given by my cousin); and the loss of friends who moved away in a world where email and Facebook were not even dreams yet.

I thought I understood grief. I believed I was capable of handling whatever life threw at me. Never did I suspect how wrong I was.

After graduation, I went off to university to train as a teacher and encountered the first situation that caused me intense grief. I had been born with a vision disability – blind in one eye but with enough vision in the other eye that I could see, read, and do most things. Yet I would never be able to drive, and I needed to hold books very close to see words on the page.

Nonetheless, I did my best, believing that my personality and love for children would get me through. However, the university put every possible roadblock in my way, believing my vision was not sufficient to teach in a regular classroom. Shattered, I had to change course and tried to figure out: if not teaching, then what?

In university, I met the man who would become my husband, and we married in 1983. I found part-time and temporary jobs until I was hired by our local telephone company in 1987. This was the job that would help pay our bills for seventeen years.

In 1988, our first daughter was born. Delivered at only 36 weeks, she was tiny – far smaller than the youngest crawler I had ever babysat.

While I found parenthood a bit of a challenge, I loved being a Mom and found creative ways to overcome the obstacles my vision posed. With the help of my husband (the eldest of four children) and our closest friends who already had children, I developed skills that made parenting easier. By the time Peter and I started talking about a second baby, we had a lot more parenting experience.

Getting pregnant was never an issue for us, but staying pregnant turned out to be a challenge. Our first attempt at a sibling for our daughter ended in miscarriage at twelve weeks. Since my body did not want to let go of the pregnancy, I required surgery just two days before Christmas in 1993.

We were overwhelmed by sadness, but we accepted the words of the medical community and other people in our lives, minimizing this loss. We heard statements such

as “Lots of women miscarry, you’re not alone,” and “You’re young, you can always have another baby.” Words which were meant to ease the sadness we felt did nothing to soften the grief of miscarriage.

As I had done for so many years, I had a good cry and then tried to put the loss behind me. When my doctor gave the green light to try again, we were soon pregnant. Our joy and cautious optimism were short-lived. At six weeks’ gestation, I lost that baby too.

We hadn’t told many people about this pregnancy, so there weren’t many to “untell.” That was both a blessing and a curse, because we did not get much emotional support either.

I wondered briefly if I should just be grateful for the one daughter I had and stop trying. However, I had grown up an only child and absolutely hated it. I always wanted a sibling to grow up with and to have in my corner, to love and protect each other. Peter and I agreed that since we had one child, we’d figure out a way to have two.

The next year, we underwent an onslaught of testing and discovered the probable cause of my two miscarriages. Surgery was done to address the issue, and soon we were pregnant again.

After twelve weeks, we began to breathe a little easier. People naïvely told us that safely getting through the first trimester meant a good chance that everything would go well.

Everything appeared okay. I was gaining weight at the proper rate, I felt good, my checkups were normal, and soon I began to feel our baby move.

Then, while at work, on the morning of March 17, 1995 (St Patrick’s Day), I discovered I was bleeding. My employers arranged an ambulance to take me to the local maternity hospital, where my specialist met us. I was already dilating and would require immediate surgery to ensure the pregnancy could go on.

Peter and I tried not to panic. We were in the best hospital, and the doctors knew what to do. We’d be fine. Additionally, we had faith that a loving God would protect our unborn baby and us. Little did we know then that this situation would test us to our limits and teach us more about love, strength, and faith than anything we’d endured.

The next day, my water broke, and we were given two choices... They could undo the surgery they had worked so hard to implement. In that case, our baby would be born almost immediately and have virtually no chance of survival. Or we could leave things be. Perhaps if the amniotic sac damage was small, it might repair itself, and I could continue the pregnancy on strict bed rest. We chose the latter option.

Our baby was so active that day, and with little amniotic fluid as protection, I could feel every movement. But by bedtime, the movements had slowed. Nurses tried to comfort me, saying that our baby was just resting after such an active day. I wanted to believe them, truly I did, but the next morning, an ultrasound showed no heartbeat. In a valiant attempt to survive, our baby had fallen onto the umbilical cord and compressed the connection that sustained life.

That afternoon, I delivered a tiny, fully formed baby girl. She was complete and perfect, except for twenty more weeks of growth and development. We called her Angel.

Angel left behind two broken-hearted parents who only wanted a second baby to love, a six-year-old sister who had to learn firsthand how cruel life could be, and numerous relatives and friends who had no understanding of how to help us, although they tried their best.

There was no preparation for this type of grief. No comforting words from others, no literature offering guidance. We were completely on our own.

It was here that we discovered how ill-equipped our culture is to handle grief. We learned the hard way that people wanted to help, but being clueless of how, they might say horribly unkind things. We learned that platitudes, clearly meant to make us feel better, only made us feel angry. While we appreciated efforts to ease our pain, we soon learned that nobody could do so.

We longed to find someone who truly understood and could help us begin healing from this great loss. The internet (as we now know it) did not exist, and it wasn’t easy to find support, but two months after losing Angel, we found Empty Cradle, a bereaved parents’ peer support group.

At our first meeting there, we were surrounded by several other couples who had endured similar losses, and we found the help we had so long sought. These people truly understood what we had gone through. They offered kind, supportive words and good suggestions on what had helped them.

I became friends with the group’s founder, Patty-Lou, by the time she entered the hospital to deliver her ‘rainbow’ baby. A rainbow baby is a healthy baby born after the loss of a previous child due to miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death. The term symbolizes hope and healing, representing the bright, beautiful arrival of a child following the dark, turbulent storm of grief. [https://americanpregnancy.org/pregnancy/what-is-a-rainbow-baby/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_baby ]

Patty-Lou asked Peter and me to facilitate that month’s support meeting while she was giving birth, and we found that doing this was such a healing experience that we joined her first Board of Directors and we continued to take turns facilitating the monthly meetings.

By then, we were pregnant again. Now, not only did Empty Cradle help us navigate our grief, but it also supported us through the fear of getting through our subsequent pregnancy.

In May 1996, we successfully delivered our daughter Jennifer. It had been a stressful 37 weeks. Never did I have the courage to just enjoy that pregnancy, but rather, not a day went by that I didn’t look for signs of trouble. When we finally held that baby girl in our arms, the tears we cried were no longer tears of sorrow, but rather of joy and relief.

Peter attempted to tell his parents the good news, with a phone in one hand and our baby in the other. I suggested he put Jennifer down, but with a lump in his throat, he replied, “I don’t ever want to put her down. In that moment, I realized how much the whole experience had affected my dear husband.

In 2005, we took over running Empty Cradle. Not that we were trained to do so, but we had learned that when you go through something so life-changing as we had, it was truly a gift to share what we’d learned with other newly bereaved parents.

All these years later, we are still running the support group, now known as the Metro Vancouver Empty Cradle Bereaved Parents Society. In addition to supporting newly bereaved parents, we have begun providing training to the public and medical personnel on how to support parents after a loss. We have also begun getting involved in advocacy work, in hopes that one day, grieving parents will not be subjected to additional pain because friends, society, and the government had no idea how to support them.

If you endured a pregnancy loss or neonatal death, our hearts go out to you. You have just lived through one of life’s most devastating experiences. What most people don’t understand is that not only is the child you wanted so much now gone, but also gone are all the hopes, dreams, and plans you may have already begun to create for that child since you first knew of their existence.

Help is available, but you may have to really search for it in your area. Looking online for terms like Pregnancy Loss Support, Miscarriage Support, or Stillbirth Support is a good start. If nothing seems to be available close to home, please reach out to us at emptycradlebc@gmail.com, and we can at least provide resources (link:) www.emptycradle.bc.ca or an invitation to our online support meetings.