I am pregnant with our rainbow and just found out that it is a boy. We lost our daughter when she was a few days old. I hadn't expected to have such an emotional response, but my initial feeling on hearing the news was sadness. I felt disappointed and bereft. I had been hoping for a girl. This is of course a new baby, not a replacement, but I am finding this difficult to process. I also feel terrible for not simply being filled with joy about having a healthy baby and instead feeling sad about the gender. Did anyone else experience this? How did you reconcile yourself to the gender of the new baby?

Yes I have felt this. I cried when we found out the gender, and not with joy. I struggled on and off for the rest of the pregnancy, until he was born. And then it turned out, just like everyone who I had told about my struggles said it would: It was fine. I am in love with him. Now that he is here I would not change him to be a girl if I could. I think it is very understandable to feel this way. Many women on glow have written about these feelings. Try not to feel guilty! I am very sure that you will be so in love with your little man once he is there. We will always miss our daughters. This does not make me love him any less. And maybe it even helps a little to differantiate, to let him be his own little person. I have come around to think so.

I am 14 weeks pregnant now and really do not want to find out the sex. I want the opposite of what I had and lost. I want everything in this pregnancy to be as different as possible from my last one. I figure if I don't find out and all goes well I will be overjoyed no matter what just to have a living baby in my arms. Where as if I find out now and am disappointed and worried the rest of the pregnancy because of the sex, how much extra stress will that add? My husband on the other hand wants to know the sex so that we can bond with the baby more throughout the pregnancy and not miss out on anything just in case we lose this baby too. He thinks we would regret not finding out if anything happened. I'm really torn.

This happened to me too. We lost our daughter at 35 weeks and I'm pregnant again with another girl. I desperately wanted this baby to be a boy just so I could have a different experience. We found out the sex early on but we're telling everyone that we don't know just because we don't want to hear everyone's opinions. They'll find out when the baby gets here (hopefully healthy).

I sometimes find myself referring to this baby by our dead daughter's name, but then sometimes I refer to her as my first daughter (living) as well. I remind myself that this must be a common thing right, for parents to mix up their kids? And that isn't as macabre as I think.

It's hard to really shake the guilt and all the complex emotions that you deal with when you lose a child. I've found that its best to embrace and acknowledge your feelings rather than beat yourself up over guilt.

I'm not even pregnant again yet (as much as I would like to be, it's almost all I can think about) but I've already gotten emotional thinking about this. I lost my twin girls, and while I was never hoping for twins specifically, now that I've lost them, I really would like to have twins. Of the few embryos we have left, I think doctors will likely only put back 1 at a time now, so even facing the reality of one baby rather than two already had me in tears. My one compromise if we couldn't put back two embryos again was going to be to ask to do a gender determination on the embryos first, so I could be assured of getting a girl next. Again, not that she would replace her sisters, but just because I had already wanted a girl forever, then to lose two, my soul is in desperate need of a girl to buy pretty dresses for, have tea parties with, etc, and I'm just hoping beyond hope that we still have a healthy, living girl coming to us. But when I mentioned the gender testing to the nurse, she got a concerned look and said such testing is really rough on the embryos. And then I really started crying even more, because now I can fully see each of those embryos as my fully formed children, just frozen in time, and especially after seeing my beloved girls all hooked up to tubes and monitors in the NICU, I can't bear the thought of putting my children through anything harsh, especially if its not absolutely necessary. So I just knew then I would of course love any healthy living siblings of my girls, girl or boy, and will just hope that if it's not a sister right away, that she is still coming to us eventually.

In addition to the foremost loss(es) we've all had, all these additional related losses are just so further sad and difficult - i.e. not being able to have an innocently jubilant pregnancy with maternity photos and baby showers, not being able to fully enjoy our next child's gender because that either does/does not remind us of our lost child(ren), loss of friendships because so many don't understand and are too uncomfortable around us, etc, etc. It's just all so difficult. And I am just living to hopefully finally have living children so then there will be some amount of joy to at least counterbalance this heavy sadness.

living children mentioned...

I lost my firstborn, a daughter, in 2005. we kept the gender a "surprise" till her birth.
I had a lot of green and yellow baby clothes. after she died, I went and bought a dress for her- ruffles and layers with a lot of strawberries on it- beautiful. never having been a mom, I didn't know what to expect, raising a boy or a girl. but knowing her gender all of the sudden made her loss that much more real. you lose all of the experiences that maybe you have been planning for the day you raise your son, or your daughter. it is a whole other thing to grieve. I missed my baby, but when I held that dress and thought that I would never get to pull it over her head, it was a whole new thing to feel horrible about. but it helped bring me closer to her.

ok, so, we got pregnant again a few years later and we want to know ASAP the gender. I want to bond with the baby during the pregnancy more. I want to give the baby a name and a more specific 'identity' in utero, because this is something I found that I regretted during my daughter's pregnancy. she was always "the baby" with no name. it wasn't like I didn't love our baby but when she died and the time I had being pregnant with her was the only time I had to build and experience that relationship, in the end, I wish I had known her by her name and her gender.

we found out our baby was a boy at the 14-15w ultrasound. the pregnancy was complicated and we were worried about losing this baby too. the gender all of the sudden took a secondary role to the survival of our baby. sure, absolutely, I felt a succinct pain in my heart to think that I might never get to do things with a daughter, things I dreamed of doing with my daughter that died. it was a real loss. but I was distracted by stress and fear of another loss of this subsequent baby.

we named him right away, after that u/s. it felt good, to call him by a name and feel the mom/baby and dad/baby relationship take a new direction. we talked to him in my belly about his grandpa, his namesake, things we might do with him... boy things. it helped us to center ourselves and get thru some of the fear.

ok, so he wound up being stillborn, too. no son, no daughter. the gender is a large part of how we relate to our babies that died. it is a part of their identity and something that we would only ever be able to fill in blanks about, no matter when our babies died- it is something we need to grieve and give attention to.

I had a miscarriage after our son. a girl. that hurt. but it would have hurt if it was a boy too... it just hurts in different, yet equal, ways. later on, we had another loss, a chemical pregnancy- ivf w/surrogacy, and that embryo was a boy. another layer of loss. these futures that never get to happen. lives that never get to be lived.

we went on to have living children. a boy. then, later, a girl. I see things about my living children that I could only dream about for my kids that died. it is a curious side effect in all of this that raising a subsequent child triggers certain grief. when I put tights on my daughter, it hurts my heart, literally, to think that I never got to do that with my daughter that died.

In any case, gender of a baby if a very personal thing. we all relate and react to it differently. no judgement. I knew a mother who's son had died at birth, and it was a real issue for her husband. they went on to have another girl, and it was a real problem- he wanted a son so badly. it caused their relationship a lot of stress. listening to her talk about this made me realize that this is ok... it is ok to want things, to miss experiences. when a baby dies, it is so complicating, it complicates all of these "normal" feelings. this husband deeply grieved not only the baby, but the loss of experiences with his son that were deeply important to him. it wasn't like he didn't love his daughters, but this loss for him was incredible and difficult for him to surpass.

we had issues with infertility that made me wonder if I would ever be able to have the experience of raising a child, ever, at all. the gender, while not unimportant, became very less-important to me. I guess its "easy" for me to say, because I wound up with a living boy and a living girl. dresses and boy underwear. I have not had to grieve the "never". so, this an incomplete response...

all I can think is that you have to validate and allow this gender issue to be something that is a grieve-able kid of loss... its ok to want a boy, or want a girl, even if you are a loss parent. there is so much pressure to be a certain way when you have another baby when your baby has died. people expect you to get better or just be happy again, etc., and I think some of that seeps into our own psyches... we do not "allow" ourselves to have a bad-parent moment. we should be groveling on our knees in gratitude every day and night for being able to have another baby, one that lives... and you know, I personally DO feel that way, a lot of the time... maybe more than a "regular" parent who has never lost a baby. but I feel a lot of self-judgement when I have a "bad parent day"... how could I ever complain, seriously? but that is not a normal healthy expectation to live up to. and this goes for gender too. just because you lost a baby, it doesn't mean that you not allowed to feel the whole spectrum of emotions just like a regular person.

I have never known anyone who did not wind up liking (and loving!) their next baby- even the husband that I mentioned above... he loved his second daughter. he was a great father to her. and this transfers over to parents who use donor eggs or donor sperm, or both, or who adopt, or foster, or whatever path they take... the next child will be loved, no matter what. but the losses remain, and they have to be felt and dealt with accordingly.

sorry for the length.

I am relieved to be reading this dialogue,because I experienced big guilt during my subsequent pregnancy -- for secretly wishing for a baby girl... I did not find out the gender with this pregnancy, or my first. Both times I was POSITIVE I was having a boy, and both times I was wrong -- as well as shocked and elated when the cry of "It's a girl!" finally came in the delivery room. My rational self understood that I would be grateful for a healthy, living baby, regardless of gender, but still there is that unexplainable longing, we can't pretend it isn't there.

There is no picking up where we "left off" with a new child after a loss; we all start from zero the minute they hand that beautiful, sticky, wriggling, living baby to us. Ready, set, love. Love that will never stop, love that will prevail regardless of gender. So it is only fair that we not look down upon ourselves for hoping what we hope, wishing what we wish before and during a subsequent pregnancy. It is all fair game, if you ask me -- when you think of what we have been through! It all seems perfectly normal to me, despite what our consciences might otherwise be telling us. After we experience the initial horror of the loss itself, we continue to discover all the other tiny losses that ripple through the pool once that stone is cast: all the realizations that plague us as we watch the blissfully oblivious raise their own flawless families, the things we discover we are missing out on, things as simple as being able to say our baby's names out loud with out fear of making other people uncomfortable (god forbid!), or realizing there will never be pigtails or ice skates or pretty dresses as the case may be.... those are all losses in their own right.

Like grief, there is no timeline, no formula, we all do it differently. The best we can do is to be gentle with ourselves, let those feelings be, and not berate ourselves for our thoughts and dreams. Let them come as they will.

Anonymous,
I cried for 1 week straight when I found out my rainbow was a boy. I wanted a girl.
It was my truth.
This was 5 years ago. I am glad you shared your feelings. What you are going through is completely normal. Continue to be brave and honest and you will process all of these conflicting and difficult and counter intuitive feelings.
i believe in you.
I promise you will love your baby, and that you will bond and look back on theses strong feelings as a blip on the radar.
Sending love and hope and strength.