Grief and Pregnancy Loss

To Post or Not to Post, That is the Question

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It’s been months since I considered writing a blog about social media pregnancy announcements. It’s been since June 12th, Maliyah’s due date, and the date we announced her existence (past tense) to the world. We did not make the decision to post about her lightly. In fact, months and months of discussions went into that post. If I’m completely honest, the conversation goes even further back, to October 2022 when we first found out I was pregnant.

Should we post, or should we not post?

If you are in your 20’s or 30’s, or if you have an Instagram or Facebook account, or if you just plain don’t live under a rock, you’ve probably been inundated with pregnancy announcements, gender reveals, birth announcements, or in some cases the hat trick – all three.

I am no stranger to social media, I have two TikToks, 4 Instagrams and 2 Facebooks. I used to post almost all of my meals to my stories. But with my pregnancy, I was terrified. This goes back to my post about superstitions, I was far too nervous to say anything on social media about my pregnancy at all and I didn’t want to hurt anyone. What if something went wrong? What if someone was struggling with fertility and my post made them cry? I posted exactly nothing about a pregnancy. In fact, I posted a blog in November where I talked about how my bucket list would need to go on hold “if” I got pregnant… but I already knew I was. I didn’t want to say anything and jinx it. I didn’t know what I would do about posting photos as I started showing, but I had already taken a step back from posting on my blog – that bucket list post was my ONLY post between October 2022 and July 2023. I figured I would do the same thing with Instagram and take a step back, or not post photos of myself. I posted a carousel of photos on Instagram from a wedding in mid-February where I was sort of visibly pregnant, but you could also have assume it was an unflattering angle or cut of the dress. I never said anything explicitly about it.

So, how do you announce your baby died, when you never announced she existed? Isn’t that crazy? Also, who wants to read about such a horrific loss? For some reason I felt like I wanted to tell people, but I couldn’t figure out why.

I had only one example to look to. I had a friend who had a pregnancy loss while I was pregnant. She posted about it as part of a larger social media post celebrating an anniversary. I was obsessed with that post. I read it 100 times. Eventually I asked her about it. I said, “how did you come to the decision to post this? And how did you decide when was the right time? What did your husband think of it?”

I asked that last question because Chris and I were not in agreement. He keeps things close to the chest. He doesn’t share anything about his personal life on the internet, and he certainly doesn’t share about such monumental and private things as this. I knew we disagreed, and we continued to have conversations about it.

I asked on multiple support groups what other people had done. Why did they tell people? Why didn’t they? When did they say something? Was it too late?

Some people said they needed to unannounce because they had already announced they were pregnant. We didn’t have this issue, since we never announced.

Some people said they announced to avoid questions about when/if they were going to have children. This was an interesting point I hadn’t considered.

Some people said they announced because they didn’t want people to assume their next pregnancy was a first pregnancy.

Some said they felt they needed to share about their loss because it was far too heavy of a burden to carry alone. This resonated deeply with me. As the days kept coming and going, it felt like the lead bricks on my chest were growing and it was too much for one person to handle.

But had we missed our window? She died two weeks prior. Four weeks prior. Two months prior. Would people even care? Should I share about her on our one-year anniversary, when I thought we’d have a growing family? Should I share about her on my birthday, when she was the only thing I could think about as my biological clock was ticking forward at a furious pace?

Here’s the thing: there’s no good time to tell the world about your dead baby.

I agonized over this constantly. Why did I feel such a fierce urge to share about her? I decided I needed to answer that question before I answered the timing question. I also needed to decide what I wanted the world to know.

I considered posting as a cautionary tale. I felt a sort of obligation to warn people. I had been healthy, I had a textbook, sickness-free pregnancy, I had no symptoms, and yet I almost died! I needed to tell people! I wanted to scream “CHECK YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE AND INSIST ON PERIODIC BLOODWORK” from the rooftops. Eventually, I decided that what I wanted to share had nothing to do with me. Yes, I think more education is needed, but I didn’t feel an obligation or responsibility at that point in my depths of depression.

What I wanted was a place in the world for Maliyah. I needed her to have a tiny corner of the internet that knew she existed. I needed people to know we loved her and would continue to love her. I needed people to see her tiny footprints and to understand she was a person. This was not just something that happened to me, this was a person who existed, and now she was gone. I wanted people to understand that Chris and I were not the same people anymore because the most important person in our world was no longer in this world.

For all of those reasons, I decided to post on her due date, the day that was supposed to be her birthday. I needed there to be a post only about her – a reserved spot just for her, on a day that was already reserved in my brain for her.

When I finally posted on Instagram and Facebook, I was relieved. She had a spot. Losing a child is so lonely. It feels like nobody in the entire world understands, or cares as much as you, and they never will. Even if only for one second of one day, I knew by posting on social media, people would see her name, know how much we cared about her, and perhaps pause for a moment and think about her. For Chris and me, those moments were all day every day, but for a brief moment in time, she would be on someone else’s mind.

But unlike when you post something amazing on Instagram and you sit there waiting to watch the likes and comments roll in, I couldn’t face the comments. I clicked “post” and immediately went to the gym where I locked my phone in a locker for 75 minutes. I was fearful of the pity. It wasn’t about me, after all. My therapist advised that “pity” could be reframed as “empathy” and perhaps people cared about me and that’s why they would extend sympathies. Maybe that was true, but I assumed as soon as I pressed “post,” there would be a game of telephone that started with, “OMG did you hear what happened to Emily?”  

Overall, I was happy I posted about her on social media.

Meanwhile, I continued to see an onslaught of pregnancy and birth announcements on Instagram. People had so much hope and surety they would have alive babies. It seemed like there were ultrasound photos or onesies or bump pics every time I clicked on the Instagram app. I knew every permutation of these announcements:

  • A. The collection of onesies with the parents’ hobbies/sports teams/funny puns laid out on the floor.
  • B. The ultrasound photo
  • C. The letterboard announcing Baby Smith and a date (with certainty!) of when they would be born.
  • D. The family pet with a personalized bandana.
  • E. The living child wearing a “going to be a big brother!” shirt.
  • F. All of the above.

My gut-reaction every time I saw these was disgust and anger. How could the world keep spinning? How could people get pregnant so easily? How could people just… be sure their babies would be born alive? Didn’t they know what could happen??? How dare they have such confidence.

I started to think about this all the time and I realized the anger was just jealousy. Not jealousy about their babies or their pregnancies, I didn’t want their kids, I wanted mine! The one that was dead. I would scroll through the comments and see the hundreds of “congratulations” the “you’re going to be such great parents!” the “I can’t wait to meet them!” the “this is so exciting!” the “I knew it!”

I missed out on that. I missed out on all of the positive thoughts and excitement, and I found myself in a deep pit of regret. Why had I been so hesitant to share our joy? All I was left with was a cautionary tale and a hundred “I’m so sorry” comments or “I don’t know what to say” or “this is horrible.” And it was. And it is.

I felt sadness compounded on sadness. I try very much not to have regrets, but if I had to say one regret of my entire pregnancy it was this: I wish we had taken the opportunity to celebrate while we could. I was consumed with worry, and I didn’t allow us the space to have joy, and there’s no do-overs.

I had this regret almost immediately, even before we posted about Maliyah’s death. I wished for a redo. I wished we could have been happy before we were devastatingly sad. I remember calling my pregnant best friend and through snotty tears, telling her I saw a repost on her stories of her with a bump (which had also cried privately about) but I had noticed she hadn’t put anything on her feed. I was worried she was doing this to protect me. I didn’t want her to dampen her joy because of my sadness. It wasn’t fair to her. I hadn’t allowed myself to be happy (certainly not publicly) and I regretted it. I didn’t want her to make the same mistake. Of course, I said it was up to her if she wanted to mention anything on social media, it’s a personal decision, but I didn’t want her to base it on me. I told her not to worry about me seeing anything, and I had her account muted because I wanted to make the decision about when or if wanted to see it, but this was my issue, not hers, and I wanted her to feel comfortable sharing whatever she wanted to share.

When I spoke to another pregnant friend recently, she mentioned she wasn’t planning to post on social media about the baby. She knew many people in her life who struggled with infertility and had devastating endings to pregnancies, plus she had me. She said she didn’t know who else was hiding in pain as well, and she didn’t want to contribute to that. She explained that for those reasons, and because of her own “what-ifs,” she wasn’t planning a post. I told her I could relate, but then I admitted my regret to her. I told her how I wished I had made a different decision, but it was too late. I told her to bask in her joy and excitement because you never know when it will be taken away. She ended up telling me I convinced her to change her mind.

But I understood her hesitancy. I also had friends I knew who struggled to get pregnant, and friends who had lost babies. When I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t want to push my happiness in their face. And now, I have regret for that. For prioritizing my friends’ emotions over my own, and for letting my worries shroud my happiness in clouds of anxiety.

I want to make sure I’m clear here, I think it’s important to look out for your friends and to not do anything with intentional malice. But there are always people in the world who are struggling and may find your posts triggering, whether it is about babies, parents, siblings, work, food, really anything. As a human, you should always balance the feelings of others with your own. But you also cannot take responsibility for each person’s struggles. First of all, many may be invisible. There is no way to know if something you post may hurt someone with a silent struggle. It is also important to live life for yourself, and to take control of your own story, both in the real world, and online. While I regret not sharing about my pregnancy, I cannot change the past.

I have mentioned before that social media sometimes feels like a highlight reel, and for that reason, I plan to make a conscious effort to share authentically here, and link these posts on my Instagram. This blog has quickly become heavy and dark, which is mostly because a majority of my life in this moment feels that way. But I want to also make a commitment to myself to share the moments of joy. There are so few, and they can feel fleeting. They deserve to be celebrated.

You may have assumed this post would end with an announcement. Well, it’s not going to. You may also be wondering if this means I’ll share publicly and early about a next pregnancy, and I’m not sure. To be honest, that’s none of your beeswax. But I have a feeling I will do things differently, and I promise if I do decide to share anything, I’ll take you along for the ride.  

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Grief and Pregnancy Loss

My Own Worst Enemy

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A lot of things have gone wrong this year and most of those things have been outside my control. They may have been inside my body, but they have been outside of my control. Recently, I realized that even my feelings are spiraling out of control, and it’s extremely disconcerting.

I never considered myself a control freak, but as more and more snowballs, I’m realizing that maybe I am.

I had thought that if I had controlling or stressful tendencies, they would have come out during the most stressful times in my life, like in law school, or while planning a wedding. But no, when it came to law school, I was perfectly fine with studying as hard as I could, and doing as well as I could. For my wedding, I thought maybe I’d be a bridezilla, but instead I filled out a spreadsheet with my flowers of choice, told my two bridesmaids to pick a color and style of dress they liked, and then I showed up in Cabo for the first time, 4 days before my nuptials.

So why, all of a sudden, do I want to control everything including my thoughts, and I’m mad at myself for wanting to be in control, mad at myself for not just accepting that some things aren’t in anyone’s control, and then I continue to spiral out of control (which brings me back to my very first point)?

All of this came to a head last week when I had a grief attack at the gym. I wasn’t sure if I’d write about it because it’s extremely vulnerable and embarrassing. But I also feel like I shouldn’t be embarrassed, even if I am. This blog is already an overshare, that’s the point of a personal blog, so I figured I’d jump in headfirst and overshare again.

I’ve had two “panic attacks” since Maliyah was born, both in healthcare settings. I’m using quotes because I don’t think they fit neatly into a “panic attack” box. Panic attacks usually mean extreme physical reaction triggered by intense fear when there is no real or apparent danger. For me, it’s not really a fear, or thoughts of imminent danger, it’s more like a “grief attack” with intense physical reactions based on extreme sadness and self-loathing.

My brain is a very fun place to be.

The first time this happened was at a post-partum appointment at the OBGYN. Obviously, being at the OBGYN after baby loss would be triggering for anyone, but this happened before I was even called into the room. I was sitting in the waiting area barely able to catch my breath, with my heartrate sky-high, facing the wall trying to avoid eye contact with anyone pregnant, and my Fitbit vibrated on my wrist, congratulating me for hitting my “zone minutes” for the week. I opened my Fitbit app, looking for a distraction, and realized it had clocked a 23-minute workout. This all happened while I was sitting in a chair just trying (and failing) to breathe normally.

The next time this happened was when I had a full abdominal ultrasound because my nephrologist thought there was a chance I had one kidney, since there seemed to be no other explanation for what happened to me. Turns out I have two kidneys. It also turns out that the sound of blood flowing into a kidney on an ultrasound machine sounds eerily similar to the sound of a baby’s heartbeat in your uterus. Cue grief attack. I couldn’t breathe while I laid there on the table. The technician was instructing me when to breathe in and out, because when your lungs inflate, they move your other organs around, making the ultrasound more difficult to perform. Clearly, I was unable to breathe on her count. I couldn’t breathe at all. I tried to focus on the ceiling tiles but soon enough I was gasping for air, with water streaming out of my eyes, and I started choking on snot while I was gasping, so she made me sit up to try and catch my breath. I got ultrasound goo all over the place, and the tech asked me if I had brought any family with me that she could call in from the waiting room.

Again, while I was caught off-guard by this grief attack, it was not exactly unpredictable. Of course I would be grossly triggered by my very first ultrasound with no baby inside me. Of course the sound of blood flow that was not a heartbeat drove me to tears. In my rational mind, this makes sense. But in my irrational mind, which is my mind most of the time, I got mad. Furious, really. Frustrated. Angry. Livid.

The mantra in my head over and over again was, “Why can’t I be normal?? Why am I like this? Why can’t I do ___ like a normal person? I used to be able to do ___ without a problem, now I am a freak. I’m the same person but now I’m completely f*cked up.”

As I mentioned, my brain is a very fun place to be.

This week was different because I thought I was safe in non-healthcare settings. But Thursday I went to the gym and I proved to myself that no, I am messed up in many different kinds of settings, yippee!

Thursday at Orangetheory was a “benchmark” day called the 12-Minute Run for Distance. A few times a month, they have treadmill or rowing challenges where you measure your progress on distance, speed, incline, or power. They repeat these workouts 2-3 times/year so you can see if you have improved. As the coach said before class last week, “it’s you against you.”

The last time I had done that benchmark was in April 2022, the month before my wedding. I had been working out a lot, and I was in pretty good shape. But I’ve been working out now 5-6 times/week mostly as a mental distraction, and I thought I had set myself up to PR. I was determined to beat my previous distance.

Well, readers, I did not. I matched my distance exactly, down to the hundredth of a mile. I got off the treadmill and tried to continue the workout, but I found myself falling apart as I picked up the weights for the next part of class. I went to the bathroom to try and calm down, but it did the opposite. I started beating myself up.

My internal dialogue: “Why couldn’t I get .01 extra on the treadmill? What is wrong with me? It’s not like I have anything else going on. All I do is work out. It’s not like I’m taking care of a baby. I’m trying to come back from a post-partum break where I wasn’t allowed to work out, but I have literally nothing to show for it. I don’t have a baby. I don’t even have .01 on the treadmill. And why am I coming back from a post-partum break? How? How is it possible that I need to have a post-partum come-back when I am childless? And I’m supposed to be thinking about going through this again? Why would anyone ever do this again?”

Then the really fun thoughts start in: “Why am I not better yet? It’s been 8 months. Some people would be functional by now. And I’m in the bathroom at the gym struggling to stand. Why can’t I be normal? I used to be able to get through a f*cking class at the gym and now I’m so messed up I can’t run 12 minutes without having a panic attack?”

I finally got to a place where I thought I could go back to class, so I did. I lifted weights for 3 minutes while I continued to battle myself in my head. That’s when I realized that my heartrate monitor had been on the whole time. Everyone in class was in blue and green zones (moderate effort) and my name was the only little box on the screen in orange and red, clearly still in full panic. When I realized that the entire class saw my heartrate sky-high during the mental breakdown I had in the bathroom, I completely lost it again and left the gym. Somehow, I wiped off my equipment and got my stuff from the locker, and made it 10 yards from the studio when I stopped being able to breathe again.

I sat down on a railing and tried to breathe. I counted 4 in, 4 out, but it wasn’t helping. I was crying hard at this point but I’m not sure how long I was there. One of the best parts about NYC is that people mind their own business. But on this particular day, I guess I looked like I was in acute distress because a woman walking her dog asked me if I was ok. I nodded. I thought she would go away, but no. She asked if I had asthma, I shook my head no. She said, “should I call you an ambulance?” I vigorously shook my head no. Given that my previous panic attacks were both in medical settings, I knew the last thing I needed in that moment was interaction with healthcare professionals. The woman asked, “are you sure?” and I nodded again, so she walked away. I think the fear of having to talk to EMTs scared me into action. I went through a list of people in my mind who I could call, who wouldn’t think I was a complete basket case. I realized it was really only Chris because he had seen this happen to me before, so I called him and talked to him while I tried to get myself home.

An hour later, once I showered and through some superhuman power, braided a girl’s hair for a race, I was able to see what happened with some distance. When I took 3 steps back and I was in a better headspace, when I was able to breathe, I said to myself, “this makes sense. You are very sad. You’re not the same person, you had a baby die inside you. You gave birth to a dead child and almost died this year. What you achieved on the treadmill is a triumph. Despite everything that happened this year, you are not only alive, but you are in as good shape as you were three weeks before your wedding.”

I see that when I am not deep in it. But when I was in the bathroom at the gym, trying to tell myself those very same things, I couldn’t believe it. All I could believe was, “fail fail fail fail fail.”

Later that night, after talking sense into myself and feeling like a completely crazy person (because who starts sobbing at the gym???), I wrote to one of my loss mom friends and explained what happened. She told me that it’s so, so hard but also so, so relatable. She said that being in an extreme pit of grief feels like you are fighting a constant battle with yourself, and it’s excruciatingly exhausting. I couldn’t agree more.

I’m tired. I’m tired of being sad and I’m tired of being mad at myself for being sad. I wish I was “over it.” I wish I was “better.” It’s ironic that the Orangetheory coach had said “it’s you against you” for the benchmark, since that is ALWAYS the battle I am fighting in my head. I want to be kind to myself, I want to “give myself grace,” as all of the Instagram Inspo accounts say, but it’s easier said than done.

The ”benchmark workout” felt in my head like it was a benchmark of more than just distance on a treadmill. To me, it was a benchmark I was measuring to see if I was still the person I used to be. When I “failed,” and found out that no, I am not, and I will never again be her, it hit me like 100 tons of bricks.

Watching other people around me grieve differently and on different timelines makes it even harder. While I try not to compare, it’s impossible. Of course, I’ve read all the books about how grief’s timeline is different for everyone, but I want to be done. I want to quit. I want to trade in these feelings for other ones. I want to talk to the manager.

But that’s not how life works. And as surprised as I am every day to wake up, ready to put on my armor and go to battle with myself yet again, here we are, alive another day and ready to fight. Waking up each day as your own worst enemy is tiring and demoralizing. I hope someday to be a friend to myself. I hope that I can be kinder to myself. Gentler. Softer. Since it’s nearly December, maybe that will be my New Year’s Resolution. I am going to try my very best to be kind, because at least that is something I can control.

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Grief and Pregnancy Loss

What’s in a Name?

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Naming someone is a huge responsibility. You are deciding what a human will be called for the rest of their life.

When I found out I was pregnant, I knew I would take this responsibility seriously. Part of the reason I was so invested in this process was because I hate my name. It is so common, so typical. Everyone knows an Emily. Actually, everyone knows multiple Emilys. When a person hears my name is Emily, they automatically know what they think I’ll be like. They preconceive my personality, my appearance, and they probably assume I’ll be a white girl in her 20’s or 30s. And they’ll be right.

The first time I realized how much I hated my name was in 9th grade when I went to sleepaway camp and in my bunk of 20 girls, there were 4 Emilys. Someone who did those assignments was surely chuckling at our confusion, but for us it was annoying. I remember each Emily came up with a nickname so we could tell each other apart, but my “nickname” was just “Emily.” Lame. Just last month I was in the airport when some “Emily” was late for her flight that was boarding at the gate next to mine. They kept paging an “Emily” over the intercom and I kept taking out my earbuds to see if it was me. But no, I was not traveling to Minneapolis, it was just another one of the million Emilys.

I have been pretty vocal to my parents about how annoying this is. Sure, every time I go to a souvenir shop I’m guaranteed to find a keychain or magnet with my name on it, but I also constantly answer to strangers who are calling out in the grocery store for another Emily. I go to Orangetheory, where they put your heartrate zones on a tv screen and sort them by first name. I’m constantly squinting across to room to see which Emily I am on the screen because there is ALWAYS more than one Emily in class. This is such a pervasive issue that the New York Times had an article about the extreme amount of Emilys recently. At least 10 people sent the article to me, since my friends know I complain about this all the time. I, of course, forwarded it to my parents to show them that I was not alone in my strife. There are too many of us!

When Chris and I tried to come up with names for our baby, we couldn’t agree. I had 4 things mandatory on my list:

  1. Unique
  2. Easy to pronounce
  3. Gender neutral
  4. Good nicknames

Chris and I had a Baby Names app where we could swipe right or left on names we liked or didn’t like, sort of like Tinder for names. We could do this asynchronously, and we were notified every time we had a match. Chris and I both had so much work and personal travel my first and second trimester, we were often not in the same place and this helped us move the name conversation forward without long, in-person conversations. I swiped and swiped (mostly left) and waited for a match. Matches did not happen often. Even for the names we agreed on, when we talked about them, we usually decided they weren’t top of our list, they were just “maybes.”

That is how we ended up in the hospital at 6 months pregnant, with the unexpected imminent birth of a child and no name.

Of course, we ended up with a dead daughter so there was no birth certificate, and no name was necessary.

I didn’t really think about a name after I gave birth. I didn’t think about anything. I was completely numb and I was on a lot of medications. I hadn’t even known she would be a girl until she was already gone. I went home from the hospital in a daze. Later in the week, I tried to rifle through the packet of papers I had received from the hospital. Some of the things were not helpful, but at the back of the packet there was information about support organizations. A lot of them were specific, either to religion, or type of infant or baby loss, but there was one organization that seemed local enough and broad enough to be helpful. I found their website and saw I could request a free peer counselor via webform. Since I was struggling to speak, this seemed easy enough. I wrote something like “I lost my baby over the weekend, and I wonder if you can help.”

The next day I received a call from one of the volunteers coordinating the program, and she asked me questions, trying to get more information so she could match me with the right peer. I cried silently through the conversation, but I don’t think she could tell. She said, “does your daughter have a name?” I was frozen. I didn’t even think of her as my daughter yet. People had never said that. At the hospital they tip-toed around terms. They were more concerned with my health and getting me in good enough shape to discharge from the hospital. No one wants a bereaved woman on the maternity ward, least of all herself. No one at the hospital called me a mom since the first night in triage when things started going south, no one mentioned my daughter. No one said “death” or “died.” There was vague conversation about “loss.” And here was this woman on the phone talking about my baby in the present tense, acknowledging she was a person, a girl, my actual child.

I said, “no,” because I couldn’t even bring myself to say, “we didn’t name her” and acknowledge “she” was a “she.” The woman on the phone said, “we really encourage moms to name their babies.” I thought, “Moms?? I’m not a mom I have no baby.” What I said was, “why would I name a dead baby?” She had a lot of reasons, and they all seemed equally as dumb to me. I was trying to FORGET that I had been pregnant. I was trying to forget that I had a baby, and now I don’t. I was trying to forget that for the brief moment in time when I did have her, she was killing me from the inside physically, and now she was killing my soul. Eventually, the woman on the phone stopped pressing the name thing because I was clearly not engaging, and she moved on to other topics. At the end of the conversation, she brought it up again. She really urged me to think about it, because in her experience, she had found naming a baby helped people heal and move forward. I agreed to think about it.

But I didn’t think about it. I went through the motions of living. Waking up. Staring at the wall. I went on walks to kill time. I saw doctor after doctor after doctor. None of them asked about my baby. It was all about me. Was my liver still failing? What caused this crazy fluke? Did I maybe have one kidney? Did I have an auto-immune disorder? The conversations of the long-lost baby were forgotten.

Meanwhile, I started following many dead baby accounts on social media. I listened to innumerable podcasts on my endless walks. On every single one of these accounts, people talked about naming their children and the way these moms talked about their children was heart-warming. I started to change my mind. I talked about it on support groups and with my therapist at the time. I decided to talk to Chris about it. He didn’t really see the reason for it. I tried to explain that it all felt made up. I felt like I dreamed up our whole pregnancy. She was inside me and now she wasn’t. No one knew about her. No one even knew she was a girl. How was I supposed to wrap my mind around the fact that “it happened” when “it” was a person, and that person didn’t have a name?

A few weeks before I was admitted to the hospital, I had asked Chris to send me his list of names from the Baby Names app. After our conversation months later, I went back through his list of names. The very first name on the list was Maliyah (muh-LEE-uh), like Malia Obama but with a more beautiful spelling. I absolutely loved the name immediately.

All of the reasons I wanted a gender-neutral name did not apply to a dead child. She would never go through the world. She wouldn’t have to deal with people’s assumptions before they met her because no one would meet her. No one would ever see her resume. I also cared less about having an easy-to-pronounce-by-sight name. No substitute teacher would ever call her name in class. I still wanted a unique name, one that showed everyone how special and different she was to us. I needed a name that made us think of beauty.

I looked up the meaning of Maliyah, and the first website I saw said it meant “beloved and bitter.” I felt the breath leave my lungs. How perfect and apt. I didn’t say anything to Chris, but I started thinking about her as Maliyah in my mind. I wanted to get used to her having a name. I was curious how it would make me feel. Almost immediately I found my perspective start to shift. She felt like a person. She felt more real. My grief made more sense. Of course I was devastated, I had a human inside me and now she was dead. The more I used a name in my mind, the more it felt necessary.

I brought the conversation up again to Chris. I was expecting a bit of a fight, since we had so much trouble agreeing on a name when we thought she’d live. But I think it was more important for me. I needed her to have space in the world and in people’s minds, and no one gives space to a nameless human they’ve never met. I told him about the meaning of Maliyah I found online, and he agreed, it was perfect.

The next day, I went to happy hour with a girl I had met from a support group and I told her we had a name. She asked what it was, and I said Maliyah out loud for the first time outside of our apartment. She said it back to me, and she said it was a beautiful name. I started crying. It was the first time I had heard her name out of someone else’s mouth. It gave Maliyah legitimacy. She existed! Other people knew about her and spoke her name! I immediately felt so happy she had a name. I started telling other people: my family and my therapist and my best friend.

I suppose it’s strange I haven’t said her name yet on this blog, given how happy it makes me feel to hear people say it. I posted her name on social media when we talked about her on her due date (blog coming on that next week), but sometimes I have conflicting thoughts. I want EVERYONE to know about her, but I also want to preserve parts of her for me. It’s a strange dichotomy I can’t explain. There are so few memories and so few mementos. We had so little time with her. Sometimes these things feel sacred and scarce, like a nonrenewable resource I need to keep all to myself. But sometimes, I just wish one person would text me and say her name. As my therapist would remind me, it can be “yes and,” because dialectical thinking exists. I can want people to talk about her, but also feel like I wish I had more of her to share. I can want the world to recognize she existed, but also feel that what little I have, needs to be protected.

But I do want people to talk about her. If we ever have future kids, I’ll want them to know there was a baby before. I want my friends to use her name. I wish I had more to share. I wish I had more memories. I wish I knew her better. I only have assumptions and unrealized hopes and dreams. But she did exist. And she did have a name. Maliyah.

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