“I just wanted people to ask me what she had been like:” Broadcaster Mairi Rodgers speaks out about losing her baby

WHEN Mairi Rodgers lost her baby, Annie, five months into her pregnancy, her sense of loss was only part of a storm of emotions.

Like many parents enduring the trauma of losing their unborn child, she felt alone and isolated.

Now, the 35-year-old broadcaster has spoken of her loss in a documentary as she meets other mums – and dads – to talk about their experience of miscarriage and stillbirth.

The programme, BBC Alba’s Gaol is Call/Labour of Love, features moving testimony from former Celtic footballer Kris Commons and his wife Lisa Hague, as well as broadcaster Annie Maguire, and will be screened to mark Baby Loss Awareness Week.

Here, BBC Alba presenter Mairi, a mum of two, from Inverness, tells Paul English about her own experience and why women going through the same ordeal should be encouraged to discuss their loss and their feelings.

I didn’t talk to anyone about it at the time, when we lost Annie. I just felt I was rubbish, rubbish at having babies.

My other daughter Mairead was born at 28 weeks, premature, because I had pre-eclampsia. Everyone else seemed to be moving on and having straightforward pregnancies, but I felt I’m letting my husband, my family and my daughter down.

I just wanted to get on with it, and I felt I was maybe making people feel uncomfortable talking about Annie. I didn’t want to remind them.

I had the memory box which I’d been given by the hospital, and I put it on the top shelf and tried to move on. I just didn’t want to talk about it.

You blame yourself, because there’s nobody else to blame. I just locked myself away. Lachie, my husband, and I grieved in different ways. We just carried on looking after Mairead and trying to get on with life. I was dwelling on things. I think you do look for a reason, and you do look to blame someone. But, of course, there’s nobody else to blame.

Pre-eclampsia is common, so of course it wasn’t my fault. And Annie had a genetic mutation. I thought it was such a horrible term, but it meant she had an abnormality, skeletal dysplasia, which is a form of dwarfism. She wouldn’t have survived.

I actually feel lucky now to know that’s what she had, because some other women go through full term and then the baby’s heart just stops. They never know what’s happened, they never know why their baby died.

We had Annie with us for a couple of hours after she was born. Lachie didn’t want to see her at first, but I did. After she was born he changed his mind.

I think we were both frightened. You don’t know what you’re going to get. After she came out I asked Lachie to check that she was dead, that maybe they’d got it wrong. You don’t know what’s going on in your head – you’ve just been through labour.

So we held her for a wee while, but I felt under pressure to hand her back, to end things. We didn’t know anyone else who had been through this, and we worried that we might have been making the staff feel uncomfortable, because we were lying in bed with a dead baby in a maternity ward, where there were lots of other mums with newborn babies – and we’re in the room next door cuddling a dead baby.

I felt like a bit of a weirdo, but now I wish we’d spent longer with her. We were well looked after at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness and any pressure we were under was pressure I put on myself. I just wish we’d stayed with her longer.

I think we were lucky, though. Other people weren’t. Some women have told me about having delivered a stillborn baby, then they can hear newborns next door and milk is coming through. It’s painful on your mind and your body. Everything’s a mess, hormones are everywhere.

In making the programme I spoke to some older women who didn’t want to speak on camera, women in their 70s and 80s, from a different generation, when it was a case of flushing it down the sluice and going home and getting on with it.

I spoke to one man whose granny had twins who died. They took them away from her and told her to go home. She must have been in such a panic. She scribbled down their names and date of birth and that was all she had. She kept that for years. It just shows you, you need to have something. That’s why it’s so important to have memory boxes.

Our memory box had the blanket Annie was wrapped in. The blood she had on her was on it, and I got that blanket. I know it sounds gross, but I slept with that for weeks.

There was a teddy, the same one as was in her box when she was cremated, and a print of her wee hands and feet, too. That’s nice now, to look at, because that’s all I have. We took pictures, too. There’s an amazing charity called Remember My Baby who go into hospitals to take amazing photos, all about love and togetherness.

The thing I hope most in making the programme is that people feel it’s easier to talk about. At the time, I just wanted people to ask me how I was feeling, to ask me what had happened, and give me a chance to process it in my head, ask her name, ask what she was like.

I didn’t take so much comfort from hearing things like, “Ah well, at least you have your daughter”, or, “You can maybe try again.”

When we set out to make it, I wasn’t sure anyone would want to speak to us, because it’s such a hard thing to talk about. I was actually quite scared, if I’m honest.

But I was quite wrong. A lot of people took comfort from speaking about it.

But for people who haven’t been through it themselves, if you know someone who has, if you’re able to talk about it, then it really helps, it honours the baby’s memory. And that’s important, because they’re very special.

Gaol is Call/Labour of Love, BBC Alba, Tuesday, 9pm

www.simbacharity.org.uk