Let’s Honour Our Lost Babies

What an absolute treat to sit down with Frances McKenna, Irish Artist, to discuss book covers for my next book, “Barren”. I’m deeply privileged that she is reading my story of a miscarried child’s spirit who communicates with her grieving mother and connects her to an ancient Irish woman’s struggle with her own infertility while surviving a climate catastrophe in 2354 BC caused by an Icelandic volcano.

Photo credit: Barney McKee

I’ve admired Frances’s art for at least three decades (probably more), and we had a lovely afternoon going over ideas and sketches, finding magic in, and being energised by, the whole creative process. There’s something enchanting about having an artist discuss the images your words bring to their mind. As a woman with personal experience with baby loss, I know Frances will lean into her own experience and approach the project with tenderness and compassion. Our conversations have been laced with joy and tears in remembrance of the dreams we had for the children we cherished but never got to hold.  

When I asked her permission to mention her experience in this post, Frances’s answer was, “I don’t feel baby loss of any type should be hidden. I feel that Little Souls, in whatever form they came, for however long they were here, deserve their existence to be honoured. Let’s honour our lost babies.”

I appreciate that validation, that openness and generosity of spirit. My only pregnancy was a miscarriage. I borrowed from that experience to write the modern timeline of “Barren”. The title is a nettle-grasping nod to infertility as well as the effects of climate change. It’s not autobiographical as such, but it is a salutation to my own little angel, I hope, shining some light into dark places to help others in a similar position.

Society still has an archaic attitude to many aspects of women’s health, and while we are breaking down some of the taboos around issues such as menopause, miscarriages are rarely talked about, infertility even less so. However, I must point out here that infertility is not just a women’s issue. Men have an even harder time talking about it, I think.

One welcome step forward is the UK government’s introduction of baby loss certificates in England last year. There are moves to bring it in here soon, too. Hopefully, some people will find some comfort in having it.

When I had my miscarriage, I longed for that feeling of being pregnant and for the future I had mapped out in that short space of time. It was such an early miscarriage that the only proof I’d had of being pregnant was the doctor’s bill (we lived in the USA at the time) and the pregnancy test, which I kept for years, only throwing it out when we moved back to Ireland. I’d have felt ashamed to keep a piece of plastic that I’d peed on for so long, except for the fact that it was the only tangible thing I had of that short pregnancy. Perhaps a baby loss certificate would have helped me fifteen years ago. Fortunately for me, I can still remember the glow, the joy, the sheer magic of being pregnant, even as it was thrown into stark contrast with the grief and sorrow that followed.

Instead, I wrote “Barren,” my personal tribute to my lost baby, pregnancy, and motherhood. It spans the genres of fantasy, historical fiction, and climate fiction and is a unique piece of writing. I am forever grateful to Frances Mc Kenna for translating that into the vivid technicolour of her painting, making this project a beautiful work of art.

Byddi Lee