Stillmother

The Atlantic Monthly had a question in the November magazine: What do we call parents who have lost a child? What do we call women who gave birth but who aren’t mothers?

I lived in this limbo for a year and a half between the death of my first daughter and the birth of my second daughter. Ada was a forty week stillbirth who was delivered on her due date. I was a mother with no child to show for it. I wasn’t really a mother though, as I had no child to call my own. Aside from preparing for and giving birth, I had no experience of mothering.

I was talking to my friend Sharon who commented on the term stillbirth. She thought it was a fitting name for an infant who died in the womb. "The baby came into the world," she said. "It was 'still' born."

"And it was still, as in not moving," I said. "Maybe the term for a mother of a stillbirth is stillmother, or stillfather. The mother is still a mother, but not a moving or active one."

We could have stillbrothers and stillsisters, though it would be hard to know which child was alive and which one was deceased. The terms could apply to any child that died, as the parents are still parents.

Ada's eighteenth birthday was October 15.