Desirée van Nieuwenhoven from Groningen wants attention for parents who have to celebrate Sinterklaas without their child this year. To be able to talk openly about stillbirth. “His response was: at least you know you can get pregnant. You don’t want to hear that.”
Desirée van Nieuwenhoven (51) is the mother of two sons: Tom and Tim. But both of them are no longer alive. She died seventeen and sixteen years ago in her stomach because she developed HELLP syndrome, a serious and rare pregnancy disease with no clear cause. The disease can be life-threatening for both mother and child.
A heavy loss that she didn’t want to talk about for a long time. Not to face it. “I felt alone. I didn’t talk to anyone about it and no one talked about it to me.” According to Van Nieuwenhoven, there is a reason for hiding the loss. “There is a big taboo on stillbirth.”
Bad day
Van Nieuwenhoven decided to look up other mothers who are in the same boat. She founded a platform called Stillborn Sisterhood in September. There, women who are missing a child can visit each other online or in real life to talk about their grief and loss.
According to Van Nieuwenhoven, a holiday like Sinterklaas is certainly a bad day for mothers with a deceased child. Now they no longer have to worry alone about the fact that their child will never be at a Sinterklaas arrival or will never wear a shoe.
‘I hid under a blanket’
Van Nieuwenhoven believes that those bad days should become connection days. Because she had a hard time during Sinterklaas. “The confrontation with what it could have been was too painful.” She still remembers her first Christmas Eve after Tom’s death. “I hid under a blanket with the television off.” She tried to block the whole world.
According to Van Nieuwenhoven, many people do not know how to react after a stillbirth. After Tom’s stillbirth, she met an acquaintance in the supermarket. “His response was: ‘at least you know you can get pregnant’. That’s not what you want to hear at a moment like that.”
Nice jokes
In addition to the Stillborn Sisterhood, Van Nieuwenhoven is in a WhatsApp group of another organization together with 35 women. In it they talk to each other about their experiences.
“I don’t want to burden the people around me with my story and it’s nice that my story is so recognizable to others,” says a mother (51) who is part of the Stillborn Sisterhood and the group app. Another mother (44) thinks the same. “You can discuss your feelings and how to address someone about the comment, which can always be confrontational.”
Now Van Nieuwenhoven celebrates December 5 in a completely different way, together with a friend and her children who are the same age as Tom and Tim. “Once one of them asked: do you think Tom and Tim had played football? Then I would have been better anyway.” She likes those kinds of jokes. “There doesn’t have to be two empty chairs at the table, but the recognition of what could have been is nice.”
Stillbirth or stillbirth?
Babies who are stillborn are also called stillborn. Derived from the silence that comes after a deceased child is born. While a living baby often cries after birth.