‘I’m not a mum but I’ll be celebrating Mother’s Day this year’

A traumatic baby loss meant Woman Alive editor Tola-Doll Fisher avoided Mother’s Day for years. Here’s why she wants this year to be different.

I have always had mixed feelings about Mother’s Day or Mothering Sunday, for the more traditionally minded among us. My ex-husband and I both really wanted children and our daughter was born by spontaneous labour but died later that day. Any kind of baby loss whether it is miscarriage, early infant death or stillbirth, is heartbreaking and thank God for those who go on to have other children of their own or reach out to adopt.

In my own case, none of those things happened. My ex and I were divorced within two years of our baby loss experience and I remain childless today. Mother’s Day Sundays since then have been a mixture of sorrow, sadness and self-pity. Luckily less towards the latter as the years passed. However, in 2019, the year our daughter would have been seven, I felt God tell me that my time of grieving was over. Seven is an important number for many Christians. The Bible tells us that God created the world in seven days and so it is often seen as the number of completion. This is what I sensed; that my time of mourning that loss was complete; it was time to move on.