“The funny thing is: it was found in my umbilical cord. That is very rare, the doctors said. So rare that they cannot tell anything about it. Normally the baby gets it at birth, if the skin of the The baby comes into contact with the vagina. And then it can get sick. But the strong suspicion is: Nino died of it, in my belly.”
After the funeral, the curtains were drawn for Lisanne and Simon. They didn’t dare go outside. “I didn’t want condolences, I didn’t want to be congratulated. I wanted to be left alone. I really didn’t get anywhere. Yes, at my mother’s for dinner, but then she would come and pick me up, because I didn’t go alone. After at fourteen weeks, my sister said – she is fantastic, and sometimes a bit strict with me: why don’t we go into the village and get some fish?”
“Not at all,” Lisanne replied – she had become not just an ostrich, but a man-shy ostrich.
“It would be all right,” her sister replied.
So: sunglasses on, sweaty hands, shuffling onto the market square. “So a woman comes to me: ‘It’s great that you’re here, so brave’. Yes. Then I close. The people who normally didn’t say anything to me suddenly started talking to me. I found that so scary. And also hypocritical. Quite a few disaster tourists live in a village.”
What mother would do such a thing?
There was guilt. Why didn’t she hold her son right away? Which mother does that? “I was ashamed because I had been afraid of my own child, when he was so beautiful.”
She went to therapy, there she learned that her fear and sadness only say something about love. She is not a bad mother, she is a mother who loves her baby. EMDR therapy, before the birth and the funeral, also helped her. Those proverbial sharp edges: they’ve been getting rid of them, in recent months, but very slowly. “I can’t say it’s getting better.”
“But it’s not getting any worse,” her sister notes. Lisa nods. “That’s because of the petition I’ve started, and the interviews I’m doing, the conversations I’m having with other parents who went through the same thing. After this conversation, I know I’m devastated, but I want to be able to say Nino’s name, and warn other women. They need to know that this exists. The doctors, the midwives, the general practitioners: tell the women. Please.”