The thing about miscarriage is that it steals the joy of pregnancy and replaces it with terror.
Intellectually, every parent knows that the womb is a mysterious and vulnerable world. Anything could happen in there.
Until you lose a little one, miscarriage is one of many possible outcomes of pregnancy, but the one you’re focused on is the one where you plug the newest member of your family into the capsule, take them home, feel guilty about all the thank you cards you haven’t written and get tangled up trying out your new sling.
In January this year, I weed on two sticks in quick succession producing consecutive double-striped results. I read and re-read the instructions. Yup, really quite pregnant.
We were over the moon. From that moment, in my head, I had already held this baby, smelled this baby, witnessed a big sister’s pride as she held her first sibling.
Two weeks later, I was bleeding. We tried not to freak out and went up to the hospital for a blood test. My HCG levels were low, but my hopes remained resilient. For three days, we had no medical confirmation of what was going on, but to me, with every toilet trip and shower, the loss was painfully, physiologically obvious.
People don’t know what to say when you lose a baby and that’s okay—I never did either. It’s conceptually difficult to relate to if you haven’t experienced it, and even if you have, everyone has different ways of coping.
“Welcome to the world’s shittiest club,” a dear friend said to me when I told her. “Keep a mental tally of the things people console you with. They don’t know what they’re saying. It’ll cheer you up to laugh at them.”
She was right. It did.
Some say, “it wasn’t meant to be,” which is strange, because you’d never say that about any other dead being. “Oh, your partner died. Sorry. I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
Some say, “there was probably something wrong with it,” which is equally unhelpful to the bereaved who are rummaging through their short-term memories to come up with a cause for this tragedy.
Is it because of that New Year’s champagne I had before I found out I was pregnant? Is it because I walked the dog on a hot day? Is it because I lifted my toddler out of the car? Or when I bumped into the kitchen bench?
The truth is, it’s unlikely to have been any of those things. Miscarriage just happens and regardless of how pregnant you are or whether you have another healthy child or whether you’ll be able to conceive again, it results in grief.
I’m delighted to tell you I’m in the family way again. This time, all the signs point to a healthy pregnancy, but I am terrified. I’ve witnessed the tiny heart beating inside me, and while I’m overwhelmed with gratefulness, my own grown heart resists the reassurance the little one inside me offers.
There are countless worse losses than ours. Parents who have miscarried over and over. Parents whose children have been stillborn. Parents whose children die of SIDS. We are extraordinarily blessed to have a healthy little girl and another baby on the way.
But there is no such thing as a replacement child. For so many parents, this quiet grief for a child unknown—for a life unlived—remains.
I think of the baby we never met whenever my three year old flexes her fingers and sings Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,
How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are.
