I would’ve been nine weeks pregnant tomorrow. I thought this when my phone alarm rang this evening to remind me of the doctor’s appointment I haven’t cancelled. I remember the receptionist handing me the appointment book to pen in my name, and as I was writing it down, it had seemed so far away, tomorrow.Â
I had never craved a child. I made an effort to connect with them, my friends’ children, and my favourites were the cuddly ones and the ones who loved having conversations. But I never babysat, was never asked to, and inevitably felt relief handing them back to their parents.
Part of this was self-defense, since I’ve always known I might be fertility-challenged. When I was 15 I had an appendectomy, and the surgeon informed my mother that it looked like I had endometriosis. Fifteen is an age ago, when my boyfriend at that time snuck into bed with me at the hospital and got caught by the nurse. I wasn’t in the least bit interested in being a mother then, but that piece of information clung.
Through those years, during and between monogamous relationships, I never bothered too much about the time of the month. I had a couple of pregnancy scares, with discreet purchases of tests and minutes of hoping for and seeing just the one line. But secretly daring it to be two lines too, to defy my diagnosis.
Then one day, without warning, my bluff was called.
The first couple of days, I wasn’t sure what to feel, or if I was really happy. I had career plans that looked like they would have to go by the wayside. I thought about what my parents would think, since I was unmarried. I wondered if we had the money. I felt scared about being pregnant, going through labour, and being a mother in a foreign country.
My partner and I talked about names, and being parents, and told a few people, who were thrilled for us. Slowly, I fell in love with the idea, still intangible.
Then in my seventh week, almost as a reward for my worrying nature, I started spotting and bleeding. Bed rest was ordered, and I complied. I read and faffed online, and marvelled as my partner looked after me as he never had before.
On the eighth day, I had cramps that got more and more painful, accompanied by more and more fresh blood, till at 4am. I said, “I really don’t want to go to the toilet but I have to” and everything important came out.
It has been nine days since then, and every day I bleed and spot a little bit less, my uterus emptying itself of the vestiges. Last night I had a darkly comic moment when I thought I had really bad cramps, almost like a second miscarriage, but then it turned out to be diarrhoea.
My career plans can proceed as planned now. And the next pregnancy, whether hoped for or feared, will no longer be unexpected, which is the worst kind of anticipation.
That next pregnancy was hoped for and happened soon afterwards, resulting in Alex. But reading what I wrote now, the images and feelings from that experience are visceral.
I remember trudging through the snow to the clinic the day after. It was so cold, with snow piled up on the sides of the pavements. I remember crying openly and piteously in the waiting area as we queued to register. I remember the unflinching cruelty of the doctor who examined me and blamed me for the miscarriage. It was as if my outpouring of sadness was grotesque and offensive to him. I remember a friend holding my hand and telling me about her own two miscarriages that I’d never known about. I remember my partner’s quiet tears.
Two weeks later, I had to return to the hospital for a follow-up. I had opted not to have a D&C, which meant that I needed another ultrasound to make sure that I didn’t have any ‘foreign tissue’ left in my uterus. I was OK by then, life moving on. But when I went to register and told the woman behind the counter the reason I was there, she touched my hand and said to me “It happens. Don’t worry, you’ll have another one.” And that little gesture of kindness completely undid me.
I managed to keep it together for the examination, but on the bus to work, I fell apart and blubbered unashamedly. You know, ugly crying with racking, hiccuping sobs. Luckily, a colleague happened to be on the bus and when she saw me, shepherded me off the bus and held me in her arms as I cried, not asking any questions at all. She then had to go to work and I was still a complete mess, so I wandered into a barely open shopping mall with the toilets still shut and cried for another hour in the emergency stairwell.
A miscarriage is such a private loss. It’s deliberate, of course, this first trimester secret, just in case. But that also means you mourn alone, and that is a very lonely place to be. IÂ sought solace on online forums. I spent a week reading, writing and responding to people who had been through similar experiences. It was a measure of comfort to me as I was surrounded by everyone else’s blissful ignorance. I haven’t looked at the forum since, and wonder who the regulars are, the ones who respond right away to women reaching out for an anonymous but compassionate ear. Those people are unsung heroes.
A pregnancy after a miscarriage is a loss of innocence. I was petrified of things going wrong again, and when I started spotting around the same time, I feared the worst. But my gynaecologist was better and prescribed progesterone suppositories, and that lead to Alex. It both infuriates and saddens me that a simple prescription might have saved that first pregnancy.
As Alex grows, I often wonder about what kind of person that pregnancy might have developed into. It’s a sort of ridiculous fantasy of course, because there would be no Alex without that miscarriage. And that’s unfathomable; that phantom baby in the place of my very real toddler. Still, it doesn’t stop me wondering.
–
Uma is a Malaysian working mum with a French husband and a toddler named Alex living in their fourth country together.
Image credit: Newstalk
