So..yeah
I'm Emma. I was a member of this comm following my miscarriage in 2004 with another journal name. I just wanted to share something I wrote, I kind of wonder if it's relatable. Maybe I'm not crazy after all, you know? Obviously it might be upsetting but I don't think it needs any specific trigger warnings, please let me know if I'm wrong.
I need to explain this so someone can understand it.
This is the fact that starts it all.
In 2004, I was pregnant.
This is not rare. I couldn’t begin to estimate how many times a day this happens. But it only happened to me that once, and that’s the only one I know about.
I’m relatively sure this all catalysed on my single bed in the corner of a barely decorated room in my First Proper House after finishing uni, and being in a bit of a happy blur having also acquired my First Proper Job and rather more remarkably, my First Proper Boyfriend.
The boyfriend was a surprise. I didn’t think I’d ever be playing for that team, to steal a crude but effective common metaphor. I’d had to unglue myself from the girl I fell ill advisedly in love with at seventeen, who it seems saw me as some kind of sexual comfort blanket. I didn’t expect much more from anyone. And then there was the boy.
It started out as pure and simple boy+friend, then on my little single bed it wasn’t so simple any more. The Boy. He had blue eyes and a shy smile and an Idlewild setlist on his bedroom wall, and I loved him like fireworks. Like stars. Like Christmas when you’re seven.
And in our summery little haze we darted between his single bed in Newcastle and mine in Nottingham, and we listened to a lot of music and ate a lot of pizza, and then one time, one of many times, the bomb went off and I’m still hearing the reverberations.
Sex is not really a tangible thing. This I had discovered already but would have much cause to reflect on. At the precise moment of doing it, you couldn’t physically be any closer to someone, and you couldn’t wish to be, but afterwards there’s very little proof that ever happened. I remember someone telling me once that when they lost their virginity they walked around for a while wondering if anyone could tell. If there was anything in their face that might indicate this seismic, fundamental change to who she was.
That’s how I felt when I knew I was pregnant.
There’s a song I can only half remember that says something about small sparks flying. That’s how I’ve always thought of it, that little spark of a baby. A little snatch of light or fire or life that came from us and ignited. When you think that’s how most of us got to be here, it’s pretty awesome.
I don’t want to be over sentimental here. I don’t want to minimise the feeling that underlies all of this, that there is something fundamentally wrong about me and my approach to the situation and how I felt and what I thought. The Boy was 17. He was not pleased. I think, when I try and work it out now, with the Boy long gone and the benefit of hindsight, that he didn’t want a baby until he was absolutely sure he was not going to have one.
I don’t want to be cruel. We were kids. But I’ve never ever been able to straighten all these feelings out in my head, in all these years, and that’s why I’m writing and it won’t help but it’s something, at least. It’s making something that resembles an effort.
The Boy’s mother felt it obvious that I would have to have a termination. My mother did not venture an opinion,beyond your-father-is-going-to-be-so-disappointed-in-you upon finding one of those horrible home test sticks in my belongings. She never asked if the test had been taken, or what it might have said, and I never told her. Then the baby was gone, and I didn’t say anything about that, and now it’s a secret that I keep from my parents with as much pain and fear as if I had robbed them.
It was obvious that I would have to have a termination. Of course it was. There was no way around it. In fact, the only other narrative possibility was the one that eventually happened, hormones or chromosomes or tetarogens or just bad luck conspiring to block out that little spark before any of us had time to make a decision.
I did nothing. I did nothing towards procuring said termination, I did nothing that would have indicated I was preparing to have a baby, I did nothing about informing my family or friends or seeking any professional advice about either having babies or dispensing of them. I argued with the boy, who was desperately googling any rare non fatal illnesses which present clinically as an early pregnancy. For me that didn’t work. Because I knew. I always knew. I sat on the bus,going to work, going home, wondering if anyone could tell. If they could see. The Boy did not know about this. Other than that, we didn’t discuss it. We didn’t speculate or plan or anything, we just kind of hung on to each other and waited for what was going to happen, to happen.
After, I wondered if he was right and it was all some odd biological trick. I had occasion to tell people what had happened, and I always felt slightly like I was lying. I don’t know how you come to doubt something like that. It announces itself. Even in the very early parts, babies stake their claim to your body and I assure you you will know all about it (ref: those fat women on Discovery Home and Health who think they’ve got heartburn and give birth out of nowhere) It’s like doubting you have blood, or doubting that you’re breathing.
That maybe sounds meoldramatic. I have no religious or spiritual tradition and something I’ve fought with for a number of years since this happened is the question of where life begins. If an eight week foetus, when I’m arguing for the right to abortion, is just a lump of cells, then how can I possibly say it becomes a baby when I want to feel sorry for myself?
The only answer I’ve got for this one is, it’s just different. It is. Because I never imagined I would sleep with a man, let alone love one, and I thought any children I had would be paid for and arranged in advance and with outside assistance. I never thought there would be two of us holding onto each other and then conjuring into existence another little person made out of both of us. I never, ever thought, since about the age of 12, that I would ever be pregnant with the child of the person I loved. And that, in my mind, is where the line is. For me. For you, the line can be anywhere you like and good luck to you. But I digress- cause the thing is, even if it’s not a baby, even if it’s an alien, a growth, go on then, a tumour-this ispart of your body. It kicks a lot of systems into action. It changes you in actual, real, touchable physical ways. It’s like if you stop to think about how complex your very existence is, it’s overwhelming. That’s what I felt, every day. I remember reading that at six weeks, a foetal heart wouldn’t be audible on an ultrasound, because it’s too fast. 150 beats per minute. While you’re watching TV or making noodles or sat on the bus or bored shitless at work. 150 beats a minute from a one chamber heart that’s too fast to hear, your little sparky baby, me and him and both of us and neither of us.
Everyday magic.
I used to find myself talking to it in my head, you know. Seriously, without even thinking about it. I remember being on the train crossing the Tyne Bridge into Newcastle (which incidentally is one of my favourite views, in the entire world) and in my half asleep brain noting to the baby that they should pay attention, because this is where their dad lives and he gets very emotional about it.
You know, even when I was in the maybe-its-all-been-a-mistake phase, I felt-I mean physically felt-that baby out in front of me. The space that should have been taken up. For the whole rest of the nine months.
I may be the only person in the world to be as fucking emo as that. It was not thus, for example, for the Boy.
He grieved. He mourned that baby. I’m sure he did. I saw it. But here’s the kicker-he only mourned it when it was no longer a threat to his life as he knew it. And I resented him for that. I resented him because I felt guilty because I knew he was right. I resented him later because he was able to claim his baby enough to name it, which felt almost obscene to me in the way it missed the point. A lot of people say you should do this. They say it’s a healthy thing to do, an acknowledgement. I can see how it would be. But for me it misses the point so fundamentally I still feel guilty that I went along with it.
But he chose it, and we used it, so the baby has a name.
It didn’t sit right with me, and it took me a few years and the end of that relationship to understand why.
Post-Boy, which was also post-job, post-home, and writing degree interruptus, I had a particularly virulent renowned fit of raw grieving. I thought at first this was because the Boy, being the other parent, was the only possibility of creating another said baby, thus Making It All OK.
It became clear to me in a short period of time why this was wrong.
The Boy is a Christian. He has access to lots of lovely images of angels and heaven. I went looking for information/solace/both, shortly afterwards, when I couldn’t quite process that my entire life had turned on this point and now it was just gone. It seems a lot of people do a lot of talking about angels and heaven when they lose babies. Maybe it helps them. I hope so. But see I can’t just pick up something like that when I need comfort. I don’t believe in God. I believe in people and music and basic decency and books and that these are the things that can save your life. I’m not going to heaven. So for me to entertain the image that I now had a perfect little angel sitting on a nice cloud in a beautiful place, I would have to reconcile this with the knowledge that I would never be there. I don’t go much further into the theology of the thing, because I have to admit I still believe, somewhere in my lizard brain, that this baby only ever existed to punish me, because I’m not a good enough person, I’ve never been good enough, and it’s too much to hope you’ll never have to answer for it.
My best reason-why-I-am-being-tortured was because I helped my best friend get an abortion when she was sixteen and reassured her that this was the right thing to do. I remember sitting with her and reassuring her in a way that makes me sick for how stupid I was when I think about it now. I had no idea. None.
But I digress. The Boy can create in his mind a version of a child that he can grieve for, and maybe that helped him to do it. I can’t. Because what I’m grieving is, there was THAT BABY, that particular unique combination of genes, that wouldn’t ever be replicated even if the Boy and I set up a business churning out a million embryos a day. That little person existed. And I never met them. I can’t put a name to someone I never saw, someone who’s gender I don’t even know. I don’t want to invent a ghost child to keep me company, I want to know the child I had. And I can’t.
It may be possible to ascertain from what I’ve said that I don’t have an especially close relationship with my parents. That would be right. We’re at the stage now where I actually feel uncomfortable and even a little bit sick when my mother tries to involve herself in my life in any meaningful way. I gave up wanting anything different years ago, and I always thought, I mean right from when I was small, how important it would be if I had children to never, ever let them end up as strangers to me. And then: it would be difficult to imagine a circumstance where your child could be any more of a stranger to you. That’s the bit I can’t get over.
Its like, when you get pregnant, happy about it or not your reaction is not OH CHRIST A LUMP OF EXPANDING CELLS. You’re thinking baby. And your life is basically going to turn on this point, whatever you feel and whatever you may decide to do, in order to do it you’re basically going to have to reimagine yourself because now this thing has happened. But the issue arises because in your mind there is a time limit before there will be a baby, which must be kept or otherwise, and this must be established. To anyone else, at this point, pregnancy is just something that is happening to you. My friend put this exquisitely when I came home from the hospital unsure what planet I was on.
“it’s like,you’re sad because your baby is gone. But everyone else just thinks something bad has happened to you. You’re the only one who’s really lost anything.”
And so, people complain about a brand of pregnancy tests or use the name that was attached to your baby and your stomach twists but you say nothing. Your colleague complains of morning sickness and you want to tell her what worked for you but that would involve saying you were pregnant and that then you weren’t, and people aren’t really comfortable with that, so again you say nothing and you wonder when this became a dirty secret. You don’t get to acknowledge that you had a baby and lost it, because to everybody else there’s nothing missing, and there’s no trace of this baby anywhere on earth. You’re the only one who’s lost anything. People, your friends, whoever, they might be sorry, and they might be really really sorry, but they’re sorry because you’re unhappy and you’re sorry because your baby is gone and your unhappiness is irrelevant, and they just fundamentally do not get it.
I didn’t hear this again til I happened to be watching, of all things, a documentary about Lily Allen’s fucking clothes shop. Hearing it was a good thing. See, it’s one thing for me to have invented a little crazy grief system in my head, but if someone else, someone who has no connection or similarity to me at all beyond the fact that they miscarried, then maybe it’s like, normal or something.
I’m beginning to think in terms of the ripple effect. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe people go anywhere when they die, and I don’t think they float around in the ether waiting to talk to some douche like John Edward. For me, it’s about what you leave behind you. What survives of you is the effect that your life had on other people. And why I could never really reconcile myself with this, why I tortured myself with heaven and hell and all the other crap was because I didn’t see how someone who was basically just my little secret for a few weeks could have made any imprint on the world. I created a whole child with someone I loved and to everyone but me it makes no odds that that child died.
So I figure the ripples will have to be from me. I was changed. The Boy cannot possibly have avoided it, and he will have children, he will have more children with someone else and I’m sure it will affect how he parents them and how he appreciates them. I hope it helps him. And I’m left at the end of it with the memory of how awe inspiring it was to have this, this little spark that ignited, this one chamber heart that beat too fast to here. A little person that was half me and half him and essentially neither of us. I didn’t ever think I’d get to know how that felt.
I want that to mean something.
So the mark this baby left on me is going to have to change the marks I leave behind me. I’m not sure how that’s going to work. I find that awe now, the imprint that little spark made on my memory, in songs and places and other people’s words and memories of everything that happened before and after and in things I never knew would happen. From this I’m going to have to conjure up some lasting proof that this person existed. And that they mattered. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I do know I feel much more at peace with myself and the rest of the world for having worked this out. And I’m working on it. In the meantime I sum it up in one of the songs that takes me back there more than most, in the words of a man who was describing a different kind of change : if this is all we ever have, well, it was good enough for me.
It was. And it will be.
I need to explain this so someone can understand it.
This is the fact that starts it all.
In 2004, I was pregnant.
This is not rare. I couldn’t begin to estimate how many times a day this happens. But it only happened to me that once, and that’s the only one I know about.
I’m relatively sure this all catalysed on my single bed in the corner of a barely decorated room in my First Proper House after finishing uni, and being in a bit of a happy blur having also acquired my First Proper Job and rather more remarkably, my First Proper Boyfriend.
The boyfriend was a surprise. I didn’t think I’d ever be playing for that team, to steal a crude but effective common metaphor. I’d had to unglue myself from the girl I fell ill advisedly in love with at seventeen, who it seems saw me as some kind of sexual comfort blanket. I didn’t expect much more from anyone. And then there was the boy.
It started out as pure and simple boy+friend, then on my little single bed it wasn’t so simple any more. The Boy. He had blue eyes and a shy smile and an Idlewild setlist on his bedroom wall, and I loved him like fireworks. Like stars. Like Christmas when you’re seven.
And in our summery little haze we darted between his single bed in Newcastle and mine in Nottingham, and we listened to a lot of music and ate a lot of pizza, and then one time, one of many times, the bomb went off and I’m still hearing the reverberations.
Sex is not really a tangible thing. This I had discovered already but would have much cause to reflect on. At the precise moment of doing it, you couldn’t physically be any closer to someone, and you couldn’t wish to be, but afterwards there’s very little proof that ever happened. I remember someone telling me once that when they lost their virginity they walked around for a while wondering if anyone could tell. If there was anything in their face that might indicate this seismic, fundamental change to who she was.
That’s how I felt when I knew I was pregnant.
There’s a song I can only half remember that says something about small sparks flying. That’s how I’ve always thought of it, that little spark of a baby. A little snatch of light or fire or life that came from us and ignited. When you think that’s how most of us got to be here, it’s pretty awesome.
I don’t want to be over sentimental here. I don’t want to minimise the feeling that underlies all of this, that there is something fundamentally wrong about me and my approach to the situation and how I felt and what I thought. The Boy was 17. He was not pleased. I think, when I try and work it out now, with the Boy long gone and the benefit of hindsight, that he didn’t want a baby until he was absolutely sure he was not going to have one.
I don’t want to be cruel. We were kids. But I’ve never ever been able to straighten all these feelings out in my head, in all these years, and that’s why I’m writing and it won’t help but it’s something, at least. It’s making something that resembles an effort.
The Boy’s mother felt it obvious that I would have to have a termination. My mother did not venture an opinion,beyond your-father-is-going-to-be-so-disappointed-in-you upon finding one of those horrible home test sticks in my belongings. She never asked if the test had been taken, or what it might have said, and I never told her. Then the baby was gone, and I didn’t say anything about that, and now it’s a secret that I keep from my parents with as much pain and fear as if I had robbed them.
It was obvious that I would have to have a termination. Of course it was. There was no way around it. In fact, the only other narrative possibility was the one that eventually happened, hormones or chromosomes or tetarogens or just bad luck conspiring to block out that little spark before any of us had time to make a decision.
I did nothing. I did nothing towards procuring said termination, I did nothing that would have indicated I was preparing to have a baby, I did nothing about informing my family or friends or seeking any professional advice about either having babies or dispensing of them. I argued with the boy, who was desperately googling any rare non fatal illnesses which present clinically as an early pregnancy. For me that didn’t work. Because I knew. I always knew. I sat on the bus,going to work, going home, wondering if anyone could tell. If they could see. The Boy did not know about this. Other than that, we didn’t discuss it. We didn’t speculate or plan or anything, we just kind of hung on to each other and waited for what was going to happen, to happen.
After, I wondered if he was right and it was all some odd biological trick. I had occasion to tell people what had happened, and I always felt slightly like I was lying. I don’t know how you come to doubt something like that. It announces itself. Even in the very early parts, babies stake their claim to your body and I assure you you will know all about it (ref: those fat women on Discovery Home and Health who think they’ve got heartburn and give birth out of nowhere) It’s like doubting you have blood, or doubting that you’re breathing.
That maybe sounds meoldramatic. I have no religious or spiritual tradition and something I’ve fought with for a number of years since this happened is the question of where life begins. If an eight week foetus, when I’m arguing for the right to abortion, is just a lump of cells, then how can I possibly say it becomes a baby when I want to feel sorry for myself?
The only answer I’ve got for this one is, it’s just different. It is. Because I never imagined I would sleep with a man, let alone love one, and I thought any children I had would be paid for and arranged in advance and with outside assistance. I never thought there would be two of us holding onto each other and then conjuring into existence another little person made out of both of us. I never, ever thought, since about the age of 12, that I would ever be pregnant with the child of the person I loved. And that, in my mind, is where the line is. For me. For you, the line can be anywhere you like and good luck to you. But I digress- cause the thing is, even if it’s not a baby, even if it’s an alien, a growth, go on then, a tumour-this ispart of your body. It kicks a lot of systems into action. It changes you in actual, real, touchable physical ways. It’s like if you stop to think about how complex your very existence is, it’s overwhelming. That’s what I felt, every day. I remember reading that at six weeks, a foetal heart wouldn’t be audible on an ultrasound, because it’s too fast. 150 beats per minute. While you’re watching TV or making noodles or sat on the bus or bored shitless at work. 150 beats a minute from a one chamber heart that’s too fast to hear, your little sparky baby, me and him and both of us and neither of us.
Everyday magic.
I used to find myself talking to it in my head, you know. Seriously, without even thinking about it. I remember being on the train crossing the Tyne Bridge into Newcastle (which incidentally is one of my favourite views, in the entire world) and in my half asleep brain noting to the baby that they should pay attention, because this is where their dad lives and he gets very emotional about it.
You know, even when I was in the maybe-its-all-been-a-mistake phase, I felt-I mean physically felt-that baby out in front of me. The space that should have been taken up. For the whole rest of the nine months.
I may be the only person in the world to be as fucking emo as that. It was not thus, for example, for the Boy.
He grieved. He mourned that baby. I’m sure he did. I saw it. But here’s the kicker-he only mourned it when it was no longer a threat to his life as he knew it. And I resented him for that. I resented him because I felt guilty because I knew he was right. I resented him later because he was able to claim his baby enough to name it, which felt almost obscene to me in the way it missed the point. A lot of people say you should do this. They say it’s a healthy thing to do, an acknowledgement. I can see how it would be. But for me it misses the point so fundamentally I still feel guilty that I went along with it.
But he chose it, and we used it, so the baby has a name.
It didn’t sit right with me, and it took me a few years and the end of that relationship to understand why.
Post-Boy, which was also post-job, post-home, and writing degree interruptus, I had a particularly virulent renowned fit of raw grieving. I thought at first this was because the Boy, being the other parent, was the only possibility of creating another said baby, thus Making It All OK.
It became clear to me in a short period of time why this was wrong.
The Boy is a Christian. He has access to lots of lovely images of angels and heaven. I went looking for information/solace/both, shortly afterwards, when I couldn’t quite process that my entire life had turned on this point and now it was just gone. It seems a lot of people do a lot of talking about angels and heaven when they lose babies. Maybe it helps them. I hope so. But see I can’t just pick up something like that when I need comfort. I don’t believe in God. I believe in people and music and basic decency and books and that these are the things that can save your life. I’m not going to heaven. So for me to entertain the image that I now had a perfect little angel sitting on a nice cloud in a beautiful place, I would have to reconcile this with the knowledge that I would never be there. I don’t go much further into the theology of the thing, because I have to admit I still believe, somewhere in my lizard brain, that this baby only ever existed to punish me, because I’m not a good enough person, I’ve never been good enough, and it’s too much to hope you’ll never have to answer for it.
My best reason-why-I-am-being-tortured was because I helped my best friend get an abortion when she was sixteen and reassured her that this was the right thing to do. I remember sitting with her and reassuring her in a way that makes me sick for how stupid I was when I think about it now. I had no idea. None.
But I digress. The Boy can create in his mind a version of a child that he can grieve for, and maybe that helped him to do it. I can’t. Because what I’m grieving is, there was THAT BABY, that particular unique combination of genes, that wouldn’t ever be replicated even if the Boy and I set up a business churning out a million embryos a day. That little person existed. And I never met them. I can’t put a name to someone I never saw, someone who’s gender I don’t even know. I don’t want to invent a ghost child to keep me company, I want to know the child I had. And I can’t.
It may be possible to ascertain from what I’ve said that I don’t have an especially close relationship with my parents. That would be right. We’re at the stage now where I actually feel uncomfortable and even a little bit sick when my mother tries to involve herself in my life in any meaningful way. I gave up wanting anything different years ago, and I always thought, I mean right from when I was small, how important it would be if I had children to never, ever let them end up as strangers to me. And then: it would be difficult to imagine a circumstance where your child could be any more of a stranger to you. That’s the bit I can’t get over.
Its like, when you get pregnant, happy about it or not your reaction is not OH CHRIST A LUMP OF EXPANDING CELLS. You’re thinking baby. And your life is basically going to turn on this point, whatever you feel and whatever you may decide to do, in order to do it you’re basically going to have to reimagine yourself because now this thing has happened. But the issue arises because in your mind there is a time limit before there will be a baby, which must be kept or otherwise, and this must be established. To anyone else, at this point, pregnancy is just something that is happening to you. My friend put this exquisitely when I came home from the hospital unsure what planet I was on.
“it’s like,you’re sad because your baby is gone. But everyone else just thinks something bad has happened to you. You’re the only one who’s really lost anything.”
And so, people complain about a brand of pregnancy tests or use the name that was attached to your baby and your stomach twists but you say nothing. Your colleague complains of morning sickness and you want to tell her what worked for you but that would involve saying you were pregnant and that then you weren’t, and people aren’t really comfortable with that, so again you say nothing and you wonder when this became a dirty secret. You don’t get to acknowledge that you had a baby and lost it, because to everybody else there’s nothing missing, and there’s no trace of this baby anywhere on earth. You’re the only one who’s lost anything. People, your friends, whoever, they might be sorry, and they might be really really sorry, but they’re sorry because you’re unhappy and you’re sorry because your baby is gone and your unhappiness is irrelevant, and they just fundamentally do not get it.
I didn’t hear this again til I happened to be watching, of all things, a documentary about Lily Allen’s fucking clothes shop. Hearing it was a good thing. See, it’s one thing for me to have invented a little crazy grief system in my head, but if someone else, someone who has no connection or similarity to me at all beyond the fact that they miscarried, then maybe it’s like, normal or something.
I’m beginning to think in terms of the ripple effect. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe people go anywhere when they die, and I don’t think they float around in the ether waiting to talk to some douche like John Edward. For me, it’s about what you leave behind you. What survives of you is the effect that your life had on other people. And why I could never really reconcile myself with this, why I tortured myself with heaven and hell and all the other crap was because I didn’t see how someone who was basically just my little secret for a few weeks could have made any imprint on the world. I created a whole child with someone I loved and to everyone but me it makes no odds that that child died.
So I figure the ripples will have to be from me. I was changed. The Boy cannot possibly have avoided it, and he will have children, he will have more children with someone else and I’m sure it will affect how he parents them and how he appreciates them. I hope it helps him. And I’m left at the end of it with the memory of how awe inspiring it was to have this, this little spark that ignited, this one chamber heart that beat too fast to here. A little person that was half me and half him and essentially neither of us. I didn’t ever think I’d get to know how that felt.
I want that to mean something.
So the mark this baby left on me is going to have to change the marks I leave behind me. I’m not sure how that’s going to work. I find that awe now, the imprint that little spark made on my memory, in songs and places and other people’s words and memories of everything that happened before and after and in things I never knew would happen. From this I’m going to have to conjure up some lasting proof that this person existed. And that they mattered. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I do know I feel much more at peace with myself and the rest of the world for having worked this out. And I’m working on it. In the meantime I sum it up in one of the songs that takes me back there more than most, in the words of a man who was describing a different kind of change : if this is all we ever have, well, it was good enough for me.
It was. And it will be.