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Dead babies

It’s not only the loss of the baby, and their absence in the future a clear transparent shape of nothing, and the grief from that hole.

It’s partly that no-one else can see it. When someone alive dies, the gap in the world is apparent – even if people can’t see the gap in your life they imagine the gap that would be left in their own if one of their people were to suddenly leave, and so there is a common place to share. There are words you can say and cards you can send. With miscarriage, the person never existed in the first place. The gap is inside me. 

Another thing is the grief not bringing out the best in me, and making it nearly impossible to keep up the pretence of being normal, which is necessary for all life and particularly the part lived in offices and with colleagues. We moved buildings at work a couple of weeks after the miscarriage, and began hot desking, but there aren’t enough desks for people. Partly out of belligerence, and partly out of disorientation, when I turned up to the area where my team is meant to sit and there were no desks left, I wandered around the floor shouting ‘any desks, are there any desks free’. I think it frightened people. At the least, it was noted.

We met up with some of Conor’s friends at a pub in Nelson, including a woman who had also had a miscarriage, who I like, who had said before Christmas at a party she was pregnant. At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘me too’. And when she was there after Christmas, I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’. Or to venture that I’d had a similar loss too.

I realised why I couldn’t say anything a moment later. “We’re hoping to have another child,” she said, eyes shining. She is 35, I am 42. My miscarriage is likely to be as close to motherhood as I’ll ever get. She is looking forward to a future where her son has a baby brother or sister.

Comparisons are odious, as they say (they being everyone from Margaret Attwood to Jack Kerouac), and they are right.

But the grief we have is different, and so isn’t a common place of connection but of distance. She is a mum and will have another child, all will be well and god can get comfortable back in his heaven. I am not a mum and it’s highly unlikely I’ll have a child. All the odds run against me – the chance of getting pregnant is low, the chance of downs, defects and miscarriage are high. A miscarriage followed by childlessness. Grief on grief. There’s nothing you can say to that. It’s just bad followed by bad. No resolution, god nowhere to be found on the map. 

The conflicting medical advice has given flight to already overcharged feelings of fear and hope. My midwife saying ‘I see lots of older mums’. Well, as a midwife, that would make a lot of sense. What you don’t see is the people like me, who got over their denial about wanting to have children at the moment that that thought become completely useless. It’s like having failed spectacularly at your own life. More, I have failed spectacularly at my own life.

We went to a hilariously bad counselling session at the hospital where the social worker seemed to be all at sea when it turned out the lab wasn’t able to get any results from the dead baby and blood I’d handed over to them in a plastic bag. “Usually the results can help a couple decide whether to try again.” She seemed more upset at the loss of potential genetic information than the baby itself.

On my google journey, I discovered there is miscarriage jewellery you can buy, which seemed unbelievably mawkish. Then a day later I’m considering getting the one ring I own engraved with the dead baby’s due date. And why? Because you’ve got nothing to hold on to. The miscarriage support groups suggest writing a letter to your dead foetus, or holding a ceremony to bury the remains, the ‘products of conception’. In my case the remains have been flushed down a toilet in Taranaki at an AirBnB, and what was left of the rest given to a lab to try and figure out if it did have abnormal chromosomes, and would’ve had downs syndrome. “It looks like this baby wasn’t meant to be,” said the practice manager who took my blood to do the chromosome test, sending up another flare of anger in me. The test found too little of the baby’s blood mixed in with mine to really tell anything, but that in itself is an indication that something’s wrong.

The other part that I failed to grasp when fearing miscarriage is the physical – the muscles inside you cramping up to expel the newly dead foetus like the worst period pain I’ve ever had and giving me an all too clear understanding that the pain I’m feeling isn’t close to that of giving birth. The gush of water that came out at one point. The fear, mostly of the pain - not knowing how long it was going to hurt for. And the lack of control. This is all happening to you. Suddenly feeling the truth in Picasso’s horrible phrase that ‘women are machines for suffering’.

Then after, the grief being like some sort of touch-paper lighting up all of the other grief gathered over the course of my life like fireworks. Saying mean things to Conor, I think to try and make him feel as bad as I was feeling. Feeling again the despair of my family being broken and permanently so, beyond redemption. 

The way my mind revolting when I tried to make it go do normal things like turn up to work. The outrage of that, like – what the fuck are we doing here? Our baby is dead.

The kindness of friends which sometimes helped, and sometimes I was beyond help. My friend Laura sending me flowers and a card with the words Ahakoa he iti he pounamu - though it is small it is greenstone (precious). The perfect phrase that shocks my heart even now.

My boss trying to be supportive by offering me a secondment in one of the highest pressure and highest profile parts of the business: “No, I can’t do that, I’m half dead.” Asking to take some unpaid leave, getting it. “Whatever you need.”

Realising the amount of support and lenience and space I have to grieve is a complete luxury, realising there are women who have less than me, who have to turn up to work the day after and bury their grief and just get on with it.

Doing a lot of staring in to the middle distance with my mind on shut down, empty as a bus station at 3am. Realising that I look like the stock shots on file with keywords ‘grief, loss, depression.’

Realising there’s another kind of luxury here too, that of being able to imagine that if the child had been ok, and had lived, it would’ve been a good thing. One of the main reasons I had not wanted to have baby for all of my fertile years was the fear of being like my own mother and me, and failing to make the necessary bond at the start that determines pretty much everything afterwards. And then the too-late and too-strong desire to have a baby is to repair that in some way. To right it.

Now the baby’s dead, the only future I’m imagining we would’ve had is a good one. But maybe I wouldn’t be any good at it or liked it. Maybe it would’ve been too much pressure for me and Cons and spelled the end of us. And in any case, let’s not romanticise the reason I was having that chromosome test, and the likelihood that I would’ve had an abortion if the test came back and the baby had downs. 

The fight with my mum over email, her inability to comprehend anyone else’s grief, least of all mine. I sat with her for most of the nights between when I was 16 through to 18 and comforted her when she was depressed, after she had had an affair, after she had taken the house from my dad, after she had caused our family to split. She stubbed a cigarette out on her hand one time. She kept chickens in a coop at the top of the garden, and I remember her coming back in crying and distraught after what must’ve been a psychotic episode where she’d lost her temper and killed one of the newly hatched chicks, smashing it into the concrete. Then when she started seeing a man, I had to move out. The only way for me to have any kind of relationship with her is for everything to be on her terms, always. Even when my baby’s dead. Especially then.

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40 love

And of course all I ever really wanted to do was write a book. Or more accurately, to have written a book (I hate writing, I love having written, said Dorothy). But instead all I’ve got is this dismal internal stuff that not even I want to read. Comms blogging instead maybe. Creating content that’s about content creation, very meta. 

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Not losing

And not winning either. Just floating around in the middle ground. And fans of glasses half full would be ok there. Me, I want it to be dialled up to 11 all of the time. Smashed glasses are better than mediocre ones. 

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House

No, I’ve not just won at Bingo. But I expect the jubilation of a bingo win being similar to this joy of finally owning my own house. A surge of surprise and delight, holding the ticket aloft in trembling hands, saying to your friend, but I never win anything! Moment like that, like this, like being in my own house (house!) are precious wins. 

Though today, this afternoon, I felt loss - I missed him for himself perhaps for the first time. Up to now it’s been the loss of what he meant to me: the loss of his desire for me, my connection to him, and then understanding how little respect he must’ve had for me to’ve messed me around. Loss of illusion, I suppose, which is not actually loss at all but the end of a dream. You can’t lose something you only had in a dream. 

Today, this afternoon, I missed him for him. Because I liked him, his energy and his spirit, I’m not even talking about his personality, it was the basic stuff he’s made out of I liked. And it’s difficult because all of those other things are true as well - that he was using me, that he wasted my time (and yes, he couldn’t have done that had I not let him), that by not acknowledging me, our relationship, to his ex-wife and children he’s made it weird for me (and them) should we ever bump into each other again. I wonder if they’ve talked about that. Probably not, probably I wasn’t even anything as significant as that. And yet. At the same time as being unhappy with how he treated me, and the weirdness I feel about that not being resolved, I also miss him for him himself. Like I imagine I’d miss my child when they leave home. 

But he’s not a child. He’s a grown up, older than me. Which makes it all the more contradictory and confusing. Missing a man I thought was good, and kind, who behaved towards me in a way that was careless and cruel, who is older than me, but is actually a child. Life is strange, unlike Bingo it’s not just that the odds aren’t in your favour but more everyone’s playing a different game and the rules keep changing. 

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Family friend

I used to spend Christmas at my friend’s house instead of mine. Not sure if that was before or after my parents split, and my mum’s mum died, and everything fell apart. Either way, a little odd. And I then repeated the pattern of rejecting my family, falling out with my friend and therefore her family. Moving on to Kate, my friend at Uni. Then fell out with her, and her family. Moved to New Zealand, and really was a stranger in a strange land. Tried reconnecting with my family recently, found distance. 

So when the therapist says you can’t think about having a baby in isolation, she means where is your family and your community? For your baby to be part of that. But I have no family, and no community, nor any connection. 

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The plan

When I interviewed author Geoff Dyer he said writing gave him purpose and then quickly corrected himself and said - it gives me the illusion of purpose. 

And that’s what I’m looking for. The illusion of purpose. The sense of momentum, instead of the sense of twisting in the wind. A house I can renovate, for example, would keep me busy. The before and after shots a physical sign of change. Like Geoff Dyer in ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ turning his hand to DIY-ing. The conclusion of the book was that you’ve got to just keep plugging away, and it’s not a choice necessarily it’s just all there is. 

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The places you’ll go

When you’re down, your friends who are up will fly past you and you’ll be on your own, said Dr Seuss, in a more colourful and rhythmic way than I ever will. And it being a children’s book, he made it sound ok.

It is not ok. 

I feel once more like I have no direction and no hope of things working out better. Better means being part of a community of people, having friends, having someone who cares about me. The same stuff as everyone else wants, and has. And that I want, and seemingly am incapable of getting. Even admitting I want it is a new and devastatingly grim experience.

And you’re on your own kid, like Dr Seuss said. I can’t talk to anyone about this because it hurts too much and I can’t risk being on the receiving end of well-meaning words that measure out the distance between me and the rest of the world. I’m in space. So don't tell me to just breathe. 

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That time I moved to New Zealand to escape awkward conversations at weddings about being single

It didn’t work. In fact, it made things a lot worse. Because there are people here too, and weddings, and awkward conversations. More awkward, in fact, because I’m more single here than I was back in the UK. “So is all your immediate and extended family back in the UK?” asked a guy at the barbecue. “Yes,” I said, after my brain did a quick calculation. It wasn’t a lie but it wasn’t the picture he was suggesting - my dad living in a housing association flat down the road from the family home that my mum sold to buy agricultural animals and a house further north when they split up, my unemployed brother, me. That’s not really a family, that’s a collection of pain. Although maybe that is what a family is, a collective noun for a group of related painful experiences. So I said ‘yes’ instead, because he didn’t want to know all of that. “So it’s just you,” he said, nailing it this time. “Yes,” I said, feeling the nail. 

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Babies

“I think I’m happy that my girls are eight now,” he said and walked into the living room overrun with toddlers. It landed on my chest, heavy. He’s never going to want to have children with me. And so I filled my glass with more red wine and slung it to the back of my throat. The decision to drink more almost made itself. It’s like a natural law of physics when something like that happens and you’re already drunk. 

I learned from my mum how to pretend to be happy, it’s more a reflex than a choice. So I kept up the nice, I think, for the rest of the barbeque. Talked to some people, and given I’d given up on trying to make them like me, I didn’t mind too much about not talking too much. They are all parents, and so essentially they were the same person. There were conversations about the difficulties in choosing names for their babies. That one of the children was named after a family friend, another was given the wife’s maiden name as a first name… and I’m giving you the conversational highlights here. It was tedious because to me it’s totally irrelevant. We then had to have conversations about the prices of houses, favourite TV programmes that you can watch on demand. I fled the UK to avoid these conversations, and it seems beyond irony that I’ve ended up in exactly the same place. Different parents, different hemisphere, same conversations.

In the taxi on the way home, he asked me what was wrong. In bed I told him. ‘Tonight has been all about children. And I didn’t want children til I met you. And you don’t want to have them with me.’ ‘Is that something you could talk to your therapist about?’ he asked. ‘I have,’ I replied. A pause, as straws were grasped. ‘Good sharing,’ he said eventually. I put my head under the covers and resumed crying.

Woke at 3am angry and feeling thirsty and sick – thanks, red wine. Stood in the kitchen in my vest and pants, made a cup of tea, ate some toast. Slept again, then woke at 7, he did too. I said I was going to go for a run and would go back and pick up my car. He said why are you doing that we were meant to go together and pick up the brownie and my bag that I left there? And it was the start of an argument, my trying to get my independence back, pulling away. Him getting angry, saying that wasn’t the deal. And all I really wanted to do was leave, so I acquiesced, sidestepped the argument-in-the-making. Have my car, I’ll use my feet. Walked home, went running. And must’ve still been drunk because when I rounded the corner at Princess Bay and saw the waves surging the beach all lit up and silvery in the sun, I thought – I’ll get in there. And did. Not once, but twice, the second time because I realized I didn’t put my head under the first time. Stripping to my sports bra and pants I walked into the waves, cold granular stones beneath my feet and frothy salt water up to my knees. It was cold but not shockingly so. Walking further in as the sea came towards me. ‘Come on then mtrfcker, what have you got for me’ I said to the waves, potentially in my head, potentially not. Took my feet off the floor, went weightless. Moved by wave moving through me, up, and then down. Got an energy zing - that feeling you get when your cells are trying to generate enough warmth. Got out, stood on the beach in the sun drying off, looking out to sea, and trying to make sense of everything.

 Realised as I was trying to squeeze the water out of my pants that there were two people and their dog stood to my right. Probably a measure of my state of mind that I wasn’t embarrassed, but it did speed me to start putting my clothes back on. They walked past as I was using my socks to wipe off the gritty stones that were stuck to my feet, thinking, I remember when my dad did this for me, I didn’t like having sand between my toes and I think he patiently wiped my three-year-old feet with a towel to get all the grit off, what a princess I was, no wonder my mum hated me. “Nice swim?” asked the man of the couple. “Brilliant, really good,” I said back, it felt good saying something true that wasn’t something heavy, or with consequence.

 When I got back home, I thought about the therapist’s words when I told her I thought I wanted to have a baby. “You had a lot of denial in there before. Now you have to grieve for not having a baby,” to paraphrase. And I thought – right, so this must be the anger part of the grieving. And felt a bit better, naming it. (Maybe that’s what I should have contributed during the baby names discussion at the barbeque…)

 The dunk in the sea and the run didn’t bring me the answers I was looking for though – the answer to ‘so what the fck do I do now?’ Wait out the next bit of grieving and see how I feel? Talk to him some more about it? Break up? Move? All of the questions are really – how do I make the pain stop? And the answer is, you don’t. In the same way as you don’t make the tide turn or the man change his mind.

 All of which doesn’t stop me thinking about it, of course, like some mental version of Houdini, looking for a way out.

 And it’s the weirdest kind of rejection - being with someone who doesn’t want to breed with you. And who is the reason you want to breed in the first place. Feels like a real kick in the teeth. Though from a practical point of view – if I don’t want to hang out with couples with children, then not having children is probably the right choice. If I find it that dull, then not becoming one of them is a sound move.

 Makes me wonder if all relationships are about reducing your personality, diminishing yourself to the will of someone else. That sounds like it could be fun though, power play, and I don’t mean that, I mean something much more boring. Reminds me of the interview I saw a few years ago with fashion designer Karen Walker and her husband Mikhail. The interviewer led with this anecdote: "They met as students and on their first date Karen wanted a Miami Wine Cooler but Mikhail said, "No, you’re having a martini." It was the first of many decisions he’d make as Creative Director of the Karen Walker brand!"

 The rest of the interview was true to this form set several years ago - Mikhail proceeded to talk over Karen, answer questions directed at her, and she gave him dead eyes for the whole uncomfortably hour, which only he seemed to be oblivious to. And she took it. That was the deal, at least he’d been clear about it from the start.

Which, thinking about it, he had been. “I’ve had my babies,” he’d said. The first time we slept together he said ‘I’ve had a vasectomy so I’m not going to get you pregnant.’ And that’s the hideous thing - it’s not that he’s changed, he’s changed me. 

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Learning

Eugh, and the worst kind of learning is the surprise kind. The realisation that actually you may be behaving like a bit of dick. Unwelcome news, and it arrives on a tandem bike with the back seat taken by its partner, the knowledge you’re going to have to learn how to not be a dick, and that this is going to be hard. 

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Ill behaviour

I guess they call good things sick (well, they did in the early 2000s) because being sick is one of the most intense states you’re every going to be in. I’m on the better side of a gastrobug which had me confined to bed and the bathroom and no further beyond, for a good three days. And it was pretty intense, and not in a good way. Woke feeling better, elated! But this afternoon, I’m in bed again, still wiped out from it. Thoughts too big for my mind to handle rushing in. An initial rebounding of energy, a victory lap run on adrenaline after winning the fight followed by an energy crash, weeping on the floor of the changing rooms, what are we even winning the fight for? 

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And it all comes back to

...who are you, as the football chant goes. We are Leeds, ad infinitum. A heart of gleaming Whitby jet, back near the sea an ocean away. 

Or: you can take the girl out of Yorkshire..

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List of things to do when I’m back in the UK

Grit teeth

Grin and bear it 

Pull hair and dig fingernails into skin 

Book ticket back to New Zealand

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Surely I should’ve learned this by now?

I’m thirty eight and a half. Too old to be still counting my age in fractions. And also too old for ‘giving’ to be news. Or ‘listening to others’. Childish belief that I could do these things. Like believing you’re an awesome swimmer because you’ve seen other people doing it. And then someone chucks you in the deep end. There’s the shock of the cold salt water, shooting up your nose to burn in your throat. The thrash of limbs trying to get a handle on the sea, and working out quickly that’s a losing game. Less sink or swim, more learning to switch out fighting for floating. Keep still. Everything’s going to be just fine. 

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What are we going to do now?

I’ve had to write my own script, and plot, in a way that I don’t think other people do. 

I used to interview people for the appointment pages when I worked in PR, and ask them how they got into their career. “I just fell into it,” was the most common response. I didn’t fall into PR, unless you call 8 months of applying, mostly unsuccessfully, for PR jobs while working in a call centre ‘falling’. Even I wouldn’t have the audacity to put that much spin on it. And since then it’s been pushing to make things happen. To fill up the time and give it a certain velocity. It’s like I’ve got autocorrect switched on permanently, forever trying to mess with the path of life. 

I don’t trust life to take its course, I’m happier trying to lead it. Though I don’t trust myself in that role either.  Essentially this is the ‘to be or not to be’ speech. What Hamlet got wrong was being Hamlet - over-thinking things, ending up halfway between doing and not doing. Dithering. Taking the wrong option at each moment. Fucking it up by trying not to fuck it up. 

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Vegan January

Things I've learned from being vegan for January:

1. I can live without cheese. Thanks to avocado. 

2. Dairy's a bit odd once you starting thinking about where it comes from. 

3. Don't even start thinking about what eggs are. 

4. Nearly all prepared food has a bit of an animal in it, or something from an animal. Which is fine, unless you're a vegan, or an animal. Feels a bit like overkill - it's like we're adding it to everything because we've got too much of the stuff we're trying to use it all up before it goes off. 

5. Cheese tastes good after 28 days of not eating it. Butter tastes weird. 

6. Almond milk is basically the runoff water from soaking almonds. Even more strange, it tastes good. 

7. Being a healthy vegan is easy but takes some planning. So for me, being a healthy vegan is not easy at all. Plan your meals. Or, you'll just end up eating peanut butter on toast a lot.

8. Eating a lot of peanut butter on toast makes you fat. 

9. Soy flat whites taste a lot better than you feel asking for one. 

10. You have to eat more vegetables and beans, or you end up eating a lot of dark chocolate and carbs.  

11. It doesn't really make a difference to how you feel. But it probably makes a big difference to how the animal you're not consuming feels. My main message take-out was - it's fine to have some animal product, but there's no real need to have it in everything, all the time. 

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…and the winner of the best line of the trip goes to...

"I was into the tango dancing scene in the South of England"