Maybe This Time
*Quick content note to offer a heads up that this mentions pregnancy loss *
It’s 6am on a Sunday, I’m sitting on the loo counting the seconds while the test does its thing. I watch the positive symbol slowly appear and strengthen over the next minute. My hands are shaking. My heart leaps, then sinks, and there it stays - complete despair. This is my fourth pregnancy since December and the losses have been crushing. I was genuinely surprised at how hard I took the first one, and it’s just been getting harder each time. I can’t do it again. I feel like I can’t afford to be hopeful one more time. It just seems too, I don’t know- dangerous.
I cry as hopelessly as I did when I lost the last one, I am sunk by the fear and grief and the absolute certainty that this too will be taken away from me. I want to stay in bed. I want to lie here and wait it out til it’s over. Andy gently insists we get out, go for a walk on the beach, grab some pizza. It was the right thing to do, but I’m not myself. I’m testy and keep dissolving into tears with no prompting.
I have been inconsolable. And feeling so very guilty for feeling miserable, given that this was precisely what I wanted. And for being a massive downer when I can see that Andy would love to enjoy his own feelings of excitement and hope. But I haven’t been able to think about anything except the certainty I feel that this will go away like the others. And it’s my job to just get through the moments and hours and days while I wait for it to happen.
And the days are so long. They just go forever. There are so many minutes when you’re waiting to start bleeding at any moment. Each day has mostly been a series of small panic attacks every time I need to go to the loo, so scared of what I might find. I’ve never known fear like it. A long week somehow goes by, and I visit the doctor who gets me talking about the future a bit (booking scans, suggesting the midwifery program through the hospital etc), and just as I dare to entertain the idea of a future with this baby, I get a day of of shocking cramps. Cramping can mean the pregnancy is going to plan, or it can mean it’s all over and on the way out. I’ve had more experience with the latter, so I crumpled into a heap and admonished myself for daring to think positively.
So now it’s been a couple of weeks - I’ve made it six days further than my last pregnancy. I feel perpetually frightened, but tiny moments of hope keep wiggling their way in to my consciousness. “What if you do get to keep this one?” “You should think about what the setup will be in Teddy’s room when the baby eventually joins her”. Up until a day or two ago, I’ve shooed those unwelcome thoughts away and locked the gate behind them. Experience has taught me that they’ve been setting me up for a more crushing fall. But lately, I’ve been unable to resist the temptation to dare think about what it might look like if this one stuck.
A natural oversharer, I have very little patience for the secrecy surrounding pregnancy and babies. I find it so silly. The names, the sex of the child, and of the pregnancy itself in early stages. Waiting til the 12 week mark to share with people just meant that if you lose it, you do so alone. And I’ve found myself adhering to this social norm for the comfort of others rather than myself. If you tell people it means you have to un-tell them when it doesn’t work out. And I’ve noticed that some people really just don’t seem all that comfortable with that information. But bugger them- I rather think I’m finished with doing it that way.
In these two weeks since learning I was pregnant again, I’ve discovered that every time I’ve told someone about it (and the accompanying paralysing fear) it’s alleviated some of the burden. Especially the loneliness - in more cases than not I’m met with “Oh darling, I know the feeling exactly, I’ve lost two pregnancies myself”. And to quote a wonderful friend of mine: “It’s so common, so many of us go through it but no one fucking talks about it”. What IS that shit about? Why are we doing it like this? Does this really work for most people? And I do have to wonder if my experience would’ve felt this intense if the whole thing wasn’t so private.
Every time I share about it, it seems to make a bit of space for joy where the pain used to be, for hope where the fear had set up shop … or rather a small village. So I write this for two reasons: selfishly, to ease the tightness in my guts and jaw and heart by scattering it about out into the world, and for the hope that in reading this, someone going through something similar might feel less lonely. Maybe someone relates? And maybe I can be a big brave girl and open myself up to a little of that tenacious hope.
So. Even though it might be unfair to ask such a big thing of you, please bloom my little baby. We love you already, and we have such a happy home waiting for you. I think you’ll really like living at the beach, and you’ll have a big sister who won’t believe her luck when she gets to finally meet you. Please stay.