The conversation trap 

I find myself at a birthday party in the middle of a conversation  concerning a couple’s second pregnancy. They have recently found out that they are having another boy. With little to offer to the conversation I sit quietly, hoping I will eventually evaporate, or a natural opportunity to stand up and leave will present itself.  

It doesn’t so I go on listening as others around the table cheerily goad them about having a third child because ‘they must want to have a girl?’. They would, they say, have loved to have a girl, but they aren’t planning a third. The group continues to exchange stories of people who have multiple children of the same gender, or one of each, or a reasonable balance of genders in their household.  

For my own sanity, I feign disinterest in the conversation despite how keenly my ears are picking up every heart-pricking syllable. I surely come across as aloof, rude. But that’s how I survive these situations. It won’t be the first time my hidden pain is mistaken for poor character. I expect it won’t be the last.  

Hiding in plain sight 

I realise in recounting this story that I am at liberty to intervene. No one is gagging me.  

I could tell the people around the table that not everyone gets to decide how many children they have, let alone have enough freedom to make jokey preferences about gender, but who wants to hear that? When the vast majority of people have the privilege to be so flippant about pregnancy and family size, who am I to stain the conversation with my hidden grief?  

As I sit there silently wishing myself anywhere but in that conversation I am reminded of my separateness. Invisible to the naked eye and yet in every cell of my being I am different. To society I pass as a parent, as a fertile woman, a mother. We’ve had one so we must be able to have another, is the assumption. I am asked at regular intervals by strangers and familiars alike if we’ll have another one.  I can sense the question looming, like gathering clouds and a change in air pressure portending rain. Occasionally I can head it off by inferring a difficult journey to parenthood; ‘she’s our one and only’, ‘it took us a long time and a lot of heartache to get to one’. Rarely do I indicate that there has been more loss and grief since her arrival. It’s far too complicated and too often met with well-meaning but misplaced platitudes; ‘at least you have her’, as if my unfulfilled desire to have another child somehow diminishes or negates the extraordinary gratitude and love I have for my daughter. 

The society trap

But then, am I  really at liberty to intervene. Is my silence on the matter really my choice? In a society that largely dismisses miscarriage as ‘one of those things’ am I really free to air my grief publicly? So conditioned was I to believe that early miscarriage was not something that needed to be aired or shared that I silenced myself from my very first loss in 2017 to this most recent, 6 years later. Only after extensive therapy have I come to understand that I was locked in a grief cycle; that my bereavement is real; that I was flipping between denial and bargaining, never allowing myself to accept the aching immutable truth.  

If it’s taken me personal, lived experience and years of therapy to understand how wrong I got it, how long will it take society to catch up?

Falling off the care cliff 

My own silence is echoed, my denial reinforced, by the lack of acknowledgement or follow up from the medical world. Since my recent loss I have received letters for scan dates and harried voicemail messages from the hospital confirming the date for my 20 week scan. I sent a message to the midwife asking her to cancel these and please make sure I didn’t receive any more. She was apologetic, of course.  

All these scans and calls and follow ups when people think you’re pregnant. And when you have a miscarriage? Nothing. Silence.  

I am still waiting for something – anything – from the EPU. Having experienced the horror of having to transport my own pregnancy remains in to them months ago for them to be tested for abnormalities, I remain in hopeless hope for any sign or any clue as to why this has happened. What a difference an answer or an explanation might make. They gave me no indication of when or how I might get the results. More silence to navigate.  

The power of desire 

My joyous little girl role plays constantly. She has recently told me that when she’s a bigger girl she’ll be a sister. It’s a role she absolutely relishes. I know she has picked this up from the world around her, from her peers, from books and television. How much I want her little dream to come true.  

I am not a parent who looks at their child and rues them growing older. I see my daughter growing and I’m utterly thankful that she is, because too many times I have lived with the reality of a baby that never grows up. Growing up is her right. Watching her grow up, having front row seats is absolutely my pleasure.  

My desire for another baby is so very layered and it can be hard to separate what I truly want from what I’ve been conditioned to want and expect. And yet I do so very much want the chance to see my daughter become a sister. I do want to see another baby as they race through those early weeks and months to become a babbling, crawling, reckless ball of mischief.  

When you have ‘escaped’ infertility once and ‘recovered’ from a miscarriage with one healthy pregnancy it feels like a kind of mania trying to recreate the simplest of things. It feels like trying to solve a puzzle blindfolded. I’ve done it once before. Why can’t I do it again? But all sense points to the fact that really I can’t.  

Ghosts

At worst, people think a miscarriage doesn’t matter because ‘nobody died’. And there is an awful truth in that. There is no body to mourn; no memories of a voice, a face, a smell, a laugh.  

In the middle of a conversation about growing families I feel like an apparition; a being that exists between two planes. People on a tough journey to parenthood believe I have everything because I have succeeded in having one child. People with no understanding of the existence of fertility, let alone secondary infertility, simply think it’s my choice to have stopped at one child.  

So there I am. Invisible. Silent. Like a ghost.