Trigger warning: discusses baby loss
I remember my first ultrasound. There on the screen were the contours of a strange landscape, somewhere mysterious and full of promise. For all its mysteriousness, though, it was also an oddly familiar sight. How often had I seen similar images in films and TV shows, or in friends’ Facebook posts, accompanied by a giddy pregnancy announcement?
But I wasn’t there to see my baby for the first time. There was nothing to get excited about, just an empty uterus. It was a diagnostic scan; my husband and I had been trying to conceive for over a year, and we were in the process of getting a referral to a fertility clinic for further investigations into why, as an otherwise healthy twenty-something, I still wasn’t pregnant.
Over the next half a decade, during which time I experienced three miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy, there would be many more scans, many more firsts. The first scan that showed an ungrowing embryo, the first I’m so sorry it’s not the news you’d hoped for. The first scan that showed a heartbeat – followed, a few days later, by another I’m so sorry. The first scan that showed an image so like all those that I’d seen posted to Facebook, an image of a baby, or the beginnings of one, so much more palpable and recognisable than we’d expected, even at twelve weeks: limbs, belly, a button nose. That one has stuck with me; when, a week later, we attended a follow-up scan, I knew even before the I’m so sorry that something wasn’t right, I could see the stillness where the flash of a heartbeat should be, but it made it no less devastating. On the way out we passed a machine that dished out ultrasound images, £5 each; we had nothing to collect, of course.
All that time, when I was pregnant, or maybe pregnant, and then when I wasn’t, when I was trying desperately to conceive, or to make my peace one way or another, they were everywhere, those little photos: on social media, in excited text messages, hung on fridge doors, next to the bin day schedule. The heart-clenching feeling of seeing one, the mixture of private grief and public elation, the sting of residual anxiety, sticks with me even now – my first instinct, when I see an ultrasound image, still, is to hold my breath for a moment, seasick, and wait for the world to settle around me.
The emotive power of an ultrasound image extends, of course, beyond the associations that traumatic memory may lend it. There is something wild, something extraordinary, about what such an image represents: a possibility, never guaranteed; a map of the interior, the unknown landscape, the unknown future. How small a thing it is, and yet how huge, how world-shaking, no matter what happens.
How small a thing, and yet how huge: the last time I had an ultrasound I was alone, as so many people have been since the start of the pandemic. It was May, everything locked down, and I was thirty-six weeks pregnant. A few days earlier I had been admitted to hospital after my waters broke, and the doctors were loath to send me home in case I suddenly went into labour.
I don’t think you can once be delivered bad news at a pregnancy scan – the sucking of teeth, the so sorry, the stillness on the screen – without a part of your body forever after anticipating that in the same situation, even under very different circumstances, there is a risk of the bad thing happening again. And so, as a doctor lead me down a maze of dark corridors, walking so fast that I had to jog to keep up with her, and into a small hot room for my thirty-six-week scan, my heart was racing. My heart was racing while I manoeuvred myself onto the bed, racing as she dolloped cold gel on the hill of my belly, racing while she quietly moved the wand across its slopes. As she worked she explained to me what she was seeing, but I myself could not really see it: I did not know how to read the map. At the end she printed out a photo for me, illegible, and when I got back to my room I duly took out my phone and snapped a shot to send to my husband at home.
What bit is that? He texted back.
I don’t know! I replied. I think it’s his hand?
READ MORE: I Gave Birth Alone Because Of Covid
When my son was safely delivered, less than twenty-four hours later, it didn’t matter that my husband had not been with me for that scan, of course it didn’t. But it also mattered a great deal, somehow.
I’m reminded of this now because the pandemic is writing its own stories about scans, inscribing its own traumas, as it is with so many otherwise routine aspects of our lives. I think of the pregnant people whose partners have never heard their baby’s heartbeat, the pregnant people who have had to bear terrible news, the worst news, without a friend or a lover or a family member beside them, the pregnant people who have been consumed by worry or overcome with joy, whose hands, all the while, have gone unheld.
How small a thing, to see that map of an unknown future laid out, how insubstantial – and yet how heavy, how huge, to have to bear it alone.
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