I am standing in my garden with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Through the window I can see my flat, full of friends who are dancing to ABBA and laughing. As festive scenes go, this is pretty much as good as it gets. People I love, all in one place, eating, drinking and being merry, as per the festive instructions. It is exactly how I had always hoped my life would look, but it’s not how this Christmas was supposed to be.
If everything had gone according to plan, I would have gone into December around 37 weeks pregnant, almost ready to give birth. My hospital bag would have been packed and my family would have been fobbed off with ‘I didn’t have time to buy presents this year what with the human life I am creating.’ Rather than drinking and parties, high heels and hairspray, I was expecting fat ankles and fights about what colour to paint the nursery.
Only, my ankles are fine and the nursery is still a spare room, because I had a miscarriage back in May.
In the months following a pregnancy loss, you live in a strange sort of parallel universe where you chart what would be happening if things had been different.
‘If I were still pregnant I’d be having the gender scan.’ ‘If I were still pregnant we’d be buying a pram.’ ‘If I were still pregnant I’d be half way, three quarters, almost all the way there.’
It’s like somewhere in the universe there is another version of me, a version whose body didn’t fail her, who was able to sustain the tiny flicker of life buried in her body. And it’s impossible not to wonder how things are going for her. Often I am envious of that version of me, of the adventure that she is embarking on. But just sometimes, I forget to be envious.
I have had just over six months of life that would have been completely different if I had stayed pregnant.
There is another feeling that sits alongside the sadness about my miscarriage, a confusing one. It rises every time I order a glass of wine or slide into a very hot bath. The feeling is a bit like gratitude, tinged with relief, and it’s a feeling that no one else seems to have, or if they do, it’s not one that they talk about.
I did not want to have a miscarriage. I would not wish either the physical or the emotional pain of it on another human, and I pray that I don’t have another one. But, the fact is, instead of a pregnancy, I have had just over six months of life that would have been completely different if I had stayed pregnant.
Nights sitting outside on my balcony, drinking wine with my husband. Parties where I stayed up until 3.30 in the morning. An eight-week stint of the Keto diet to fit back into my clothes. Nights at the pub with friends, a return to ballet classes, spontaneous trips booked with disposable income. Coming home from work and spending another three hours writing the book that I was working on. It’s true that I could have had all of those things while I was pregnant. But I wouldn’t have done them, because being pregnant is very tiring and requires that you don’t inhale a bottle of Chardonnay in a freezing cold beer garden, or light one Malboro Light off another hanging out the window of a friend’s flat.
Those are the things that I have given myself in lieu of a pregnancy. Of course I would rather have had a baby. But that wasn’t an option. So I am trying to be grateful for what I have had instead, and I have found a strange kind of peace in that. I will always have had an extra six-and-a-bit months of my life which were entirely about me, my wants and my needs.
It has been a hard task to convince myself that I’m allowed to say that – that by acknowledging the nice things that have come from not being pregnant I am not being selfish or heartless, and that it doesn’t somehow mean that I didn’t deserve to have a baby.
I hope that one day I will be elbow-deep in children, and that then I will look back on this time, and be glad that I turned it into an opportunity to get my fitness back, work hard, be creative, and sometimes drink a bottle of wine, sleep for 12 hours and then get my nails done.
A silver lining seems too strong, too optimistic an expression to describe this period of my life. There is no upside to pregnancy loss. But there is a strange sort of comfort in knowing that I have used the time I would otherwise have been using to nourish someone else, to instead nourish myself.
Let’s Reflect: As 2019 comes to a close, Grazia writers are looking back and looking inwards to reflect on the last year.
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