Last month, I had a miscarriage. I found out at a scan, following some bleeding, that I wasn’t ten weeks pregnant but had actually lost the pregnancy several weeks previous.
What followed was several weeks of medical treatment to remove the left-over pregnancy tissue from my body, which resulted in surgery under a general anaesthesia and quite a lot of medical appointments to check that I hadn’t sustained any lasting damage.
Miscarriage is, to put it lightly, not fun. You build an entire world in your head and pour maternal love into the potential for humanity that is growing inside you, and then all of that disappears. It hurts. It hurts emotionally, physically, in every way that a thing can hurt. It’s shit. And then afterwards, you’re supposed to get on with your life.
For the most part, I’ve done that. The day we found out, my husband took me to an especially fancy branch of Waitrose and walked next to me while I silently filled a trolley with wine, pate, French bread, soft cheese, and pretty much anything else I could find that I’d previously been prohibited from enjoying. I threw myself into my work. Saw more of my friends. Booked trips away rammed my weekends with boozy brunches and Sunday pub sessions.
But the one thing I still can’t quite shake is the burning injustice when other people get pregnant and manage to stay that way.
When the news broke yesterday that Natalie Imbruglia is pregnant for the first time aged 44, following IVF and using donor sperm, my first, horrible thought was ‘How can she have a more successful pregnancy than me when she’s nearly twenty years older than I am?’
Isn’t that awful? Isn’t that selfish and mean spirited and nasty? I’m genuinely ashamed for having that immediate gut reaction. But I think sometimes that’s what grief does to you – it strips you of your ability to be entirely reasonable.
Every pregnancy announcement I read or hear at the moment feels like a wound. I know that another woman’s ability to go full term has nothing to do with mine. I know that the chances are I will have a healthy pregnancy in the future. And I know that being bitter about other people’s happiness is not an acceptable way to behave. But all of those things do very little to soothe the irrational anger I feel about other people being pregnant, apparently with ease.
Similarly, I was secretly agonised when I saw that Anne Hathaway is pregnant with her second child. Why are other people able to have two healthy pregnancies when I haven’t even had one? Another stream of uncharitable, irrational, nasty thoughts which I am ashamed to admit.
It won’t be long until someone I know and love in real life tells me that they’re having a baby. And if I can’t cope with celebrities doing it, I’m not going to be able to be a support system to a pregnant friend or a new mum. So while it’s easy to cut myself slack for those kinds of negative thoughts and write it off as grief, I’ve decided that I have to reframe the way that I’m thinking.
Rather than being bitter about Anne Hathaway and Natalie Imbruglia’s pregnancies, I’m trying to draw strength from their honesty about their struggles.
Under the announcement of her pregnancy Ann Hathaway wrote: ‘All kidding aside, for everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies. Sending you extra love.’
Posts like Anne’s, and honesty like Natalie’s are so important. They debunk the myth that it’s easy for every other woman, which of course it isn’t. And knowing that it isn’t always a doddle to get pregnant makes it a whole lot easier not to be eaten up by bitterness and jealousy.
It’s not easy to be open about your reproductive ‘failures’ (which of course aren’t failures at all). But it’s an enormous act of kindness to be candid about your struggles. When you lose a pregnancy, or struggle to get pregnant, or have any other fertility issues, it’s so easy to feel like you’re the only one in the world who is broken. The cult of silence around fertility issues compounds that issue, making it seem like every other woman in the world gets pregnant at the snap of her fingers and stays that way until producing a perfectly healthy little cherub.
So, if you have had a long road to getting pregnant, experienced loss, or struggled with any other reproductive issues, perhaps consider telling people that when you announce your happy news. It’s not easy. I know that. But the sooner we start telling the whole stories about our reproductive lives, rather than just the happy ending, the quicker we’ll dismantle the cult of silence which makes women feel that they’re the only ones struggling.