Miscarriages might be relatively common but they are never forgotten. OONAGH CHARLETONwrites about the disappointing and dramatic end of months of anticipation and the return to normal family life
I AM CYCLING down Chesterfield Avenue in the Phoenix Park, in the early autumn of 2009. My small son is behind me in the bike seat and there is a sea of acorns, beechnuts and chestnuts sprawling the paths and grassy verges. Brilliant branch-high oranges and yellows shield us from the warm afternoon sun, and I coast along listening to the crunch of debris under the wheels. It seems all too perfect. It could be New York, Central Park, happy families, perfect. I am pregnant under my green poncho. The perfect three, the space filled, the ghost of the third child that has always flickered in my subconscious, waiting to be conceived, is growing.
I pedal carefully, gently, and the electric motor brings me uphill. I have a picture in my head of the ultrasound screen. A beautiful television, grainy and grey, flickering and dense. I could stare at it for hours, like a child watching a snowstorm, seeking shapes, patterns, rhythms as it whirls and swoops. Locked in to the surrounding matter is the black uterine oval, holding within a grain of simple yet complex brain and form. My tiny “belonging” pulses with intent, cellular and multiplying, as it drives itself forward, limb by limb, beat by beat.
I AM WAITINGto fit into my old maternity clothes and I wear them, even though they are loose and baggy. I love inhabiting this space, this pregnant house where I dust the walls and daydream of the curled up, caramel smelling warmth that is you. I talk to you and scribble hurriedly, guiltily, in my diary as your brothers mill around on the floor with their cars and their socks off. I am already stroking your cheek in my mind, to send you to sleep perched under my chin. My lips adhesed to the top of your head, inhaling the scent of vernix and pink skin. I kiss your eyes squeezed shut against the light of the room in the Rotunda's Lillie Suite. I can dream this as I have done it twice before and I look forward to you in an achy kind of way.
A few weeks later, towards the end of October, Alec and I have a row. The kind of fight in which I rant and rage over themes of unfairness and criticism. I say my piece and huff to the bathroom to recover.
It is an unremarkable blood, just a simple trace, but he knows. He knows as I tell him that it isn’t good. I refuse to even acknowledge such traitorous negativity. “It happens to loads of women,” I say firmly, knowing I am right. Tomorrow we will go for a scan and it will be another opportunity to see you and check how much you have stretched and grown. I sleep easy and well, unfussed, unconcerned.
The Early Pregnancy Unit in the Rotunda is a quiet side space away from the rush and heave of pregnancy and ambulance deliveries. I like the receptionist. She is pleasant and soft, with red shoes and a positive disposition. I remark on her shoes; it is not often you see a woman in red shoes. They are pretty, flat, shiny, I think. She wears them with black trousers. Her desk is full of Post-Its and I know she knows I am fine by the way she looks at me and responds to my questions.
I don’t feel like I belong there, nor have I anything in common with the ladies beside me. They are miscarriage ladies; I don’t know this world.
It is alien to me. I know the emergency room, with my big, heaving, contracting belly and the clickity-clackity-clack of the baby heartbeat echoing around the room, surround sound. I sigh, look at my watch, wonder what Alec is doing to entertain Joshua on Parnell Square, sip water from a plastic cup and wait.
I love the cold squeeze of ultrasound jelly and the gentle static of the rollerball on my skin. Within seconds, I can see that lovely dark uterus.
I am not nervous, waiting for the white flicker of shape to emerge. It is there somewhere. “The sac has faded,” I hear the doctor say. I sit up.
She is finished. I know by her face that this is no joke. She says some nice, gentle, medical, sensitive things but I immediately become practical and scientific as if by default my survival mode is to understand, arrange, do.
The ribbon is cut, the band has snapped, the frame within which I had defined myself for 12 long weeks has cracked and slowly it disintegrates. I swing myself off the table, after discussing all the options for moving the echoes of this baby from me, and leave the room as one would a dentist. Hasty, polite, unwilling to go back and experience that again.
On the street outside I meet Alec. I tell him that the baby died. I allow myself to cry, a bit. We go home. I am numb. I feel my maternity trousers still loose around my waist and I become conscious of the purple top I bought in Midleton at the end of the summer with the stretchy material. I feel self-conscious, like I had been pretending all along to be carrying a bump, a life that required clothes like these. I want to take them off.
When you are told that a life inside of you has died, there can be two very conflicting reactions. I wanted to hold on to it, the fragments, the shell, the faded bit; to nurture the fleece of tissue that nestled against the bottom of my womb. Yet there is an immobility in that, where one becomes intractable, and moving on, impossible. Alongside that is a rising panic of “the dead thing, a carcass that I no longer know, buried, decaying within my life-space” that I must purge so that I can feel whole, normal, separate from this terror of it all.
As a child I had a hospital experience that was unpleasant enough to make me decide against the dilation and curettage option now. I ask for the tablets, go home, take them, and wait. Two days later, we bring the kids into town.
Early dinner in Grafton Street’s Café Bar Deli, a stroll around and a vain attempt to forget where we are, just for an evening.
Three hours and close to two litres of blood later, and the Rotunda has saved my life. It’s funny what you think of as you lie on your back, knowing that you are as close as you have ever been to death. My heart was doing a grand-national sprint on the heart monitor and my midwife was frantically trying to get a senior registrar down from theatre to resolve this unrelenting haemorrhage.
I am thinking, quite randomly, of a woman lying under the desert stars in Afghanistan, with the same problem, the same miscarriage, the same blocked cervix, who in a helpless act gives herself up to the universe or her God. I am angry that she is alone and that she has no help. Then I multiply her into thousands of women of different nationalities and creeds experiencing the same thing as I am, in their townships, their forests, their mountains, their islands, their huts. All of us the same in our aloneness and our individual tragedy.
But then I am on a trolley after a deft, flick and twist of Pakistani expertise, and in a cool, dim ward with opened windows funnelling the night air through the open curtains. I lie quietly and listen to the gravelly roar of the last buses from O’Connell Street.
I wonder about my baby. What on earth happened to the poor little soul? At what point did it give up and its primordial heart choke on its beat? I knew not to blame myself, as I had read it all before. Nature is unpredictable, untrustworthy, beautiful, dangerous, tragic. Part of me is so glad to be alive that I deliberately soften my grief.
I listen to the sniffs and choking sounds from the woman in the other bed. She leaves at 3am and I am alone. I stay there for three days and finally, after a large transfusion, Alec leads me home.
THE LASTtime I drove down North Circular Road, it was October 2007, and there was a baby in the car seat beside me. Now I look and autumn is still in fine fettle as the gold-yellow trees sweep past my window. At home, the boys have gone to their nanny's and the house is quiet and empty. I sit on the couch and stare for a bit.
Alec opens a bottle of champagne and we toast the little fella for trying his best. I tag the cork and put it in a box beside the picture of the first scan. I am glad we have celebrated him. The champagne warms my belly and we both sleep uninterrupted sleeps.
THE FOLLOWINGweek it's life back to normal. Montessori, entertaining Joshua in the morning, shopping and sorting the house. I am unable to write. I feel energised thanks to my unknown blood donor. I ring the Irish Blood Transfusion Board to see if I am eligible to donate. "Not just yet," she says kindly.
Weeks pass into Christmas. I remember very little of it. I repack my maternity gear into a box at the back of my wardrobe and I keep myself busy with the boys. I feel like I have left something behind, as if I have forgotten to collect something. Every few days I look at the first scan picture to convince myself that you were real, that you actually existed. I stare at you and wonder what you felt as the cellular division began to slow down and your embryonic breath laboured and faltered.
January and the new year of 2010 brings with it my 32nd birthday. Early spring pricks the blackcurrant bushes in the garden and there is an unspoken sense of renewal and re-growth. Eleven months later, in the hours before the artic snows set in, your sister Eva is born. I kiss her vernixy skin moments after birth, cradle her under my chin, and smell that newborn caramel smell. I soak her up and loll in the Rotunda’s Lillie Suite, hazardously euphoric in the glow of birth and new life. “I have seen it all,” I think, grandly, naively, as I cradle her, encompassing her littleness.
Now, I sit on that same couch that I mourned you on, and balanced on my knee is a one-year-old vision. I look at her intensely and I see you in her. She is beauty itself and serenity unflattered. Yet you still linger as a constant, and in the spring, when the crabapple blossoms burst from the tree we planted for you in my childhood garden, you are alive again.
That fragile baby, pink petal floating, softness, that I can touch and hold and never, ever, forget.
