Gone but not forgotten

Gone but not forgotten
The West Australian
Ros Thomas
Published: Saturday July 21
Section: Opinion

I am haunted by the babies that never were. I have three children squabbling over their dinners in front of me and six positive pregnancy sticks in the freezer. I keep them there as markers of respect for who they would have been. Blue crosses in white windows, frozen in time.

This is not a column I ever wanted to write. Or thought I needed to. But the idea was planted in my head by my editor, and since then it has been growing little fingers prodding memories of a time when all I thought of and all I wanted to be, was pregnant.

Those pregnancy tests are some of my most precious possessions, small windows of wonder at my ability to procreate. For a woman who had such trouble falling pregnant, they are reminders of the sheer elation I felt at discovering I was really, truly with child, after so many crushing disappointments and the floods of tears that accompanied them.

I know some of you will think I’m mad. Or morbid. But those three babies that didn’t make it gave me nothing to hold. Nothing but the emptiness of knowing they were no longer there. A mirage.  Babies who hardly had a chance to announce their arrival before they returned to the place they came from. And so those pregnancy tests are the only proof they were fleetingly on board.

At those times, I would see the heavily pregnant women smoking outside the hospitals and want to scream at them ‘Don’t you know how lucky you are?’ How could they be so wantonly destructive? But that’s the thing about babies – they can be sturdy little souls or the most delicate of creatures and their gift is their unpredictability. They come to people who’ve lost hope, lost count or lost interest.   Fecundity is a double edged sword.

I have only ever talked about miscarriage in the most superficial of terms – just the bare necessities to give enough of an answer to a question: ‘Yes I had one before my first son was born’. ‘Yes, I had two more in my early 40’s’. I don’t think we’ve yet given ourselves permission to dive down and grind through the gut wrenching hurt and disappointment those miscarriages gave us.  For me, I struggled to think of them in any terms but failure. Yet another failure. Even after the euphoria of delivering two healthy babies, 6 years apart, two subsequent miscarriages carried the weight of even bigger, dashed expectations.

I couldn’t believe I was here again. And now racing against time. That ticking clock I was so tired of hearing. It was probably just as tired of me. I tried to think of them as success instead of failure. Success with the promise of more to come, when those babies were ready to come. But the looks on the faces of those women sitting opposite me in the fertility clinics told me all I needed to know. We were all becoming increasingly desperate.

The worst thing you can tell a woman trying in vain to have a baby, is to ‘relax’. It’s like a kick in the stomach every time. Good luck trying to relax after years of trying to conceive and months of frantic early morning blood tests and injections on the way to work. There’s nothing relaxing about it. It’s a diabolical way to get pregnant.

My last miscarriage, just into my second trimester, was the nail in the coffin. The coffin of my uterus that simply could no longer sustain life. I crashed from shock, to disbelief, acceptance into despair. And anger. Mistrust. Of my body and what it couldn’t do.  Looking back I’m sure I had a bout of depression, but I was neither sufficiently self-aware nor emotionally programmed to recognize it. After all, I had a small child and a toddler to care for. And I was so darned lucky to have them, how could I possibly be ungrateful? And what was this driving force telling me I HAD to have another? That I just -wasn’t – finished.

Are men as rocked by miscarriage as women? I’m sure they are, but their steadfastness and the pressure they must feel to support their partner through the awful physicality of the experience means they often keep their emotions in check. Certainly that’s what happened with us. He was the rock. I crumbled.

How often do I think of them, those babies who vanished into the ether? Only rarely. I open the freezer several times a day and there’s not a flicker of sadness. But there are moments out of nowhere that prick tiny pinholes into a sea of grief. Driving past the clinic where I stumbled out of the ultrasound room trying to hold it together until the bill was paid. Remembering  all the pregnant women (whose turn was after mine) scanning my face intently for signs of life, and seeing instantly that there was none. I couldn’t meet their eyes – they all knew anyway.

To all those childless women who so wanted to be mothers, I apologise for sounding greedy. I can only speak of what I know, and I knew number three was going to complete me and complete our family, and being a painfully tenacious person, I was not giving up. I wanted no regrets. Friends would say ‘You’ll know when you’re done having babies.’ I would nod and say ‘maybe I am?’ But I knew I wasn’t. So when the doctors told us that we had done almost everything we could to artificially encourage a pregnancy, we decided we had to walk away. Walk away and consult the pillow night after night about what mattered. In hindsight, it was my husband who realised my tunnel-vision had to end. Because it would come at the expense of the family we already had.

Those first few weeks of ‘not’ trying were like having no purpose. I needed a new obsession and I needed it fast. And it came just a month later in the shape of a cross on a pregnancy stick. A baby who knew her time had come. And who wanted me as her mother.