school holidays? Max himself might quite likely be there!
I felt so excited and happy that I had to go and stand on my head for ten minutes, to try and calm myself down.
Chapter 9
Getting pregnant had not been easy for me. That glib chat you sometimes heard: ‘blah blah, first night of our honeymoon, not even trying and, whoops! We conceived!’ That was so not us. And that was why Holly had been such a miracle-she’d really lasted the distance, staking her claim in what I had come to believe was the inhospitable barbed-wire rolled and—metaphorically - chilly expanses of my uterus. All the other potential babies—or, as the doctors called them when they were about to hoover them out of me: ‘the remaining products of conception’ (a phrase which made ‘embryo’ and ‘foetus’ sound positively warm and un-clinical)—had given up far more easily.
The first miscarriage was fine, because I hadn’t even known I was pregnant. I just thought I was having a particularly heavy period, and it was only with the later ones that, in retrospect, I realized what had gone on. The second was bad—eight weeks, and I’d done the positive pregnancy test three weeks earlier. Ken and I had had three whole weeks of euphoric planning and celebrations, Ken revelling in his newly-proved virility; ‘I am All Man!’: me greedily and reverentially shopping; fingering great big stretchy trousers with huge elasticated panels in the front of them as if they were being displayed in some designer-wear Mecca instead of on the rails at Mothercare, actually looking forward to the time when I’d legitimately be able to wear such monstrosities. Then came the bleeding, a little at first, just enough to worry but not panic. ‘Some women bleed all through pregnancy’, said the doctor, and I thought, that must be nice for them. Not.
Two more days of polka-dot spotting, furtive and panicked late-night phonecalls to NHS Direct so as not to worry Ken, an inconclusive scan, and then, wham, the mass evacuation. Fleeing for the emergency exits without stopping to collect possessions. Matter-of-fact but revolting talk by doctors of clots, and the reality, the even more revolting lump of what looked like grey shivery liver coming out of me like a deformation, an accusation.
Gross as it was, though, I wanted to keep it. I knew what it was: ‘the remaining products of conception’, and what would surely have become my child, a living breathing human being, had things been different. I wanted to put the lump in a matchbox and bury it in the garden, with a little cross made of ice-lolly sticks marking the place—anything would have been better than flushing it down the toilet with as much respect as for a belly-up fairground goldfish. I made the mistake of telling Ken that I wished I could have done that, but he didn’t understand. Didn’t want to think about it, I supposed. Ken was the world’s most squeamish man. Anything involving more than a bead of blood was enough to turn him green at the gills. He couldn’t even watch medical dramas on television; so the knowledge of a medical drama in his own downstairs loo was just too much to bear. He was at work, anyway, when it all unfolded.
He’d been away at a conference when I had my third miscarriage. That was the worst one: eleven weeks, when we were just teetering on the cusp of believing that everything would be OK, that this one was tenacious, clinging on with its minuscule fingernails to the cliff face of my insides. We’d even begun to believe it was not only clinging on, but thriving, blooming like a desert rose. And then, out of the blue, there I was again, examining bits of toilet paper and crying over the tell-tale signs. The doctor saying, ‘It’s a bit sad…,’ his words tailing off into nothing as if he realized that the gross understatement of them could hardly be a comfort. The craven panic which threatened to overwhelm me when I even considered this happening again. I had to
I felt so excited and happy that I had to go and stand on my head for ten minutes, to try and calm myself down.
Chapter 9
Getting pregnant had not been easy for me. That glib chat you sometimes heard: ‘blah blah, first night of our honeymoon, not even trying and, whoops! We conceived!’ That was so not us. And that was why Holly had been such a miracle-she’d really lasted the distance, staking her claim in what I had come to believe was the inhospitable barbed-wire rolled and—metaphorically - chilly expanses of my uterus. All the other potential babies—or, as the doctors called them when they were about to hoover them out of me: ‘the remaining products of conception’ (a phrase which made ‘embryo’ and ‘foetus’ sound positively warm and un-clinical)—had given up far more easily.
The first miscarriage was fine, because I hadn’t even known I was pregnant. I just thought I was having a particularly heavy period, and it was only with the later ones that, in retrospect, I realized what had gone on. The second was bad—eight weeks, and I’d done the positive pregnancy test three weeks earlier. Ken and I had had three whole weeks of euphoric planning and celebrations, Ken revelling in his newly-proved virility; ‘I am All Man!’: me greedily and reverentially shopping; fingering great big stretchy trousers with huge elasticated panels in the front of them as if they were being displayed in some designer-wear Mecca instead of on the rails at Mothercare, actually looking forward to the time when I’d legitimately be able to wear such monstrosities. Then came the bleeding, a little at first, just enough to worry but not panic. ‘Some women bleed all through pregnancy’, said the doctor, and I thought, that must be nice for them. Not.
Two more days of polka-dot spotting, furtive and panicked late-night phonecalls to NHS Direct so as not to worry Ken, an inconclusive scan, and then, wham, the mass evacuation. Fleeing for the emergency exits without stopping to collect possessions. Matter-of-fact but revolting talk by doctors of clots, and the reality, the even more revolting lump of what looked like grey shivery liver coming out of me like a deformation, an accusation.
Gross as it was, though, I wanted to keep it. I knew what it was: ‘the remaining products of conception’, and what would surely have become my child, a living breathing human being, had things been different. I wanted to put the lump in a matchbox and bury it in the garden, with a little cross made of ice-lolly sticks marking the place—anything would have been better than flushing it down the toilet with as much respect as for a belly-up fairground goldfish. I made the mistake of telling Ken that I wished I could have done that, but he didn’t understand. Didn’t want to think about it, I supposed. Ken was the world’s most squeamish man. Anything involving more than a bead of blood was enough to turn him green at the gills. He couldn’t even watch medical dramas on television; so the knowledge of a medical drama in his own downstairs loo was just too much to bear. He was at work, anyway, when it all unfolded.
He’d been away at a conference when I had my third miscarriage. That was the worst one: eleven weeks, when we were just teetering on the cusp of believing that everything would be OK, that this one was tenacious, clinging on with its minuscule fingernails to the cliff face of my insides. We’d even begun to believe it was not only clinging on, but thriving, blooming like a desert rose. And then, out of the blue, there I was again, examining bits of toilet paper and crying over the tell-tale signs. The doctor saying, ‘It’s a bit sad…,’ his words tailing off into nothing as if he realized that the gross understatement of them could hardly be a comfort. The craven panic which threatened to overwhelm me when I even considered this happening again. I had to
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