I am six weeks pregnant, again. Last time by six weeks I was already halfway through my fourth baby/parenting/pregnancy book (I would read seven in total before miscarrying the following week). Now I am more tentative. (When I asked whether he thinks we should tell parents or close friends, my husband said that as far as he’s concerned there’s nothing yet to tell.) This time it feels different, deeper somehow, more painful, more jarring. I feel my whole body sort of spreading out. I feel sick and my back aches. When I don’t, I worry. There it is: fear. But first, language.
My friend told me I had “experienced pregnancy loss”. I appreciated this. The word “miscarriage” suggests I’m the carriage, the “means of conveyance” who “missed”: “mis-, mistakenly, wrongly, badly”. But, although I realise the word pools blame onto my body, I like it. I like its sharpness, how this one word – as opposed to two of them, “pregnancy loss” – is a real punch in the gut. Every time I hear it it’s like standing on a thumbtack. Miscarriage. Miscarriage of justice. It can also be a verb: “I am miscarrying.” Something is happening to me. Pregnancy loss, although with all the right intentions, doesn’t hold that metallic taste in the mouth, that wrenching fear and realisation and strange grief: a life glimpsed and gone. I took a week off work while I bled in bed. Then I continued on.
Now, six months later, I am pregnant again. The decision to get pregnant at all has been years in the making. And still I feel completely ambiguous. My husband would rather not have children, but was willing to “if he must”. We have a good, gentle life together, very quiet, very beautiful, amid the chorus of five dogs breathing. Why bring a squalling nuisance into it? Why indeed. And I still have no idea. Something in me wants to touch something, some deepness possible when a child erupts a life. Or, who knows. That is probably very naive. The fact is, I’m still on the fence. I’m not sure I’ll ever get off it. There are endless arguments for each side but really no good reason to bring a being into a water-scarce, warming world. And yet. So I don’t have the simplicity and the privilege of a clean yearning for motherhood. (One aspect of miscarrying for me was a sense of relief. Also this, I had to think, also this feeling.)
When I found out I was pregnant again, I thought that we should quickly take a trip together somewhere exotic – but who would look after the dogs? I thought about my life, all the things I’d been doing, being interrupted, utterly, irrevocably, and felt really quite annoyed. Then, I started getting scared again: fear, my old pal. I tried to bring on some joy, tried on joy in the changing rooms but found it did not fit me right. (“Are you happy?” a doctor asked and I replied, “I am not a happy person”, then laughed and said, “Let me rephrase.”) My default is worry and fear. I scan the environment for hazards. If my husband is late coming home from tennis, my fear part, which I have named Calamity Flap, presents me with scenarios: choked on a hotdog someone offered him, gunned down by baddies looking for a mid-range tennis racket, knocked over in a point-related rage incident. My frontal lobe lectures Calamity about being reasonable, listing possible explanations and giving her nice aphorisms from Buddhism. Calamity nods politely and then goes back to pressing the amygdala. Lately Calamity and I have become friendlier. I greet her when she pops up (car crash, kidnap, crushed under a falling crane, microwave explosion) and she acknowledges me. It’s like we’re housemates the week after a night of drinking when things got weird. Getting pregnant again after miscarrying is a buffet breakfast spread for Calamity: what will she put on her plate first? Somehow I have to hold this fear and also find a way not to let it bathe my body – the carriage – in adrenaline. (“What good is looking away from the TV when someone’s throat is cut if your body is a sea of fear chemicals?” my husband asked while I wept one night.)
I am not in control of what happens. I cannot make a baby get knitted together right in my womb. I can only eat the sour yoghurt with the five million good bacterias. Worry is a way to be in control. If I can preempt, if I can scan well enough for danger, then I can somehow avoid the danger – or, no, I can avoid the feeling, because that is what Calamity is trying to do (which is why we are now kind of friends). She is trying to shield me from feeling grief by making me feel anxious. If I’m anxious and then trying to do something to deal with the anxiety (sending my husband messages and checking over and over if he’s blue ticked me) then I’m not yet feeling the grief that loss brings. Or the imagined grief that imagined loss brings. Anxiety is a refusal of feelings. I was very anxious the first time I was pregnant. My main worry was that I would miscarry. Then I did. (I still wonder if and secretly feel that I caused it – again a form of control, as though I make and unmake the world.) Now my worry has shifted. It is amorphous, a dark and constant sea slapping the sides of my boat. I know I can survive a miscarriage now, so it has moved into less obvious territory, the “what if”. At night I find I can torture myself very effectively with this prodding tool. But all of this is out of my hands. All of it. Beyond refusing sushi, I have zero control.
At the same time, I must also not renege on my responsibilities. I must not let myself be overcome, drowning in my own waters. I must make room for Calamity, allowing the fear to be there and feeling it, but not allow her to dominate. Soothe her, love her, but also be firm with her. In a way I am already a parent.
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