Last Saturday, at eight weeks pregnant, I started to bleed. For those of us who have been pregnant, we know that this is a splintering point, a moment at which reality splits onto two concurrent tracks. On one set of rails, you are bleeding; it is common, it can mean nothing, it will stop. On the other, your pregnancy is coming to a close; the embryo inside you has stopped growing, your body has made an executive decision, and the lining of your womb, along with its recent inhabitant, is making its way out.
For four days, I lived in that limbo, within two contradictory, simultaneous states. I bled through Mother’s Day in the UK, a timing so ironic that even as I changed my pad, I knew I’d never be able to put it in a book or script. I spoke to a midwife who told me that, unless the bleeding got heavier, I could wait for the Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit to reopen. And all that time my heart and mind believed the twin truths that everything would be okay and that everything was already over.
In the end, by the time of my scan, my womb was empty. There are many excellent accounts of what it is like to lose a pregnancy in other books and articles; I would recommend Adrift by Miranda Ward and the new anthology No One Talks About This Stuff, edited by Kat Brown, for a start. What I am here to tell you is what helped me come through this experience. Not because I am a blueprint for all women; not because my experience will tell you what to do; not because I am an expert. I am merely telling you because I am able to.
Here is the first thing that helped: the Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit where I live is in a community center, rather than a hospital. That meant I was in a room with three other women, all of whom looked like me—by which I mean they might have been pregnant, or not. Nobody was having their 36-week scan, there was no labor ward nearby, I heard no emergency cords beeping in a faraway corridor. This was a space for people in the early, fragile stages of their pregnancy, where life is fluttering in and out of existence, and we all knew it. It was also a place I’d been to for dance classes and children’s birthday parties. It had a library and, in the evening, a bar. It was a place woven together from the everyday stuff of life, which made what I was going through feel like part of that life.
The second thing that helped was the staff. The sonographer took the time to look me in the eye, her voice soft, and explain that I was the one in control. I could just touch her arm and she would pause. If anything hurt, we could stop. In that moment, I would have trusted her to open up my chest and clean my heart with her fingers. I knew she would look after me. There were many other brilliant members of the staff too, not least the person who printed out a sign, hanging on the back of the bathroom door, that said: “We have sanitary pads, wet wipes, spare leggings, underwear, and bags available in our clinic.” Just reading that, as I peed into a test tube, made my whole body soften. To offer clothes, underwear, pads, goes beyond simple kindness; they are acts of empathy, compassion, and recognition. These people knew what I was going through, and they knew what I needed.
I also had my friend with me. A friend who had miscarried herself, several times. A friend who knew the ropes; had lain on this exact blue plastic table; had sat in the same waiting room and looked out of the same window. My husband could have come, of course, but in that moment, she was my first choice. As I pulled on my knickers and collapsed crying onto her shoulder, I knew she was the person I wanted by my side. She held me like the mother that she is—held me and held me and held me.
This feeling of being understood, of my experience being recognized, and of being part of a long line of miscarriages has helped. Just hours after telling one friend that I was no longer pregnant, she turned up at my door with a pot of soup, a loaf of bread, a bunch of flowers, a card in which she had written out a poem, three novels, and some homemade buns. Other friends brought chocolate and offered to look after my son, delivered homemade curry, took me out for walks, and a woman I love sent me a card on which she had drawn exactly how my heart felt. A mother at the school gates made the effort to come over to me, take my arm, and tell me that she had been there, too. She told me to take an iron tablet. They knew. They all just knew.
Another thing that helped was that a few people already knew I was pregnant. When things changed, they were prepared and ready. The evening of my scan, I was taken to my local pub by three of my oldest friends, and we played drag bingo. I drank fizzy wine and shouted out the answers to ’90s summer hits and, for an hour or two, climbed out of my heavy heart. Similarly, a week after I first started bleeding, I went to the riverbank, made a fire, lit candles, and spoke to my friends. I’d baked a cake. I cried, briefly, and listened to the water move.
There were other things that helped, too, of course. I sewed myself an insane outfit to wear to a book event. I ate enough bread to sink a duck. I planted seeds. I changed my blood-spotted bedding. I eventually went for a run and one night slept for 11 hours. Every message I got on my phone helped. Every hug helped. Every time my husband held me in his arms helped. Telling my son helped. And every minute of extra springtime daylight has helped.
I feel very lucky. I have a network of friends. I am part of a community. I speak the same language as the majority of people I live among. I have a healthy body, and I work with good and kind and thoughtful people. This is not, I know, how it is for everyone. I wish it was. I cannot stop miscarriages happening or tell you how to make them better when they do. But I do believe that we can make miscarriages better for more people more often. We can demand funding for the NHS, and demand time off from our employers, and demand that women’s health is researched with the same alacrity as men’s. We can campaign for better mental health support, better monitoring of high-risk pregnancies, to address the health inequalities experienced by non-white people, and for best-practice to be available everywhere, at any time. We can vote. We can write to our representatives. We can read the reports and follow the news and stay informed.
But most of all, we can be kind.