Little egg

Notes from the vortex

Content warning: Pregnancy loss

There’s something I was keeping from my last post about the weeks after publishing Permanence, an extra dimension to my waiting. In truth the strangeness wasn’t just a post-publication lull, but also because I was still adjusting to a new state altogether – a state that, abruptly, I am no longer in.

The first clue to this new state was perhaps in how bloated I felt at my book launch. But at least I had some unfamiliar cleavage, which I welcomed (second clue). The third clue was in how I slept so much on the long weekend following publication week, which I put down to book exhaustion. And the fourth was a startling nausea on the bus one evening after that weekend, mouth coppery and dry. It turned out that I was pregnant; but I would only remain so for four more weeks.

Immediately sentimental, it felt so nice to be pregnant in the spring, with everything turning perfumed and blowsy overnight. Conception near the equinox, a midsummer second trimester, the slow winding down of the year would track my body as it grew. I would be heavily pregnant on my 38th birthday in November and then, shortly after, there would be a baby in time for Christmas: an insane idea! A deep postpartum hush blanketing January 2027. In the present, there was a hot sun above me. I could smell the trees, I could smell the river, I could smell everything from a hundred miles away.

I can’t disentangle Permanence’s publication from the pregnancy. Two things I had long waited for, arriving at almost exactly the same time, taking up all my attention and energy. The anxieties of publication and demands of the first trimester formed a perfect soup of adrenaline. I was in conversation with the kind and brilliant Daisy Johnson at Daunt Notting Hill the day after I found out, did the event feeling completely scattered, dying to tell someone what was really going on. On the train to Bristol for another event a couple of weeks later I tried to gulp down an M&S cheese sandwich in a normal way in front of my lovely publicist Laura, weighing up listeria against puking in the train bathroom. Every time someone asked me “How’s it going with the book?” I had to fight the urge to reply “I don’t know, I’m pregnant. Lol!!!!” I wasn’t just stuck in post-publication limbo, but in a secret first trimester limbo too. Double the unreality. How I longed for an internal kick to the diaphragm, for a steady stream of good news, for a lucky charm to see me through both ventures safely. I was so happy, but I was really not able to be normal, during those weeks. I think this is understandable.

I eagerly re-read Drifts, by Kate Zambreno, attending with a new perspective to the descriptions of pregnancy as an unexpected and tender shift. Each month disruption was possible, and still I wasn’t prepared for it when it came. The days were suddenly punctuated by irresistible naps, crying fits, terrible wonder, the desire to consume three kiwi fruits in one sitting when I don’t even normally like kiwis. The loosening of the ligaments in my back and the early morning waking, watchful, my skin feverish. I would be pregnant for a stay in Paris in August, I thought with amazement, and pregnant on an upcoming residency to write my new book – the future feeling much sharpened in some ways (a new person requiring my devoted care!) and more abstract in others (but what would they be like? What would it all be like?)

(I thought it would be so wonderful to tell the future child about this crazy time, one day. I would show them pictures from my book launch and say there you are. I really was very sentimental. I think this is understandable too.)

Even as I felt myself part of the blossoming spring world I also felt the desire to retreat from it, telling myself I could re-emerge once things calmed down. Distracted, sweaty and seasick, when I wasn’t doing Permanence-related stuff I mostly wanted to be alone with my little egg. There was no ambivalence about what was happening, which surprised me. Everything felt overwhelming but simple. Luke would come back from work each day and shout “How are my two sweet babes?” Then, during the scan where the bad news was discovered, he squeezed my hand the entire time and watched the screen with the intensity of a diviner, the screen I initially couldn’t bear to look at. I had ended up in A&E after a night of pain and blood, and been ferried quietly, efficiently, to the Emergency Pregnancy Unit. He asked the questions I couldn’t think to and then held me very tightly in the corridor of the hospital, and when we got home he fed me newly unforbidden smoked salmon and a perfect bowl of asparagus pasta, my body somehow still hungry, still believing itself mostly pregnant.

What a shock to discover how easy, how difficult, it is to slip from one state to another and then back again. How permeable and yet taxing those boundaries now feel. What happens next, once summarily expelled from the discovered kingdom? You return somewhat changed. My body feels raw. The fruit bowl is full of wrinkling kiwis that I no longer want to eat.

When I started to note the first faint clues that the pregnancy might not continue, hypervigilant, I found comfort in Rebecca May Johnson’s essay Haruspex, about her own experience with pregnancy loss. In it she writes about reading the blood for signs, the way I would spend the next week doing, frozen in my bathroom as the message being transmitted by my body became easier to interpret. I found out that pregnancy is not a prophecy of birth, she wrote, which I knew, technically; but the prophecy can feel so strong, until it betrays you. I also read a thousand Reddit posts, looking for reassurance that was impossible to give, until I literally blocked Reddit from my laptop to save the last shreds of my sanity. I didn’t know that, in pregnancy, so much is 50:50. That most symptoms are either perfectly fine, or a sign of the impending end, and you can’t predict which way the dial will swing until it does. A metronome, fragile and arcane. Pregnancy requires living in uncertainty, a state of trust. I truly hate uncertainty, but had no other choice.

During the (unknowingly) last days of my pregnancy I ordered To Write As If Already Dead, also by Kate Zambreno, which I have been reading as my brain slowly switches itself back on. It arrived after my miscarriage had started, and I made my first tentative non-hospital outing in several days to go and meet a beloved friend, and to finally pick it up from the bookshop. When I put on my trainers I found myself thinking thoughts like oh, I was pregnant when I last wore these, walked out the door thinking wow, last time I walked out this door I was pregnant. Everything looked the same, of course. The rupture was invisible, or mending cleanly. We got coffees and sat next to Clapton Pond, talking about ambiguous grief, watching the pond’s three surviving ducklings scurrying around, all the others having been eaten by the giant heron who rules over it lately. I have no real feelings about the heron and his bloodthirsty dominion; nature is cruel, I accept, though I did feel protective of the ducklings in a way that felt natural, and also largely unrelated to my own cosmic brush with baby-ness. In the second half of TWAIAD, a newly pregnant Zambreno writes of the ghostly feeling of early pregnancy, how “you don’t exist as a pregnant person until you get through the first one or two months alone”. I feel ghostlier still now that I’m back from my brief sojourn to another future. Maybe that is why I’m writing this.

I still don’t know if grief, ambiguous or otherwise, is the right word for what I’m feeling, but I’ve tapped into new nuances of sadness, certainly – sadness deep and acute. Gratitude, too, for how kind everyone has been. How gentle the sonographer as she explained the news in detail, saying I’m so sorry over and over; how the receptionist at my GP surgery told me she was really sorry too when I rang for a prescription, how my future antenatal appointments were cancelled discreetly without my asking. It hurt to read my report from the hospital, where I was referred to as mother. Gravida count, 1: children carried to term, 0. I took the appointment letter for my twelve week scan down from where I’d stuck it on the fridge, and cried at the thought that it referred to a baby that didn’t exist, but which I had sort of loved anyway. Tried not to feel stupid for investing so much in this mirage of a baby, a mirage of a year. A very wanted baby, I’ve been committed and patient in this baby’s conjuring. Of course I desired it too much, I’ve thought in the worst hours of the last week; of course you jinx something by longing for it with such ferocity.

I hoped to talk about this time from a vantage point further in the future and with a happy outcome, reframe it glibly, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead I am writing this from the surreal middle of it all, unable to stop myself. How have things been since the book came out? I don’t know how to answer that without making everyone uncomfortable. Actually, I’ve been dipping into the vortex of life and death! And it’s psychedelic and gory and animal here. There’s anger at everything (including myself), the tidal pull of a hormonal crash. I should be just finishing my ninth week of pregnancy, but I am not. My pregnancy is over, but when I pee on a stick to check roughly how over, it still comes up with two pink lines. I joyfully adjusted my year to accommodate the disruption, and now I must adjust it again. But you can’t just put everything back where it was before.

Perhaps it was hubristic to feel, with awe, that I was simply being given everything I wanted. I did not act with caution when it came to my heart, but then I rarely do. I didn’t consider how pregnancy isn’t a prophecy of birth, because I didn’t want to look that possibility in the eye. On the other hand, to have considered those things more soberly wouldn’t have changed the outcome, and might have robbed me of joy that was real and necessary.

Finally, I would think each morning when I woke, in disbelief, resting a hand so gently on my stomach. I still feel grateful for those weeks, even if now I’m back in the world where I was before – unwillingly, but I understand that to make another person is a game of outrageous luck, that there’s heartbreak written into the undertaking as well as the miraculous. Allow me my sentimentality. Thanks, my little egg. Thanks, and we miss you.