No room to grieve

In August, during the week I waited for an appointment to confirm that I was having my fifth miscarriage, I didn’t let myself grieve.  

The time for that will come, I thought. Not yet, I thought. When we know for certain, that’s when I will let this grief in.

Instead, I did my usual work. Cooked our usual meals. I tidied the house. I scrubbed at a stain on the hallway rug, where one of the cats had murdered a bird.

Then, when we did know for certain, it still didn’t feel like the right time yet. We had people coming to stay in a few days. I knew I could have cancelled. I knew they’d understand only too well. But I didn’t want to. Sympathy could wait. Sadness could wait.

Instead, I changed the bedding. Hoovered and stuck some bleach down the loo. Instead, I chose pizza, wine, and enjoying ourselves without the cold hand of other people’s concern on our shoulder.

In the weeks after that, I got up in the mornings. I took Edward to nursery. I went to my usual yoga class. I sent out newsletters. I suppose I could have not done these things, but I couldn’t see the sense in it.

I bought new leggings and a sports bra. I re-downloaded Couch 2 5K. My mum took Edward for a weekend. And, in lieu of feeling any feelings, Dan and I cleared out the garage.

I took on a last-minute commission to help someone out. The journalist who’d originally been assigned the job had had to return it ‘for personal reasons’. I let my own personal reasons interrupt nothing. Even the bleeding stopped in time for the new term’s swimming lessons.

I kept thinking that grief was bound to barge in soon enough: no point in inviting it before I had to. So I visited friends’ new babies. I went to a party. I wasn’t even pasting on a smile, like I have done before: there wasn’t any grief yet to mask.

I started the Christmas shopping. I phoned the GP and told them I wasn’t pregnant any more. I got my hair cut. I got a wax. The beautician asked me if I had children, followed by: ‘Is it just the one you have?’

But still grief felt out of reach.

Then, at some point, it started to feel too late for all that anyway. If I thought about it, I would surely fall apart. And there was no space or time for me to fall apart now. At some point, I started walking around with these sentences forming in my head. And that felt like a good enough substitute.

One day, last week, I cried in the shower. It was as if my body recognised something had to give, but my brain made it pick the least inconvenient moment possible: when my face was already wet.

My showers these days last less than three minutes. Perhaps four minutes if I have to wash my hair. It takes me 11 minutes to drive Edward to nursery. 9 minutes to cook pasta. 4 minutes 30 seconds to do an egg. 49 minutes for one load of laundry. The best part of two hours to write 1,000 words.

I know because I have timed all of these things, for one reason or another. I am always setting myself timers in order to get things done. But I don’t feel I’ve even started the clock on my grief for this sixth – and possibly final – pregnancy.

I told myself that perhaps this week, Baby Loss Awareness Week, would be the right moment. But here it is and I’m still not ready. This year, I’ve come offline because I find I do not want to be sad in public. This is very different to how I’ve felt before; when I needed the depth of my grief for those other pregnancies to be witnessed, understood.

This time, I want to hide it away. I picture it, this theoretical grief, like a golden jar I have placed on a shelf for the time being. It sits next to another box I have put other questions in: Do we try again? Can we try again? Is this it? Or is it worth gambling once more – or however many times it takes – with my body, my sanity?

‘We don’t have to decide anything right now,’ Dan has reminded me, a few times since the miscarriage.

One day, though, both vessels will have to come down from the shelf. We will have to answer the questions in the box, eventually.

Then – and perhaps only then – I will open up the jar containing this grief and see what it is like.  

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