016. Loads of People Talk About This Stuff

(and it’s still not enough)

There was a time, after my book came out, after my son was born, when I thought I might be done talking about this stuff.

By ‘this stuff’ I mean wanting to have a baby but not knowing if you’ll be able to, or undergoing fertility treatment, or having miscarriages, or the visceral emotional response a scan photo or a pregnancy announcement can elicit even when you know better than to tangle up your own wants and sense of well-being with someone else’s. By ‘done’ I mean I thought I might have said my piece, and that I could hand the baton on to all the other writers, smarter and with much more to say about these things than me, who are working in this area.

My son was born, as I’ve written about previously, in the very early months of the pandemic, when things like birth and death were largely being endured in isolation. My book came out when my son was seven months old. In Britain we had just entered a second lockdown. The weather was bitter. I was not getting enough sleep. My days were spent with my baby strapped to my chest, trudging through ankle-deep mud in the nature reserve near our house, seeking but not always finding beauty in the bare tree branches and the swollen river. Solace was found in the company of friends who would trudge with me at a respectable distance, and in making my son giggle, and sometimes in a message received from someone who had read my book when they needed it most, but all in all I do not have entirely fond memories of this time.

After my son was born I entered, abruptly and inelegantly, what the poet Liz Berry famously calls the republic of motherhood: that whole wild fucking queendom,/its sorrow, its unbearable skinless beauty. I had spent so long trying to gain admission to this queendom that it was something of a shock to find myself there. You’d think that after six years of trying to have a baby I might have in some way actually prepared myself for the reality of it, but it had become a protective mechanism not to prepare, and so there I was, about as unready for parenthood as a person who had chosen to undergo numerous tests and treatments and surgeries and rounds of IVF, all in aid of becoming a parent, could possibly be.

I came to believe, in this strange time, post book, post baby, trudging round and round the same muddy loop, that whether or not I had further children was a choice. And for a long time I enjoyed not making that choice: reclaiming my body, my brain, negotiating an identity as a mother that could sit comfortably alongside the identity I had formed before becoming one.

It took me a long time to do this. I suppose it doesn’t take everyone so long: some people are keen to jump back into the water right away. I wasn’t. I knew on some level perhaps I should be – time was not really on my side anymore – but I could not make myself want it when my son was nine months old, like some people I know have done, or when he was a year old, or when he was eighteen months, or even two years old. I thought I might drown if I did it again too soon.

Some of this was down to the shock and exhaustion of new parenthood, but a lot of it was a response to the residual shock and exhaustion of years of infertility, recurrent miscarriages and fertility treatment. It can be hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced these things what the relief, one way or another, of giving it a rest for a bit can feel like. I did not have to think about my (in)ability to reproduce! I could write stories that ignored this experience entirely! This is what I mean when I say that I thought I was done talking about this stuff: that I was keen to wrest some sense of self back from the abyss that had nothing to do with any of that.

On the other hand was an awareness: I had always wanted more children. I did want more children. The desire was abstract at first, a thing I knew I wanted but didn’t actually want in my gut, and then suddenly, it was an overwhelming desire. I understood that I needed to try, because trying is all we can ever do. But I’ll be frank: I thought we’d cracked it. Once I’d done it with my son I could no longer understand except in abstract terms why it had seemed so difficult to have a baby.

In other words, I’d forgotten the route I took to enter the republic. I’d forgotten the roots of my own story.

*

The autumn we finally embarked on another round of IVF was unsettled. This was eighteen months ago, give or take; we had a two-and-a-half-year-old, and emotions were never far from the surface. The weather was too warm and too wet, so that I was perpetually sweating through my T-shirts and wiping raindrops off my glasses. My husband was drifting through a period of precarious employment. I was trying to be a writer again, trying trying trying, but feeling like perhaps I’d lost the knack, or missed my moment: as with having another baby, perhaps I should have jumped back in immediately after my book came out, rather than waiting for my heart to catch up with my ambition.

I had recently become obsessed with Grey’s Anatomy after a decade-long hiatus, and to be perfectly honest all I really wanted to do was lie on the couch and watch beautiful doctors negotiate preposterous emotional melodramas while performing preposterous surgical feats and somehow, miraculously, grow a baby without effort or emotional investment: I wanted to be numb to the whole thing. I found the injections and appointments involved with IVF this time around disorientating and difficult. It wasn’t just the logistics of, for example, hiding in the toilet to assemble a syringe full of progesterone while my son roamed the house seeking me, but also the mood swings, which I hadn’t remembered from previous rounds. Was it advancing age, general exhaustion, the darkness and dampness of the season? The night of the embryo transfer I tried to have a sort of ceremony with a friend during which we lit a bonfire in my back garden and she gifted me a jar full of fertility symbols, but my wood was wet and the fire wouldn’t light properly, so we sat shivering in the drizzle and the smoke for a while observing the failure of our efforts and then discovered we’d been locked out of the house.

Towards the end of the two-week-wait my husband and my son and I went on a strange little holiday to Norfolk during which I felt absolutely certain that the transfer hadn’t worked. But then lo and behold it had worked: two lines on a urine-soaked stick, that invitation to consider all the ways your life might tendril out from this moment.

As soon as I saw those lines I was immediately on the back foot, in spite of my initial conviction that now I’d had my son I’d cracked the whole fertility game. I was terrified of everything, of bleeding, of not bleeding, of the pregnancy sticking, of it not sticking. I was terrified that in the moment during the two-week wait when I’d unthinkingly hoisted my tantruming toddler, heavy and writhing with rage, onto my shoulders, I might have written the fate of this pregnancy. I was terrified that I wasn’t devoting enough of my physical and emotional energy to the child I did have, that somehow this act of trying for another baby represented an act of greed or ingratitude. I was terrified that even having these thoughts suggested an unreadiness I could still access in my body if I reached for it, and that this unreadiness itself suggested a fundamental flaw in the whole plan.

To quiet my mind I did the only thing I could think of: I watched hour after hour after hour after hour of Grey’s Anatomy. I watched so much Grey’s Anatomy that I started having dreams in which I was a talented surgeon facing a challenging operation with a self-assuredness I’ve never felt about anything in my own life, ever.

I didn’t bleed once in that pregnancy. I’d never not bled in a pregnancy before, even the one that resulted in my son. Still, at nine weeks a scan revealed that the embryo had no heartbeat. I felt devastated more by the familiarity of the territory I now found myself in than by the miscarriage itself. Here again. What threw me was the feeling of regression: of having taken no steps out of the murk after all. And the creeping sensation that, in fact, no matter what happened or didn’t happen in terms of my own desire for another child, I was not done talking about this stuff, or writing about it.

*

Not long before we embarked on that cycle of IVF I submitted an essay for inclusion in what would become Kat Brown’s incredible anthology No One Talks About This Stuff, ‘a support group for almost-parents’ that brings together a wide array of different perspectives on infertility, pregnancy and baby loss, childlessness, parenting after loss, and many other things.

In my piece I wrote about all of my pregnancies – all five of them, as they were then. I opened by describing a pregnant self-portrait by the artist Ghislaine Howard, a self-portrait which is in fact unfinished, its progress interrupted by the early arrival of her son. This detail appeals strongly to me. I’ve always wanted to write about this stuff from a perspective of ongoingness, because that to me reflects the lived reality of it: the self-portrait which is always unfinished, which is, to borrow a piece of phrasing from my academic days, always becoming.

The truth is I don’t think that no one talks about this stuff, though certainly we don’t talk about it enough, out in the open, casually, comfortably, in the same way we talk about our jobs or our romantic relationships. I do think that people can find it hard to hear. Our cultural discomfort with nuance, with the idea that two seemingly opposing things can be true at once, our cultural discomfort with unresolved narratives, makes it difficult to tell, let alone sell, stories that don’t offer the reader or listener any obvious consolation. Narratives about this stuff so often, still, have, or are expected to have, a qualification: this happened, but [then something else great happened instead]; this happened but at least [it wasn’t as bad as it could have been]. Even just this happened, rather than this is happening: a resistance to the present tense in favour of the solidity of the past tense, a tense which implies resolution.

In the face of this discomfort simply sitting with someone else’s sadness, or ambivalence, or confusion, can feel like a radical act.

But I also think that it can feel difficult to talk about this stuff because we lack the vocabulary for it. The author and journalist Jennie Agg has written beautifully about this, how one single word – ‘miscarriage’ – is made to encompass such a breadth and depth of physical experiences so as almost to render the term close to meaningless. Sometimes it can feel like no one is talking about this stuff because the language other people are using doesn’t touch your own experience; sometimes it can feel like it’s impossible to talk about this stuff because there are no words to actually convey what this stuff is. It’s too messy – literally or figuratively, or both. It’s too personal, and also too universal. It’s too subjective: what I find painful may seem like nothing to you; what I find funny may seem inappropriate; what seems like nothing to me may be everything to you. The weight of language, then, as well as the language itself, is hard to assign accurately. Where do I put the emphasis in my story so that it translates? Where do you put the emphasis in yours?

Maybe we’re telling the same story, you and I, and we don’t even know it.

*

In spite of what I’ve said about our cultural discomfort with unresolved narratives, I do like tying threads together, in the same way that I like completing laps at the swimming pool. I like to exit where I entered.

Should I find a way to resolve this essay, then? In one version of the conclusion, perhaps the author reveals that she’s expecting another baby. (Perhaps, poetically, this happened when she stopped thinking about it. Perhaps it’s twins.) Or perhaps she reveals that she’s undergone another round of IVF, but that it didn’t work; or that she’s decided in fact not to try to have another baby after all.

Perhaps she talks about taking the train to London one evening, changing into high heels on Exhibition Road, standing a little unsteadily in a room full of other authors who contributed to No One Talks About This Stuff, feeling overawed, overjoyed, by the meeting of so many different stories, by their points of sympathy and overlap.

Perhaps she reveals nothing, because there’s nothing to reveal. Perhaps acceptance of irresolution begins with an embrace of all the ways your life might tendril out from this moment.

*

My memoir Adrift: Fieldnotes from Almost-Motherhood is out now. You can buy it from your favourite independent bookshop, or via any of the links below:

Daunt | Blackwell’s | Bookshop.org | Waterstones | Amazon