The consultant measured the baby and told us it was around four and a half months old. It had hands and a face and a brain. Because it was so developed, having a termination would be more complicated than if it had been earlier on in the pregnancy. He explained the procedure to me and it sounded really awful.
I was horrified beyond belief. There’s no way on earth I’m going to do that, I thought. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would. To be honest, I still don’t think I could have done it even if they’d said, ‘OK, no problem, we can do it the easy way.’ All I needed to hear was that they were going to kill it. The harsh reality of that fact changed my mind. I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t. There wasn’t one bone in my body that could have gone through with that. No, I thought. No.
‘I can’t do it, Mum,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ she said, and we got up and left.
‘Is that it?’ my dad asked when we joined them in the café where they were waiting. ‘All over?’ He assumed I’d had the termination already.
‘I didn’t do it, Dad,’ I said tearfully.
You should have seen the smiles on Dad’s and Karen’s faces when they heard that! They were overjoyed. It was the best news they’d ever heard. I was really surprised as they hadn’t given me any hint that they didn’t want me to have a termination.
My dad started crying his eyes out. ‘Oh, thank God!’ he kept saying. My mum looked really relieved.
‘Mum, Dad, Karen? Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said, looking at each of them in turn. ‘No one told me!’
‘We couldn’t,’ they said. ‘It’s your decision, don’t you see? You have to do what you have to do.’ Not for love nor money would they have told me that I was about to go and do the most horrendous thing.
It was a really emotional scene in that café. My mum was happy because, after looking at the scan and seeing the baby, she already loved it. Karen was happy because she was thinking that her two-year-old Josh, my half-brother, would have someone his own age to play with. My dad was happy for the same reason, and also because he just didn’t want me to have an abortion. Out of my whole family – all the cousins, even though some of them are six and seven years older than me – I was the first person to be pregnant with a grandchild, so I would have been killing the only grandchild in the family.
I didn’t feel happy like they did, though. I didn’t know how I felt. I still didn’t want a baby; it’s just that I didn’t want to kill it. Right, I’m not killing it, but what the hell am I going to do? I thought.
I looked at Dean. ‘Sorry, I just couldn’t go through with it,’ I said to him.
‘You need to do whatever you think is best,’ he said, ‘and I’ll support you.’
A few days after I’d been to the clinic, it was my eighteenth birthday. Everybody was turning eighteen that year and they were going out to massive clubs like Ministry of Sound, but I couldn’t drink and I couldn’t go anywhere to celebrate, so I did nothing. That’s when it really hit home how much my life was changing. My birthday didn’t mean a thing now. I wasn’t allowed to have fun any more. There would be no more carefree evenings out, no laughing all night with my friends; from now on my life would be nothing, nothing, nothingness. I hated it. On my birthday I sat at home, pregnant, wallowing in self-pity.
I even had to leave college because a quarter of the course was dance, so I wasn’t allowed to stay on for Health and Safety reasons. I tried to argue with them. ‘But I’ve been doing it while I was pregnant,’ I protested.
‘Yes, but no one knew. Sorry, but we can’t keep you on in the knowledge that you’re pregnant.’
So that was it. Suddenly I felt as if I had nothing to give, so I started cutting myself off from people. I isolated myself and went a bit weird. I didn’t want to speak to anyone and I definitely didn’t want to tell people I was having a baby. I was embarrassed. I didn’t tell my friends for ages. In the past I’d been really judgmental of teenagers who had kids. Other people would say, ‘Look at her, a kid with a kid,’ and I’d look over and think, Yes, you are a bit young. But mostly I’d think, How do you go out? What do you do all day? Poor you!
I kept wondering if it was my fault that I’d got pregnant, and I still don’t know. The fact is that condoms are only 98 per cent safe, so there’s always a 2 per cent chance that they won’t work. Perhaps I should have been on the pill or had a contraceptive injection or implant. I don’t know. I had a nagging feeling that I hadn’t done everything I could have done to avoid getting pregnant, although it was too late for regrets now.
As the woman, I’m the one who should have been more bothered about pregnancy. A man can get someone pregnant and leave. He doesn’t have to stay. He doesn’t have a bond with his child during pregnancy, whereas a woman does, almost from the minute it’s conceived – although that wasn’t the case with me! I should have been more scared of the consequences, because I was the one who could be left pregnant and alone, having to decide whether to get rid of the baby or not. No man will ever be in that situation. It’s not his decision to make.
I should have thought about it more and been more cautious. Dean was my first proper boyfriend and I should have gone to my mum for advice about contraception. I know that she would have taken me to the chemist and got me the pill – she’s so supportive and always has been – but I didn’t want to talk to her about sex or even mention it, because I was too embarrassed. So I didn’t think about it and used whatever was there, which was condoms.
Talking about sex makes me cringe, even to this day. Unless it’s the person I’m doing it with, when it’s the total opposite – I’m completely different in that situation. But otherwise I think, It’s not your business. Go away! In my view, there are things you talk about and things you don’t. I find it uncomfortable being around the kind of people who describe their sex lives in detail. ‘And then I did this … and then he did that.’
How embarrassing. Where do I look? I think. Kill me now. Swallow me up in a hole. I find it so crude and I’d rather they didn’t say anything, because I just don’t want to know. It’s funny, I’ve got a baby, so I’ve obviously had sex. Everyone in the maternity ward at the hospital where I gave birth has seen my noony, but I still cannot talk about it.
As long as I could disguise my bump, I still went out occasionally. One night Lauren tempted me out to a pub near her house in Chigwell and we soon settled into a chat. She was in the middle of telling me a story about one of her teachers at college when my phone rang.
‘It’s Dean,’ I said as I looked at the caller ID. ‘Hello?’ I said.
He didn’t say hello back. He sounded really upset, but I couldn’t catch what he was saying. I didn’t get it. I looked at Lauren and smirked slightly, as if to say, ‘What is going on?’ Dean wasn’t making any sense.
‘Come on, what’s wrong?’ I kept asking. I had no idea that the news he was about to give me would shake me to the core. I was completely unprepared for what was coming; I didn’t expect it at all. It took him about ten minutes to calm down, then finally he managed to get the words out. Our friends Phil and Sam, from the karaoke nights, had been killed in a car crash. It was a head-on collision and they’d died straightaway because they weren’t wearing seat belts.
I heard the words, but their meaning was lost on me. I just couldn’t take in what he was saying. ‘It can’t be true,’ I said. There was no way I could believe it. Phil and Sam were our friends; Phil was Dean’s best friend in the world. They couldn’t be dead. It wasn’t possible. ‘You’re joking,’ I said, hoping against hope that it wasn’t true.
But he was serious. He was at the hospital. It wasn’t a joke; there hadn’t been a mix-up. Phil and Sam were dead.
‘Shall I come down?’ I asked, in a haze of shock and disbelief.
‘No,’ he said. Phil and Sam had died before they’d arrived at the hospital, so there wasn’t any point in anyone being there, apart from their parents.
I can’t
remember how the phone call ended, but I do know that I then had to tell Lauren. She was as shocked as I was. Neither of us knew what to say. I phoned my mum. Everything was a blur. The words sounded all wrong as they came out of my mouth. ‘Sam and Phil are dead, they’re dead.’ I couldn’t believe I was saying them. ‘Mum, can I sleep in your bed tonight?’ I asked. I found it hard to sleep that night. I just lay awake, staring at the ceiling in total shock.
The next day, I went to where the accident had happened. I couldn’t believe my eyes when we got there. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. There were fields of flowers laid out around the lamppost where the cars had crashed, more flowers than I’ve ever seen before. So many people were grieving for Phil and Sam. I sat next to the lamppost for ages, keeping a vigil, paying my respects. I remember Phil’s mum and dad kept coming backwards and forwards. They were really cut up, just in bits. I felt for them so much.
Sam and Phil’s friends met up constantly in the days leading up to the funerals. No one knew what else to do with themselves. We didn’t know what to say to each other – we just didn’t get it – but we needed to be together, mourning together. The weird thing was that I kept expecting Phil and Sam to walk in and join us at any moment. It didn’t sink in that I would never see them again.
When someone dies, it’s horrible, but when someone dies young, it’s worse than anything. They were nineteen years old. It was so, so sad. When something like that happens, it makes you realize that you can die at any time. Until then, you think, I can do anything. I can jump off anything. I can go anywhere. But when Phil and Sam died, it brought home to me how close life and death really are.
Phil’s body was laid out at a funeral director’s just round the corner from my house, and since me and Lauren hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye or anything, we went to see him. But I will never, ever go and see someone in an open coffin again and I will never let my children go. Phil looked so different, so pale and old. It was really weird and I didn’t like seeing him like that at all.
The funerals took place quite soon afterwards and they were packed; there were hundreds and hundreds of people at both of them. Phil’s funeral was so awful, so sad. It was just terrible to see his mum and dad. The church was completely full, with people standing in the aisles and spilling out through the doors. There were hundreds of friends and relatives; I’ve never seen a funeral like it.
The funeral of a young person is very different to other funerals. My grandad’s funeral in 2010 was much more of a celebration, because he’d lived a long, happy life and was a longstanding, active member of his community in the Forest of Dean, where he’d been a teacher and a vicar. Representatives from the British Legion were there, because he’d served in the RAF, and there were past members of his congregation and ex-pupils all present to pay their respects. Grandad had buried a lot of his friends, so the funeral wasn’t packed out with his mates, like Phil and Sam’s, but neither was there the choking sense of horror and tragedy that everyone feels when their loved ones die before their time.
At Sam’s funeral I sang her favourite song, ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’, in the church. Everyone was crying and I had to block out my feelings to concentrate on getting through it and keeping my voice from wavering. I wanted to do the best for her and all the people who loved her so much. It was horrible, heartbreaking, just the saddest day ever.
What was strange, though, was that I didn’t feel properly sad until a few weeks afterwards, because it all felt so unreal. It was only when I went to ring Phil and Sam to see if they were coming to karaoke that the reality sank in, or if I saw something funny that I wanted to text one of them about. I’d start to ring them and then realize that I couldn’t. I couldn’t ring them, text them or see them ever again. It was the oddest thing.
I was still going to the karaoke, but it wasn’t the same now that Phil and Sam weren’t there, and as the weeks passed I became more and more conscious of being pregnant. Dean didn’t tell anyone, because I’d asked him not to, and I was skinny enough to get away with it, so no one had guessed yet.
In the end, I told my closest friends my news: the two Laurens, Dana and Mel. They were really good to me, even though I was the worst company. I don’t remember a lot between then and the day I went into labour. It was all nothingness, a blur of boredom and depression. When my bump started to show, I stopped going out altogether and spent the days just sitting at home in complete blankness, feeling miserable. My friends would come round and do nothing with me, just sit there and watch me being miserable. I was horrible to be with, but they stuck by me.
Dana even gave up drinking and clubbing to support me. She sat at home with me when everyone else was out, being pregnant with me. ‘We’ll go next year,’ she’d say reassuringly. ‘We’ll do it all next year.’ What a great friend.
Nothing could cheer me up. Not my friends, who came round and spent endless days and evenings keeping me company; not my sister, who was all excited about the baby and kept trying to get me interested in buying baby clothes, and not my mum, who said, ‘If we’re having a baby, we need to decorate the house and freshen it up.’
I just sat there, an ever-expanding lump, while Mum cheerily painted and decorated around me. I shut out all Mum’s positive comments about the baby, I ignored my sister’s growing excitement and I barely responded to Dean and my friends when they came round to keep me company. I just stared at the TV thinking, This is it now. My life is over.
Chapter 7
It was six o’clock on a Friday morning and I was asleep on a mattress on the bedroom floor, with my mum sleeping next to me. Dreams were swirling around my head, haunting images of a pram with no baby in it and a baby without a face.
Suddenly I woke up, feeling weird. ‘Mum, I’m really uncomfortable,’ I complained. She just laughed. Of course I was uncomfortable: I was the size of a house, I was nine months pregnant and the baby was nine days overdue.
I knew for sure that it was a boy now. I’d decided to call him Zachary, which is my favourite boy’s name. I was thankful it wasn’t a girl. ‘Please God, don’t let it be a girl,’ I’d prayed when I first found out I was pregnant, because I shuddered at the thought of having to deal with a teenager like me. Having a boy would be a whole lot easier, surely.
Zach was so late coming that the hospital had arranged to induce me the next day. He was either going to come out naturally or they were going to force him out. I was dreading it. I kept having dreams about my bump suddenly falling off. Where did it go? Where’s my bump?
And how on earth would I cope once he was out? I had no idea what to do with a baby. It was such a daunting responsibility. What if I was no good? What if I made some terrible mistake? In my dreams, I was constantly leaving him places and losing him.
I turned over on the mattress. ‘I really can’t sleep, Mum,’ I said. ‘I think there’s something wrong.’
‘You’ll be all right,’ she reassured me.
Alarm bells rang in my head. Normally she would have said something like, ‘OK, well, let’s get you down to the hospital and have you checked out.’ What was going on?
Then it dawned on me: She knows! She knew what was coming, which was why she was ignoring my discomfort. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘I’m in labour, aren’t I?’
‘No,’ she said and she laughed again.
But I could tell I was from the way she was acting. This is it, I thought, my heart pounding with fear. Here goes. Oh no, Mum!
I wanted my mum with me all the time now. I felt scared when I was on my own, so I needed her close, especially at night. She was really supportive, so if she didn’t actually sleep next to me, she would be in and out to check on me.
A slow, dull ache spread across my stomach and I felt a spasm of pain. It had finally come, the moment I was dreading. What would happen? I hadn’t been to antenatal classes, but I knew to expect pain. I knew that someone was going to ask me to push at some point, after which I’d be giving birth. I knew all of this. I
also knew that I was going to have contractions, which would feel like bad period cramps.
A bolt of pain shot up my back. ‘Mum!’ I called out. ‘It hurts!’
‘It must be a contraction,’ my mum said. ‘Hang on, it’ll be over soon.’
Oh. My. God. Who said that contractions would feel like a period pain? What a lie! This was pain on another level altogether, like nothing I’d ever known before. And it just got worse and worse and worse. My belly was one big cramping ache. And something was pressing against my back, grinding against my spine from the inside. It hurt so much.Originally I’d wanted to have a home birth, so I stayed at home, in awful, awful pain, for about eight hours. I lay on the floor; I sat in the bath; I tried every room and every position, just trying to get comfortable. The midwife came round to give me gas and air while I was in the bath, which helped a bit. I told her I didn’t want to go to hospital. It was the last thing I wanted, because nobody is allowed in there with you and you never get out.
While the midwife was with me, my dad and Karen turned up with my sister and brothers. Everyone came round. Oh my goodness, I had a houseful of people! Meanwhile, I was upstairs in the bath, thinking, Help!
‘Go away!’ I shouted.
Time crawled along and the pain got worse. I was in agony. Things weren’t going how they should: my cervix wasn’t dilating fast enough – only a centimetre every couple of hours – and it just wasn’t happening. Then the baby started to get stressed, so all of a sudden it was an emergency. An ambulance arrived, its lights flashing, and I was helped into the back of it. By this point I didn’t care about anything except stopping the pain. I wasn’t worried about the baby. It was just, ‘Get it out of me, because it’s hurting!’
Half my family came with me to the hospital, where I was wheeled straight into the maternity ward. In no time, they were sticking a needle into my back and giving me an epidural to ease the pain. The epidural didn’t do much, though, because I had a ‘back labour’ as opposed to a ‘front labour’, apparently. With a back labour, the awkward position of the baby puts pressure on your back, which means that all the pain is centred there. With a front labour, the pain is more spread out.
Stacey: My Story So Far Page 9