Happily Ever After?

by Benison Anne O'Reilly

  Greg, our obstetrician, was there to meet us. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, ‘I only wish I could change things so this never happened.’

  I was not taken to the labour ward. That would have been unbearable, being with the other mothers as they delivered their healthy, living, breathing, crying babies. The drugs I’d been given to induce labour took a while to work. The anaesthetist gave me an epidural for pain relief. I’d read in all the baby books how labour pain was a ‘good’ pain because it produced a baby at the end, but there was nothing good about my pain. Tony was a darling, staying by my side the whole time, although I was frightened a little by his quietness.

  It took several hours. After I’d delivered they asked us if we wanted to see it. I did but Tony refused and left the room. It was tiny and bony but perfectly formed. It…he…was a little boy - our William.

  We gathered our belongings together and got ready to leave the hospital. As we were walking towards the door, Greg handed me a prescription.

  ‘What’s this for?’ I asked, thinking at first it might be a sedative.

  ‘It’s something to stop your milk coming in,’ he explained, wearing an expression I recognised as professional detachment.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ I said. Poor little Baby William wouldn’t be needing my milk.

  ***

  Technically, I had what is termed a late miscarriage. I’m throwing out a challenge to the medical fraternity to come up with a more appropriate term. If I had lost a baby before the twelve weeks’ mark, yes, I would have been very upset I’m sure, especially after taking so long to conceive. But to get almost half way through the pregnancy, to begin to show, to see my baby alive and apparently healthy on an eleven-week scan, to hear his heartbeat at sixteen weeks and then to lose him after all that, it made it so…so…much harder. It wasn’t just a miscarriage. We had lost a dearly beloved baby and a longed for future with our son.

  Tony wanted explanations. We sent William off for tests and we had several investigations ourselves, but no cause could be found. Our obstetrician said that this often happened; it was ‘just bad luck’. This infuriated Tony. He wanted to know why and it wasn’t satisfactory to have no explanation.

  I was numb and quiet on that first day, but after that quickly turned into a blubbering mess. My husband, on the other hand, remained calm and angry. Not angry with me fortunately - just angry that life had dealt us such a bitter blow. He wanted someone or something to blame and for a while all his focus turned on Greg the obstetrician, which, since he was one of David’s friends, was deeply embarrassing for me. Greg seemed almost as upset by events as we were and I thought it unfair of Tony, but lashing out at the nearest target was clearly his way of coping.

  After William’s autopsy, the hospital organised a cremation. This was not required by law, technically he was too young to be classified as ‘a person’. We scattered his ashes in the rose garden at Tony’s parents’ house. We were planning to eventually sell our Annandale digs and could not have left our little baby behind there.

  Edward told me to take as much time off as I needed and in the end I was away from work for a full month. My body had to recover from pregnancy and my mind - well I don’t think I’ll ever completely recover, but I knew I needed to be able to function at work without collapsing in tears every five minutes. Tony, however, returned to flying straight away. ‘I need to,’ he explained. ‘It’s only when I’m in the air that I feel in control and can forget about things.’ I understood this but still felt hurt about his abandonment that very first time he left for overseas.

  I stayed at Mum and Dad’s on that first occasion. Mum took leave from work, hugged me and stroked me and made me endless cups of tea. Dad hovered apologetically in the background, unable to think of what to say. Emma gave me manicures and pedicures. I was coddled and nurtured and watched bad daytime television (not the Olympics, I refused to see happy smiling people) and cried my eyes out for days.

  Even David dropped by, making an impromptu stop-over on his way back from a medical conference.

  ‘My poor lil’ sis,’ he said, taking me in a tight hold, ‘I understand how hard it is for you not to have an explanation for why this has happened, but medicine is often unsatisfactory that way. We don’t always have all the answers.’ I wished Tony could have been there to hear this from his friend; it might have helped him.

  I can’t explain to you, unless you’ve been through something similar yourself, what a failure I felt. Conceiving a baby and giving birth has been the role of women throughout the ages, yet I’d flunked the course. What a loser. I was such a hopeless mother I hadn’t even realised that my baby had died in my womb. It was clear to me I was not fit for the role. When I dared venture outside the front door I was confronted by the sight - everywhere it seemed - of pregnant woman contentedly stroking their bellies or mothers fussing over fretting babies in prams. They had managed it, but I hadn’t. I hated those mothers for a time.

  Then, naturally, I started reflecting back on Pamela’s words. Maybe I should have stopped my exercise routine. In retrospect it seemed horribly superficial to have worried about how I looked during the pregnancy. What if I had exercised too hard and had killed my own baby? Or was it that I had been working too long hours? Or that night I got drunk around the time of conception, maybe I was being punished for that? I must have done something wrong. I was not brave enough to see my mother-in-law for a time. I was in too fragile a state to cope with her. If she had made any remarks to Tony I didn’t want to know. I was certain that blame, if it was to be apportioned, would not be directed towards her son. I was so grateful during that time that he never once voiced a word of recrimination towards me.

  I got very low, so much so that Mum got anxious. I was too depressed to even shower or wash my hair and looked a fright. She dragged me off to the GP, who referred me to a wonderful psychologist called Claire. I also discovered a counselling service for women just like me, those who had lost babies through miscarriage or stillbirth. The fact that there was such a service was reassurance in itself, I knew that there must have been lots of other women in a similar situation otherwise it wouldn’t have existed. Counselling ended up being my lifeline. I raged and sobbed and cursed my fate to these counsellors and said all the bad things I’d thought but had not been able to express and they reassured me that it was okay and that it was not my fault and I was not bad and that in all likelihood I would have a baby one day. I was referred to online chat groups where I met a lot of other women who’d been through a similar experience: we commiserated with one another and bucked each other up. I was no longer alone.

  Thank God for those wonderful people. I urged Tony to get counselling himself but he refused: ‘I don’t need to sit around fucking navel gazing with some ageing hippy.’

  ‘You don’t have to see Claire. We could find someone else.’

  ‘I’m fine. We just need to have another baby and things will be okay.’

  ‘But they won’t be. We can never replace our lost baby, even if we have ten others. You need to talk to someone.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said and I knew nothing I could say would change his mind.

  One of the things that Claire taught me was that grief, whatever its cause, will in the short term leave you with a great gaping wound. I’ve heard others describe it as being as if someone had violently ripped their heart out of their chest and stomped on it. It wasn’t quite like that for me. I felt I’d been admitted to hospital for another procedure that September day, the doctors neatly and efficiently opening my chest and surgically removing my heart and surrounding tissue, leaving a bare cavity where once life and hope had pulsed. So for me it happened quietly - almost by stealth - but the outcome was just the same.

  By late October I felt I needed to return to work but it was still very hard. I left my office one day glowing and expectant and returned weeks later drained and defeated. Edward was k
ind and attentive but the wider work environment was another matter. Co-workers avoided me. They would talk about me in hushed and serious voices and if I was walking down a corridor I’d see them quickly duck into their offices and hide. Perhaps I would do the same if I saw a strange zombie woman without a heart coming towards me but still their attitude hurt. I began to believe they thought my grief was contagious.

  My counsellors were able to reassure me that this was a common reaction: people do care, they explained, but because they don’t know what to say they end up saying nothing.

  Only Melanie knew exactly what to do. That very first morning she enclosed me in a tight embrace and let me cry my eyes out in her arms. After that I felt a bit better, although it took me a good few months before I was completely able to concentrate on my job and get back to my best. Edward quietly caught a lot of dropped balls for me back then.

  The person in the office who made most strenuous efforts to avoid me during this time was Christina, whose first baby was due at the same time William had been expected, her growing belly a daily reminder of what I’d lost. So one day I just walked into her office and said, ‘Please don’t feel you need to avoid me Christina. I appreciate your sensitivity but this is not your fault. I am happy for you, truly.’ We found it easier from then on. But in February, when an email was circulated announcing that she’d given birth to a bouncing four kilogram boy called Jake, I disappeared to the ladies’ toilets and cried the bitterest tears of my life.

  It took a long time for that hollow feeling to go away, but eventually it did. A scar has now closed over, although I know from experience that it will always remain tender. For a while there I thought I’d completely lost my sense of humour but it has returned intact and I am for the most part fine these days. Isabel has seen to that. All the same, the strangest things can set me off. Just the other month we attended a birthday party for one of the girls at Isabel’s preschool. This little girl had an older brother who was almost exactly the age that William would have been. He was blond and bouncy and gorgeous and I found myself crying quietly all over again.

  I still miss my little boy.

  More than anything I’d love to re-experience the feeling I had that September morning - on a day which would subsequently turn out to be the worst of my life - when I watched my handsome husband walk up the road towards me. It’s silly really, we’d already lost William by then. But I want to relive the feeling I had that life was good and was going to deliver me all that I wanted. I know I’ll never completely recapture that, but I guess that’s what growing up is all about.

  So that Tuesday in September was the day I realised that fairytales never really do come true. What I didn’t understand for quite some time was that our baby was not the only thing that we lost that day.

  6

  The joys of motherhood

  It took me a while to be ready to try again for another baby - four months in fact.

  Once again it took a long time to conceive. Not quite as long as my previous pregnancy: it was ten months rather than fourteen. But there was no early period of anticipation to liven proceedings this time. It was down to business straight away and therefore it seemed to take just as long. And somewhere along the line Tony and I stopped making love and started having ‘sexual intercourse’. Sex became the dull reproductive variety my class had snickered over in Personal Development lessons at school: one of those 1950’s style black and white illustrations of a man inserting his penis in a woman’s vagina, the only objective creating a baby. It all seemed joyless and clinical; the fun and passion were gone.

  Every month I didn’t fall pregnant was a blow. The sight of blood dripping down my thighs or tell-tale cramps in my abdomen taunted me like a bullying schoolgirl - I’d failed again. It was only my cheerers and supporters on the online chat group, those fellow travellers on the infertility bandwagon, who kept me going during this time. They alone seemed to know that conceiving a baby and carrying it to term were not God

  given rights.

  Eventually a test came up positive again. But my troubles were not over. The next nine and a half months were to be amongst the most miserable of my life - I was terrified up until delivery day that something would go wrong.

  If it had been possible to hold my breath for the entire pregnancy, that’s what I would have done: every tummy ache and pain, every visit to the toilet (would there be blood?), was fraught with anxiety. I relaxed a bit after I passed the eighteen-week ultrasound with a live and healthy foetus, but even then refused to make any plans, buy any clothes or equipment, or imagine any sort of future life with a child. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, only to have them dashed on the rocks again.

  The use of the word ‘I’ here is deliberate. Tony consciously detached himself from the whole process this time.

  ‘I can’t go through it again,’ he said, when he advised me not to take into consideration his schedule when making the ultrasound appointments.

  ‘This is because you didn’t get counselling when you should have. You haven’t dealt with it properly.’

  ‘Whatever…I still don’t want to.’

  ‘It’s a shame I don’t have that option. What will people think?’

  ‘They don’t have to know. Say I’m working or something. I’m sure your mum will go with you. Or my mum, even.’

  Pamela! Not likely! So, humiliated and disappointed, I took my mother instead. Tony got to see the images later. I insisted on continuing with the same obstetrician, Greg, but considering the frosty relations that existed between the two after my last pregnancy, I wasn’t so disappointed that my husband refused to attend any antenatal appointments with me. By this time I was just hoping he’d consent to turn up for the birth.

  Ultimately I had what doctors call an ‘uncomplicated pregnancy’, but they only make that assessment in crude medical terms.

  It was on the occasion of Douglas’ birthday that we decided to tell Pamela that I was pregnant again. We’d been summoned to the family home for lunch.

  ‘I thought you must have been expecting as soon as I saw you,’ she said when we were alone together preparing lunch. ‘You’re carrying quite a bit of extra weight. But forgive me if I don’t get too excited yet. We’ll have to see if you’re capable of carrying this one to term first.’

  I don’t know why she didn’t just grab the kitchen knife she was using to slice the tomatoes and plunge it into my chest. Probably it was the thought of bloodstains on her marble benchtops - it certainly would have been no more painful. That was the thing about Pamela: she always saved her worst for when the two of us were alone together. That way there were no witnesses.

  Later at lunch, however, the temptation became too great.

  ‘I’m hoping the fact you’ve gained weight means you aren’t exercising too much. We’ll never know for sure that wasn’t the problem last time.’

  Andrew and Douglas protested in perfect harmony:

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Pamela!’

  My husband, on the other hand, was the unenthusiastic backing singer who missed his cue.

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ he added, too belatedly for me to feel reassured.

  ‘Now Pamela, no-one feels worse about what happened than Ellie,’ said Douglas. ‘Comments like that are very unhelpful.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Tony. Again I would have preferred more conviction.

  On the way home in the car, I brought this conversation up again. ‘Thanks for all your support this afternoon when your mother tried to sheet home to me the blame for William.’

  ‘I did support you…Anyway, you should know by now what Mum’s like. She says these things just to get a reaction.’

  ‘Some things are off limits.’

  ‘I suppose so. The thing is I don’t believe this bullshit the doctors spout about our baby dying for “no reason”. There must have been a reason and I guess we c
an’t exclude anything you did…or I did for that matter.’

  A cold fear settled in my stomach. Was Pamela’s poison finally hitting its mark? Or was it possible that in those long silences after we’d lost William he’d been thinking these treacherous thoughts all along?

  ‘The doctors aren’t saying it happened for no reason. Obviously there was a reason. They’re saying that there is no way of determining the reason and that it’s nobody’s fault. Why can’t you get that? Anyway, I’m not exercising this time, so you’ll just have to put up with me getting fat.’

  ‘I didn’t necessarily say it was the exercise but you could try eating a bit less.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I’m trying to eat healthily but I’m hungry all the time.’

  ‘I can see that. I think you ate more than me at lunchtime.’

  ‘I’m carrying your child, Tony. I think you could be a bit kinder about all this.’

  ***

  Exercising was not the only thing off the agenda. During the last pregnancy, once we’d been given the green light by our obstetrician, we’d resumed love making. This time Tony declared that, as the doctors knew ‘crap all about anything’, he was not going to touch me.

  At first I was in complete agreement. I was terrified something would happen to the baby and my libido disappeared just as it had when I’d been pregnant with William. However, as the pregnancy continued without complication I began to think this might be a mistake.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be intercourse. I could give you pleasure in other ways. You always said I was good at that.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to bother you. You’re always so tired these days,’ he’d say.

  But by then I had begun to fear another reason.

  Once the sex was out of the picture I was startled to realise how little we now touched in a non-sexual way. Was this an inevitable consequence of marriage and familiarity? I wasn’t sure about that. There were times I found him looking at me with an expression I didn’t understand and something he’d said to me years earlier kept coming to my mind: Judge me by my actions not my words.