by Camilla Gibb
We got married that year in the presence of our family and friends, committing ourselves to loving and honouring and cherishing unto death. The sight of Anna’s elderly and dignified Catholic father offering his blessing broke more than a few hearts. I had the feeling of a circle being made complete.
2
Almost.
Four years into our relationship, at the precise age of thirty-six years and four months, I was shocked by the strong and sudden desire to have a baby. It was a novel and completely unexpected feeling, a biological hostage-taking that I listened to but interrogated at the same time. Was it real desire if it was biologically driven rather than consciously determined? Was this nature’s way of ensuring the survival of the species, because if we all thought about it rationally, too few of us would elect to reproduce? Was this desire a reflection of the security and comfort that Anna and I shared? Having a baby together, an extension of that love?
The answer to all those questions was yes. It no longer concerned me that I had a father who was mentally ill; I didn’t worry about some biological inheritance. If you performed an autopsy on my father’s life it would be a wonder if he weren’t sick. Psychoanalysis had liberated me from fears that psychiatry had only fed.
What concerned me was the question of how I could be both a mother and a writer, both passions so all-consuming. That became the fulcrum over which the balance tipped back and forth. We would start the process of trying to get pregnant, then I would back away. Anna was patient and supportive. The desire to have a baby returned and returned again. Anna, who was six years older, understood. She’d ridden her own waves in her thirties. Now we were riding mine. Hers had subsided. Presumably mine would. By my late thirties I had felt safe in assuming they had.
We were ambitious, though, for a bit of challenge and adventure. If we weren’t going to have a child, why not pursue something we had often fantasized about and move to England? We both had EU passports and family in England; more importantly, we had each other in a shared dream. And so we moved to London in the summer of 2008, full of brazen excitement. We rented out our house in Toronto, putting a question mark beside it for the time being. We had given ourselves a year in which to try to anchor ourselves.
We had a glorious and indulgent summer, with a flat in North London, a garden in which to read the papers, a city of fabulous restaurants and markets and galleries to explore, and short trips to Dublin and Bruges.
There was the added joy for me of ample time with my cousin Tamzin. We are the daughters of two brothers—one light, one dark—and we think and feel in common ways that never require explanation.
This was the first extended period of time I had spent in Tamzin’s world since she’d had children. I marvelled at her capabilities as a mother—naturally empathic but no pushover, funny and generous, frank about her own limitations and the challenges of parenting, loving and affectionate but unsentimental—absolutely solid in her role.
Her son was at school during the day and she was at home with her eighteen-month-old daughter, Lulu. I was totally smitten by this beautiful little creature. How abstract my own longing for a child had been. Apart from the long-held fantasy of adopting one little Ethiopian girl, my desire to be a mother had existed in a vacuum. Here was the day-to-day reality of life with a small child. A child to whom I was related, her mother a woman with whom I have so much in common—here was proof that people like me could be mothers.
While that love flourished, our romance with London began to wane. Three months after we arrived, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, heralding a global financial crisis that was immediately palpable in London. Anna was job-hunting at the worst possible moment, months during which the words collapse, crunch, restraint and austerity dominated headlines. For my part, I couldn’t even manage to persuade a newspaper editor to allow me to review a book. We don’t need your voice. We have plenty of our own.
After the collapse we were renting a flat for double its market value. And we had signed a lease for a year. Things were suddenly looking very gloomy. We were forced to spend time apart in order to manage our responsibilities in two places, an ocean between.
Winter came. The wind rattled the single panes in our London flat and the dark came early. I recognized, far too viscerally, the greys of this place. I made the long commute to Tamzin’s house and played with her baby girl.
Occasionally I looked after Lulu while Tamzin went to pick up her son. One afternoon, I was pushing Lulu in her stroller toward the tube station to meet her mother. It was a long and dodgy walk, largely unpeopled, through a sprawling council estate, and I felt a greater sense of threat than usual. I was responsible for this baby. Entirely responsible in this moment. I stuck to the road, avoiding shortcuts, crossing over whenever a man was approaching, or a large dog, or when a bend in the road obscured the view ahead.
I would kill for this child, I realized. The only other person I’d ever felt this way about was Anna. You play these games with yourself—at least I do. Would you give this person a kidney if they needed it? Your bone marrow, a lung?
I would have given Anna my heart if she’d needed it. Her life was more precious to me than my own. It’s not that I still carried a suicidal impulse, that I thought my own life unworthy. It’s that I am unsentimental about my own existence, a random happenstance of genetic collision. My life is not necessary, it just is. But I can cherish the life of another. I can feel almost spiritual in this regard.
I felt this way about Lulu as I pushed her along through mean streets in her stroller. I will look after your children if anything ever happens to you and their father, I would tell Tamzin later.
What were Anna and I doing? I wondered. What is it all about? If I belong anywhere, it is with Anna. I wanted my family. My Anna and a baby. I was forty-one years old and the desire for this was more unbridled than ever before.
I knew Anna would be a good parent. And I knew I could be a good parent with her. That we would complement each other as parents in the way we did as partners. That the best of who we were together was brave and beautiful, and that is who a child we raised together could have the potential to be. That we could lean on each other in our weakest moments. And that we could create something so much bigger than ourselves. We could love so far beyond.
It would be the most important thing we would ever do in our lives.
3
Four months later we were back in Toronto and I was pregnant. The smell of coffee lingering in my car tipped me off several days before a test could confirm it. I called Anna, who was in Chicago on a business trip. I was breathless with disbelief; she erupted with joy. She came home with a necklace she had bought that afternoon at the Chicago Art Institute. Three small stones: one tan, one silver, one grey.
We had been so lucky. The chances of conceiving at my age were slim at best. I felt the conspiracy of a huge shared and happy secret. I told Tamzin and we told Anna’s sister. We would not tell our parents just yet.
I could picture cells dividing. The astonishing pace of it. At just six weeks, an ultrasound can detect a heartbeat. Life was developing so quickly on the inside, while on the outside it dragged on in a haze of fatigue.
We went to our clinic for an ultrasound in my seventh week. Anna and I held hands while the technician pointed out the heart to us. She wrote notes in a chart for the doctor. We waited for the doctor. She entered the room, her face blank.
No, I thought, no.
I remember my mother telling me that when I was born I was purple from having swallowed so much blood. The midwife whisked me off, running down the hall to have my lungs suctioned out.
My baby will be fine, my mother had said to herself.
No, I thought, no.
The heartbeat was slow, the doctor told us, slower than it should be. There was a slim chance it could rally over the next week, but. She pulled out a chart that had largely been irrelevant to me before. The rate of miscarriage in one’s forties is alarming. Miscarriage was th
e likeliest outcome at my age. I had known this, but I took no comfort in being statistically normal. I would hold on to the idea of that slimmest chance.
A week—a week I do not remember apart from a computer screen and countless searches on the chances of a fetal heartbeat going from a trot to a gallop. And then a second ultrasound.
The doctor was a stream of words I could only partly take in. Non-viable. The heartbeat slower still, so slow it might, in fact, be mine. Dead, she meant. It might already be dead. But it was not an it, it was our son. I knew it would be a boy. We had made lists of names, but the one that came to mind in that moment was Hamish. I was supposed to be at home with Hamish in the spring, not worrying about my career for two years. I had pictured him toddling unsteadily down our flagstone path, Anna arriving home from work.
If he was not dead, he soon would be. I had a choice between allowing the miscarriage to occur in its own time, after which a D & C might still be necessary, or taking this medication—the doctor was already writing the scrip—and expediting the process.
I could not bear the thought of my body being the home to something dead or nearly so. Of waiting days, perhaps weeks, for it to leave me. Of prolonging the grief. I took the prescription from the doctor’s hands.
She led us to a room for some privacy. It was over. Hamish would not be born. We would not be his parents. I was wearing a necklace with three small stones.
4
I had, at least, been able to get pregnant. There was hope in that. But I didn’t have much time to waste. As soon as I could, I started trying to conceive again. Three months later, I was pregnant once more. Anna gave me flowers this time, withholding some enthusiasm, unwilling perhaps to invest too early and in something so uncertain.
Everything was different this time round. I felt no sense of joy emanating from either of us. I was more fatalistic about this pregnancy, less precious. A piece of brie wasn’t going to kill a fetus. There were bigger determinants at work, things beyond my control. I had no sense of this fetus as a person, a boy or girl, no image of him or her as a toddler. I was resigned to fate. If this resulted in another miscarriage, I wouldn’t risk a third.
Those first eight weeks were a strange period of suspension. Anna and I were muted with each other, cautious around this pregnancy. We were waiting for that first ultrasound, breaths held. We had sold our house, furthermore, failing to find another before winter set in. It was January, and in this brittle season of hard ground but little snow, we were renting a house belonging to friends who were away on sabbatical for the term. All our belongings were in storage, and would remain so until we found something in the surge of new listings that would arrive with spring.
There was so much uncertainty about the future—I could only hold on to the certainty of us, of our commitment to each other. Life is long: we will be many things in the course of it. I knew we could be all those things, even the most painful, together.
Anna held my hand through the first ultrasound. I saw the rapid flutter of a heartbeat. I paid attention to numbers that had meant nothing last time round. I’d done my research. This one was a galloper. The doctor confirmed it. I was overjoyed and hugged her; Anna did as well. This was a promising sign, the good start we’d been denied the first time. The suspense wasn’t over—the chances of losing a pregnancy in the first trimester at my age are two out of three—but we were further ahead than we had been six months before. If all continued to go well, we would be three by next September. That most ordinary of things. A family.
In the meantime, I had a novel to finish. It was at the proofreading stage, but I was finding it difficult to concentrate. The story is set in Vietnam, which Anna and I had visited twice in 2007. We first went to the country on holiday. We returned to Hanoi later that year so that I could conduct some research for the novel that had been inspired by the first trip. I wondered whether we’d have such adventures with a baby, whether the world would suddenly feel very small, whether I’d ever again have the time to write a novel. I’d put off having a baby this long in large part because of such concerns, but they no longer seemed to matter.
I was looking forward to this shift in focus, but for the time being, I was exhausted. Exhausted and lonely with just my manuscript for company in this big house in winter, Anna at work, all our belongings in storage, this uncertainty in my belly, someone else’s cat. And it was so grey out there. It had been this bitter grey for months.
Fortunately we had a week of holiday in the sun to look forward to. In two days we’d be going to the Caribbean with Anna’s sister and brother-in-law. Later in the day I unearthed our suitcases and some of our summer clothes. I shopped for groceries and cooked in anticipation of Anna coming home. I always looked forward to her company and conversation at the end of the day. Anna’s return the return of the world.
That night, shortly after Anna came home from work, a friend emailed each of us to ask if we wanted to join her for her daughter’s hockey practice. It was a dark, cold night in late January and I was simply too exhausted to consider it. The prospect held no appeal for me, and wouldn’t normally for Anna either, so I was surprised, even hurt, when she said yes.
I went to bed, tried to sleep in the bedroom on the top storey. The house was massive—a family home without a family. The bedroom was lonely and far from earth, so high that it sat just above the naked treetops. I tried to sleep while Anna was out but I just couldn’t stop crying. I was overcome with a deep, dark sense that I had just been abandoned.
I went downstairs and waited in the kitchen in my pyjamas. As soon as Anna got home I asked her what was going on. I was shaking, my voice unfamiliar. The question came from some primal place I had never before visited with Anna. A place of terrible fear. I had no idea what might come next, of what kind of answer might follow this kind of question. If the question felt this bad though, surely the answer couldn’t be good.
I don’t remember if she was still wearing her coat or sitting down or standing up. I do know that there was no hesitation on her part when she told me that she wasn’t happy. She had lost her passion for me and that had eroded her love for me.
I pleaded with her to go to couples counselling. She said there was nothing to fix.
She had made a decision. Our relationship was over. A fait accompli.
“Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” We’d both read The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir of the loss of her husband. We’d been to New York and seen Vanessa Redgrave in its adaptation for the stage. Anna had been far more moved by Didion’s meditation on loss. People die, I had thought at the time. What privileges your story above others?
Perhaps you cannot understand until the instant is upon you. This was the instant. “The ordinary instant.” Mine. The most devastating moment of my life. Everything I trusted in had been obliterated, including me, my entire being carved out with a knife. And in that hollow was the seed of a person I was supposed to nurture. I was supposed to grow a person. When I was no longer a person.
Anna left for St. Barts. I moved to the bed upstairs. I couldn’t sleep for all my first-trimester exhaustion. I barely ate. My hands shook. I had this bodily terror that some fatal blow was going to come at me from some unanticipated direction. I have never been more terrified in my life. I kept my eyes wide open, but took in nothing. When I did sleep I had violent nightmares. I wasn’t human anymore; I had become animal, alert to the scent of danger all around me.
My cheeks were hot and wet with tears every time I woke up.
One morning, it wasn’t tears but blood on my hands. I looked at the pillow. The pillow was saturated in red. I threw back the sheet. No blood. I worried about the blood ruining the pillowcase, the pillow, neither of which was mine. I dripped blood into the bathroom, splattering its white tiles. I worried about staining the tiles. I got on my knees to wipe up the blood but it just kept on coming, pouring out of my head. My blood pressure plummeted; I had to pull
myself up holding on to the vanity. My vision was pixilated: yellow stars against a dark grey sky.
The day Anna came home from holiday I shopped for her favourite foods so that there was something for her to eat. Because this couldn’t really be happening. Of all the potential futures, this was not one I had ever imagined.
We had overcome so many obstacles in order to have that most ordinary of things. Everything was in place for us to be a tidy nuclear family.
But suddenly there would be no us.
There would be no family.
There would just be me, alone.
Hatching an egg
without
a nest.
5
There was no escape. I couldn’t eat much or sleep. I couldn’t read, write, watch TV, listen to music. I couldn’t face or find language. I couldn’t think in anything but tortured circles. This couldn’t be happening. She’d be back; she wouldn’t do this, she couldn’t. And yet Anna had been nothing but resolute. She had moved out the day after returning from holiday. There had been no unravelling or dissolution. No expressions of love or doubt or regret. No last gasps.
I fought off thoughts of the bridge that certainly was high enough, of overcoming the pain of this with the pain of something else. But there was nothing I could do to relieve myself of it, not even the momentary transcendence of getting drunk. A little heart was beating inside me. A life growing bigger every day. I was trapped in this grieving and unknown body. And now a baby was trapped here too.
The only person I could really talk to was Tamzin. She called me every single day, as she would for months. It was late in her world, her kids in bed, and she called and just listened to me cry.
I made an appointment to see the social worker we had visited for a mandatory consultation when we began trying to conceive. I could barely get the words out through the wall of tears. I was tormented by the thought that my pain might be deforming what I was carrying, destroying it in some way. I was terrified to give birth to a baby that I had ruined. I needed to know whether I should end my pregnancy. But I was afraid that if I was no longer carrying a baby, I would lose any will to live. There would be nothing left to hold on to.