My husband’s dad died. I was furious — at him. I was convinced he did it on purpose.
I was redecorating the house to host a BBQ for him once he left the hospital. It was going to be soon — I was nearly done. I didn’t like seeing him in hospital. He looked so frail and weak. I once turned up and he was being lifted from the bed, naked, in a kind of hammock-machine contraption while they changed the sheets. He gave me a little finger wave, he looked so embarrassed. I stood outside his fishbowl room. All the machines were competing with each other to keep him alive.
All his insides on the outside — whirring, ticking, spinning, and dripping.
Towards the end, he would be delirious — asking why there was a black dog in his hospital room and where I was. I would be standing right next to him. He didn’t have a clue.
It absolutely broke my heart to see him like this.
Then he broke my heart when he died.
It suddenly felt like I had no place in the family anymore. I lost my biggest cheerleader. They actively excluded me from everything after that — even the spreading of his ashes. I don’t know if it was deliberate. Maybe they didn’t even think i would want to be involved. But now he was dead they forgot about me. Maybe I thought I mattered more than I did.
Either way, the ashes were taken to India and scattered without me. I held the fort at home with our son.
I still miss him. And then my husband’s lovely gran died six months later. I lost my main allies.
It was around this time I thought a second child might bridge the gap created by losing them both in such a short space of time.
A baby — that good old solution to a currently shit situation. That old fairy tale fix-it.
I saw the pain of losing a parent, and I didn’t want my son to have to go through all that pain by himself. I wanted him to have someone to share stories with… “Remember when Mum did this,” and “Remember when Dad did that.” Some validation about how crazy his home life was.
I talked to my husband about it — he said yes.
So we tried.
When I say tried, I mean we just stopped using condoms. I’m not saying that to provoke a reaction — more to show what I meant by “trying.”
After a couple of months, I started feeling pregnancy symptoms. My boobs jumped up two sizes, my ribs began to hurt, and I started feeling nauseous. I didn’t want to spend a tenner on a test, so I rode out the symptoms. I told my husband I thought I was pregnant.
He didn’t seem too bothered — probably in a haze of work and drunk equilibrium. Since his dad died, he had basically checked out, and I was left with full-time care of our son, the house renovations, and a new job I had only started months earlier.
You might wonder why we decided to start trying at all.
Living then was a fog.
I did whatever I could to maintain the appearance of a functioning family.
I asked his mother for help.
Not only was he drinking all the time, he was also becoming quite mouthy at home. Not all the time — sometimes he’d be drunk and vulnerable, other times drunk and funny.
It was like Russian roulette.
I never knew exactly what I’d be coming home to.
That was the first time I asked his mum for help.
I practised the ask in my head so many times.
I don’t like asking for help — it’s not my comfortable place.
I told her her son had been hurting since his dad died.
He was drinking a lot.
We tried to help him.
But I thought he needed his mum now.
In all my dreams and practice speeches, I never got the outcome I got.
She looked at me and said she couldn’t help him at the moment — she had also lost her husband.
I said maybe it would help both of them — coming together in grief.
She said no. She told me that she was going through her own pain right now.
I’ve never been so shaken in my life.
I never knew this is what a mum would say.
From one angle, I respected how much she looked after her own well-being.
But on the other hand?
What the actual fuck?
The only mum I really knew was mine.
And I know, for my well-being?
She would go over hot coals.
The advice might be to pull myself together, or a stern talking-to.
But either way, there’d be some kind of intervention.
I told my husband months later — to see if maybe she had talked to him privately.
Maybe she felt embarrassed, not knowing how her son was.
Maybe she felt out of place when I told her.
She never talked to him.
They never talked about losing Dad.
Anyway, I digress.
That day I went into the office thinking I’d purchase a pregnancy test and take it in the toilet at some point.
Work was a bitch-on-heat day. Too many things to juggle, and a fucking troll boss who decided today was her day to increase her cunt status.
I went to the bathroom to escape the noise.
While I was there, it would be rude not to use the facilities.
As I started to wee, my stomach started cramping — and then I heard a plop in the toilet. I felt a searing pain in my lower abdomen.
I looked inside the bowl and saw lots of blood and a massive clot.
I was in shock.
I put my hand in the bowl and lifted out the clot.
I ran it through my fingers.
I said goodbye.
I didn’t know whether I should try to save it or flush it.
I sat there.
Right. One, two, three — go.
Suck it up, get out, go home.
Okay, right, let this cramp pass.
I closed the toilet lid and sat down.
Gave myself a pep talk:
Flush.
Leave.
Give a rubbish reason to excuse myself from work.
Go home.
First, deal with the bleeding — rolled-up toilet roll in my pants.
When I got to my front door I realised I’d forgotten my house keys.
I went to my sister’s.
I sat there, waiting to go home and share the news with my husband.
Eventually, he got home.
I walked home with him.
Sat him down.
Told him I’d lost the baby.
He asked me if I’d taken a pregnancy test.
I told him I hadn’t had the opportunity — it was still in my handbag.
He turned to me and said:
“So then how sure are you that there was a baby?”
I told him:
I knew my body.
I was three weeks late, and normally I was regular.
He said there was no point being sad about it — it probably wasn’t even a pregnancy.
I sat there, bleeding heavily, listening.
Remembering, swirling the clot in the toilet with my fingers.
I don’t know — it felt real.
The clot was considerably larger than normal.
The cramping was intense.
I knew I had been pregnant, I had been pregnant before.
But no matter how many words I used, he wasn’t going to validate me.
I let him have the excuse — that he was using avoidance techniques.
I, on the other hand, was living with it.
Well. At least for ten days, I lived with it.
The general advice I received?
The baby wasn’t ready.
Probably severely disabled.
Basically “unsustainable to the real world.”
They also told me it was a good idea to start trying straight away — that my body was now super fertile.
Bonus — better go fuck my husband who is currently residing in Avoidance Land.
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