Circles and Spirals
Acknowledging the non-linear cycle of grief on the anniversary of our second miscarriage
Just over a year ago, I started this Substack, with the words “anniversaries are funny things.” It was March 1st, the anniversary of my dear mother-in-law’s death. As I said back then, I have a funny relationship with anniversaries: sometimes they slip by without me noticing, and other times I feel the full force of their weight.
It’s the latter I’m feeling right now. There’s not a particular anniversary date in my mind because I’ll never know the specifics, but two years ago I was in Portugal, in the middle of my 200hr Yoga Teacher Training, and I was pregnant with our first and only natural conception.1 It would be another week or so before it was officially confirmed, but after spotting had failed to materialise into my period for the first time in my life, I knew something was up (my brain swung between two unbelievable options: it was either the start of the menopause or I was pregnant). I know I flew back to England on April 28th, the day after my positive test. I know we had a week or so of barely contained joy before I felt things in my body change. I know it took a couple of weeks to get a scan booked at the hospital and to jump through their various hoops, and maybe a further week after that, before I miscarried at home.
The realisation that we’re here in April again, and that two years have passed has knocked me a little and has reminded me of the cyclical nature of grief. It’s all so bittersweet to me. Those weeks in Portugal were two of the best and most transformative of my life, but I can’t think of my training - the people, the place, the teaching, the learning, the beauty - without thinking of that little soul that didn’t make it either. I find myself daydreaming: circling through images of the various moments from that brief 5 or 6 week period, from elation to despair and back again. And then I wonder: why am I so sad? I thought I’d accepted what happened. I thought I’d moved on.
The five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - as defined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross are a well-recognized model, but they aren’t the full story. Before she died, Kübler-Ross herself acknowledged that the stages aren’t linear and that not everyone goes through all of them (or even experiences them in a specific order). Those who are grieving can cycle through the stages multiple times over many years, and as anyone who has lost someone or something dear to them can attest, the pain never really goes away. The word acceptance has more than a hint of resolution about it, but I’m coming to realise that it’s not possible to put a neat bow on grief, and hope that it will sit nicely in its tightly locked box. This idea is something I’ve heard more and more; that healing doesn’t move in a straight line, but a spiral. And because of that, there’s no such thing as going backward. We’re always moving between the thing that happened and to a newly defined point in the spiral, deepening our understanding and compassion each time.
Grief around infertility and miscarriage carries an additional layer of complexity. To grieve the loss of something you never had is a dislocating experience. It’s not tangible. There’s nothing to hold on to. It’s the grief of a dream, of a possibility. And until the desired child arrives, or a line is firmly drawn under the process of ‘trying’, the loop is never fully closed. There is always a sliver of potential, a maybe, the chance of a miracle; all of which makes the state of acceptance feel a little temporary.
So here I am, still circling and spiraling through the stages in my own incoherent and (sometimes) confusing way. Sometimes I feel like I’m making progress and other times like I’m back at the beginning. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in denial, depression, and acceptance during the past few years. I think I skipped over anger (that’ll probably come back to bite me at some point). I’ve also managed to have some moments in the newer, sixth stage as defined by David Kessler: the stage of making meaning of what has happened.
Yet of late, I’ve realised that actually, the stage I’ve found myself in most has been bargaining. It makes sense, I guess. Having never really been able to hold onto the thing that I wanted, thoughts of trying again naturally fall into that empty space. When I zoom in on how things have been, I can see that I’ve been locked in an almost perpetual state of bargaining: making an untold number of deals with God, the universe, my mind, my body, my life, on both a conscious and subconscious level. I’ll take the supplements. I’ll track my cycle. I’ll change my lifestyle, change the time I go to bed. I’ll investigate my childhood patterns. I’ll stop drinking alcohol. I’ll do all of these things if I can have a baby.
When that all got too much, I switched tactics. Again, this wasn’t happening consciously - I really felt like I’d had enough. But on some level, a bargain was still being struck. Ok, that didn’t work. How about I stop thinking about it? Yes, I’ll stop trying so hard. I’ll stop micromanaging my food and drink. I’ll throw out the supplements. I’ll delete the tracking apps from my phone. I’ll focus on something else. I’ll go on holiday. I’ll move to the countryside. I’ll start a new life. I’ll do whatever it takes.
When emotions arise around the second miscarriage, as they have done this week, I wonder if I ever fully acknowledged what was happening while it was happening. I certainly felt better quicker than I did the first time. It was only a few months after the miscarriage that we decided to put our house on the market and open ourselves up to what might come next: was that another bargain I wonder? We were following a dream we’d always had, yes, but did I, on some level, think it might make a difference to our dream of having a family? It’s such a complicated web in my mind and I’m not sure it matters. I do know that acceptance is more of a default state than it’s ever been, and that’s a nice place to be. Yet when I feel the pain of the loss like I have this week, I notice my mind’s natural tendency to drift from sadness into bargaining. Wondering what might happen in the future, wondering what I need to do, what I should do; wondering what side of the bargain I need to uphold, so what I want becomes mine. And then I also wonder if I even want it anymore.
When I’m in the right headspace for it, I try to come back to the sixth stage and see what sort of meaning I can make from what happened. There’s a lot to say here, so I’ll save that for another post, but what I can say is that my desire and drive to write has certainly increased massively in the past few years and it has helped me stay sane in some of my darkest moments. For that, I’m grateful.
As I mentioned in a post before Christmas, I’m trying to sort through all the half-finished documents lurking in my Google Drive and publish what I can. To that end, the following is a patchy account of the days following my second missed miscarriage, while I waited for the scan to confirm it, and the scan itself. I’m eventually looking to pull all the writing I’ve done around our infertility journey into a memoir of sorts, but as that’s still a long way off, it feels like an appropriate time to dust this one off.
In the week while I wait for the nurse to tell me what I already know, I’m adrift. What am I meant to do when nothing feels right in the world? I have called two of my best friends. I have had a nap. I have read my book. I have sat in bed. I have only been on my phone for 5 minutes at a time, a few times. Yet I can’t shake the feeling of wrongness that’s shrouding me. I’m heavy and sad, but I can’t cry. I can feel my aching boobs pressing into my sports bra, but I know that it’s fake: it’s not real pregnancy pain. My body has malfunctioned again, producing all the right hormones but no baby.
I don’t know what to feel. I don’t know what to do. I want to put myself in a bottle and throw myself out to sea and wash up on an island somewhere where pregnancy and children and babies aren’t a thing. I want this so much and at the same time, I want to run away from it at a sprint. I try not to get bogged down by shoulds and fairness and ‘wtf,’ but it’s impossible. The voices nag at me: why? Why me? What happened? The second time around, there is a strange mix of disbelief and familiarity. I wonder: will I ever be pregnant again? If that miracle ever occurs, will we ever be able to feel excited or happy about it? Will we ever share our news again? Will it ever happen again?
*
The second time has been so different. In the first week after taking the test, I luxuriated in all the feelings we hadn’t got to have the first time around. That Karl and I were the only ones who knew what was happening was such a novelty. During IVF, we had to decide whether we could bear going through such a major process while pretending everything was normal. Having always been a full-disclosure type of person, I opted to tell my closest friends and family. This had its upsides: I felt the love and joy through my phone as we slowly but surely traversed every hurdle of IVF, but despite the support and love we received from our nearest and dearest, there was also no escaping it. This time we were the only ones who knew, and we delighted in the fact that no one had a clue, that we didn’t need to provide an update. That it would be a surprise when we told them. It crossed my mind: this must be what it was what it was like for people blessed with a ‘normal’ pregnancy. Now I regret telling the few people we shared our news with - it was only a few, but still a few too many. Still a few people whose hearts we had to break along with our own.
I think about the stories we tell ourselves. We are such imaginative narrators of our own lives. Now was the time, this was the right time, this was our time, this was meant to happen. It’s spring time, it's the perfect time. The stars even said so (thanks, Jupiter!) As I waited through the interminable week between scans to confirm that our second pregnancy was lost, the world came alive: May, where everything is heavy with life, and scented and bursting and beautiful. The sky is so blue right now; the sun mocking me with its chirpy appearance in the sky. Doesn’t it know what’s happened?
*
I cry to my friend, who is also my boss, over Microsoft Teams. She asks me how I’m going to take care of myself today. I tell her that all I feel like doing is cleaning and watching Selling Sunset. She tells me to forget about work and do that. So I do it. That day, my body heavy with tiredness, I forgo the cleaning and lean into TV. I lie on the sofa under a blanket for the day. I read. I circle through apps on my phone incessantly. At the end of the day, I don't feel great, but the pain in my heart has been lessened somewhat by the relentless occupation of my focus.
A couple of days later, I noticed a low-grade anxious feeling in my body and mind. I didn’t want it to be there. I asked myself the same question. How will I take care of myself today? Again, I did everything I could think of: all the ‘right’ things. I did a short yoga session. I took a shower. I moved the cushions from the sofa bed out into the back garden so I could lie in the sun. I had a nap on the cushions, curled up in a ball. I got some sourdough bread out of the freezer and ate it with real butter. Later I got into bed and tried to read, and when that didn’t help, I spent some time looking out the window, trying to focus on the bees flocking to the climbing wisteria flowers, and the blue of the sky.
Nothing helped. Nothing made me feel better. It was a day of emptiness and sadness. But I couldn’t cry. I was devoid of feeling, like an old shoe, a husk. Nothing felt good, nothing felt bad, nothing felt at all. That evening, I went into the office at the back of the house to put my laptop away and happened to catch sight of a movement in our neighbour’s kitchen, whose garden backs onto ours. I absent-mindedly noticed that she was chopping vegetables. Oh, wait. She’s pregnant again. I start and then recover myself. I don’t even feel anything anymore. It’s just reality. People get pregnant and have babies, but I don’t.
*
There's an amazing capacity that humans have for adapting to hard stuff. It feels particularly potent when you’re right in the middle of it because you’re unaware of how quickly you’ve adjusted your parameters to adapt to the new way of things. I saw it during the pandemic following that initial anxiety. After the adjustment period, things became normal really quickly. It’s that strange mix of being not ok, but simultaneously absolutely ok. That is how I felt during this time. On one hand, utter disbelief at what was happening, shock and grief, and everything in between. The feeling of how will I ever be ok again? And on the other, things just continuing, of soon feeling normal again. Just another day, and I’m fine - I’m ok, I’ve lost another baby, and we’ve been trying to have one for years, but you know, it’s ok. I’m still alive. Worse things have happened to better people.
In these ‘normal’ periods, it was easy to sleepwalk through the days. No big emotions, no wild outbursts; more a grim flatness, an unreality. I’d forget what I’d seen: “That’s all done now.” This is just how life is. Interminable days, alone in the house; everything the same as before, but everything transformed.
Four years of going to the toilet and looking at the tissue after I wipe. And then trying to decode what’s there. Am I ovulating? Menstruating? Miscarrying? Right now, it’s a light brown, with occasionally bloody spots. Will I let go of things naturally this time, or will it be another medically managed scenario? If it does start on its own, when will it start, what if I’m not at home? There was so much blood last time. Why won’t my body let go of it? Why can’t we make it past 5 weeks?
*
Scan day. We had both been anxious the day before and that morning had walked our usual route to try and decompress. By the time we got to the car and started the drive, the mood was almost light. In that moment I loved Karl so much. We goofed around, singing one of our stupid made-up songs, and we laughed, and I had that feeling that things would be ok, even if they weren’t ok.
At the hospital, we went through the usual bore of waiting to be seen, before the kind EPAU nurse checked us in. As I went through the motions of explaining the situation, I felt a jitteriness under my skin. In the scan room, my mouth went dry as I undressed. “We’ve got no curtain, I’m sorry!” the Sonographer exclaimed as she and the trainee, who would perform the scan, politely turned to face the door as I took off my leggings and knickers, and placed the flimsy piece of paper towel over the lower part of my body.
I was conscious of the big screen in front of me, lit up like a panel in a spaceship. The thought crossed my mind that it was there so prospective parents could see the image of the baby, and the heartbeat, in glorious, magnified definition. I can’t look, I said to Karl, who gripped my hand tightly. My head turned to the left and I covered my eyes. They ended up turning off the monitor. “We’ll tell you as soon as we see anything.” At that point, I realised the stupidity of my agreeing to have a trainee perform the scan. It took forever. For a brief moment, I let myself believe it was taking longer than normal because she was in training. But then the drop: where I felt the energy in the room change. I looked at Karl and shook my head. I knew it then. A minute later she asked if I was sure of my dates. “We’re seeing signs of an early pregnancy - there’s a gestational sac and yolk sac, but nothing further so far I’m afraid.”
Unlike last time, there was no grief or shock, but rather a depressing familiarity to the cloud of disappointment that washed over my body. We’ll be as quick as we can, she said. You’re doing so well. She kept telling me I was doing well. What was I doing well at? I wondered. Well at receiving yet another ultrasound probe into my vagina without wincing? Well at not losing my shit emotionally? Not well at being able to get pregnant, or keep a pregnancy evidently. I realised I’d been holding my breath and as I exhaled, I felt tears rise up and seep out of the corners of my eyes. Karl noticed and pulled my head closer to him. I remember that I wanted to properly cry, but the nurse kept talking to me, kept telling us what was going to happen next, what they were doing; that I was doing so well. Just let me cry, woman, I thought. By the time they had left and things were quiet, my tears had retreated, and I was left only with a strange numbness.
Later, we binge-watched five episodes of Mare of Easttown; the bleakness on screen matching our sombre feelings. We were up late, neither of us wanting to go to bed. Completely knackered but wired too. In the final scene, Kate Winslet wakes up next to her grandson in his little bed with a dinosaur pattern bedspread. The day before I’d gone to town for some errands, and on a complete whim, had found myself in the kids’ section at M&Co. I decided to buy a little onesie for the baby: an act of faith, I told myself. At that moment I wanted to believe, so much, that even if there wasn’t a baby in there right now, there would be at some point - even if I never carried it, or we adopted or used a donor egg - a baby that would wear this.
I walked up to the till, a weird mix of feelings cycling through me: excitement, pride, guilt. I let myself lean into the fact that I was pregnant until proven otherwise, and I was buying my baby something. I can do this! But just as quickly, I felt like a fraud, like I was doing something naughty or wrong. That at any point, someone would lean over to me and gently, but firmly, remove the little onesie from my hands: “That’s not for you, dear.” The onesie had a dinosaur on it. As my eyes registered the bedspread on the screen, I cracked. It was over. Again.
Karl crawled over to me, and he cried too, and we lay there on the couch for what seemed like forever. His body on mine. It was so heavy but I liked the feeling of it. In a day where I’d spent most of the time outside my body, the weight of him brought me back home. My heart was broken but in that moment I was safe. We were together, and while we didn’t have a baby, we still had each other.
At that point, it stops. Reading back over it now, two years on, what strikes me most is how brief it all was. This briefness, coupled with the intense experience of my training in Portugal that preceded it (a life-changing couple of weeks, even without the added pregnancy), gives the whole period a dreamlike quality in my mind. And I think this bears out in how I managed it afterwards, and the relative ease with which I appeared to return to normal. In some ways, it was easier to imagine it was a dream.
From my current vantage point, I can see that there was more to process, more to grieve, and I am beginning to accept that there will always be a little piece of my heart cycling through the stages and moving around the spiral. And I’m ok with that. It was a fleeting dream, it’s true, but it also happened, and while the pain is sometimes hard to bear, I like to think that by acknowledging it, I can also honour that little soul, for its brief appearance in our lives.
I wrote about this time in a very early post on this Substack - the strange limbo I found myself in as I waited for the period that never arrived in another country, miles away from Karl, and the way that the experience in Portugal and that pregnancy will always be inseparable to me.
https://jessicahamlin.substack.com/p/music-and-magic