How callously I’d marked the gift “return to sender”. There had been a little miracle stirring inside me. I realised I’d qualified for the World Indoor Record for Self-Delusion. I’d wanted to pretend that it was just a missed period, just a tiny bunch of cells, just a blue line on a bit of blotting paper. As they shuddered and juddered, pulsing water around the house, it made me think of what the doctor had described as the “uterine material” that had been pulsing within me. The heating system in the bathroom is connected by an umbilical cord of pipes. This,” I pointed out my pumped up, hormonal bustline to startled motorists at the traffic lights, “is not a Wonderbra!”īut later, as I sank into the bath, sending tiny waves towards my toes, I was ambushed by unexpected emotion. “I’ve only got this cleavage for another few hours. “Let’s go out on the town!” I suggested to my sister as we left the hospital. Not to feel sleep-deprived and exhausted for the next two years. I told myself how good it would be to have my body back. I heard the doctor’s voice from a long way off, telling me, kindly, that one in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage. I searched the little black sack for a grainy profile. Empty. I peered in on the watery world where my baby should have bobbed, buoyant with life. In the bleary black and white of a scratchy prewar newsreel, tenuous images began to emerge. There was a whooshy echo – but no tattoo of tiny heartbeats. In hospital the next day, as the doctor dolloped a globule of cold jelly on to my abdomen and ran the scanner over my belly, my mind was as blank as the ultrasound screen. Perhaps it was just “spotting?” Then the cramps took hold.īy midnight, I was bleeding so heavily I was curled into a foetal ball around a hot-water bottle. I don’t even want to do anything that feels good for 33 hours.īut a month later, when the bleeding started, I felt a deep and unexpected sense of dread. And then there was the thought of another long, arduous labour. I was still reeling from my son’s diagnosis of autism but I wouldn’t even be able to dull the anxiety with alcohol … Mind you, once the baby realised what an exhausted and fraught wreck he or she had for a mother, the poor kid would need a drink. I didn’t want it to be stolen by aliens once more and replaced with the body of Pavarotti. The trouble was that, with a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter, I’d only just got my body back.
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