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This is a repost from 2020, but after having several online conversations with people recently about having an only child, I wanted to share it again here. I think being an only child family - whether by choice or not - can feel quite lonely at best, and can leave us juggling unkind assumptions and stereotypes about our children at worst. It’s a more personal post than I usually share, but I believe that talking about miscarriage and baby-loss and the often difficult and contradictory emotions they can bring up is important, as is the deep joy, ambivalence, and sadness which having an only child can bring.
Three years after writing this, my feelings remain complex. The Covid lockdowns were a particularly hard time to be a one-child family, and at times I felt devastated that my daughter only had two stressed parents to spend time with. But now life is back to normal - whatever that means - and I feel less torn. In the last two years I’ve had the time to write my second book, I’ve loved diving into homeschool craft projects with my daughter, and I’ve enjoyed my free time when she’s busy with other things. As the cost of everything sky rockets, I’ve found myself grateful for only one set of swimming lessons, piano lessons, winter boots. My daughter is happy. I think I am too.
But a part of me will always wonder.
One.
2017
It is hard to describe the smell of the progesterone pessaries that I insert into my vagina twice a day. After a few days, just looking at them makes me gag and retch. Like small wax tampons, I insert them and they slowly melt, oozing thick, white, stinking smears into my black underwear.
On holiday in Italy, I worry that everyone can smell me; all hormones, misery and fear. The bathroom bin of our villa piles up with white plastic wrappers, wrapped in toilet paper as if hiding them would make it better. Every time I pull down my knickers the smell hits me like a dead thing, and the gagging turns to vomit and I try to piss as fast as possible so that I can turn around and vomit in the toilet bowl rather than onto my bare feet.
My body develops a reflex: pessary, vomit.
But I’m getting ahead of myself I think. Let me go back a bit to explain how I got here.
The pessaries are an experiment, something to try when there is nothing else to try, because I have had a lot of miscarriages. Some people prefer to say that these are lost pregnancies, lost babies, but I hate this expression. I didn’t lose these whispers of life. I am not that careless. I saw where they went, smears of blood and clots and cramps and stained toilet paper and warm red trickles between my thighs. I saw, but it’s just that I couldn’t follow.
It turns out I am very fertile. Every time I have sex, I get a double pink line two weeks later. I can get pregnant easily – so easily, in fact, that when I first talk to a doctor about this I suspect they think me delusional, a mad woman who believes she has had four miscarriages in the last six months – but my body cannot seem to hold on. I read for hours and hours on forums about secondary infertility and “unfussy uteruses”, a charming expression to describe wombs which will implant any combination of egg and sperm without ensuring its viability, resulting in miscarriage after failed miscarriage despite no obvious problems.
I don’t like to think of my uterus as being unfussy. My daughter is perfection itself, and I am sure only the most discerning of wombs could create her. But I have to admit that there is certainly something compelling about this theory which sits so well with my reproductive history. I wonder if once my daughter was done, my uterus gave up on doing it’s job properly. Perhaps it knew it had already hit its peak and could do no better than her?
I ask the young, male doctor I am summoned to meet with about this diagnosis I have bestowed upon myself, and I am met with blank stares and the bland platitudes surely known to every woman who has bled instead of grown that “miscarriage is very common, it’s probably just bad luck”. He is new to this rotation, and doesn’t seem to know anything about miscarriage. I want to scream at him for wasting my time, when Google knows more about fertility than he does. Instead I sit nicely and nod my head, and in my best Queen’s English I politely beg for a prescription for progesterone because everyone knows that when there are no answers or clues you try progesterone. I leave the hospital with a box in my hands to try “next time”. I have no way of knowing how much I will grow to despise the contents of this small package of misery.
I do not really know if I want another child at all. The child I already have is everything, a sunbeam of joy who has filled me up completely, and she leaves no space for longing for another. Also, I am exhausted. I am so sleep deprived that I hallucinate, people in front of me growing necks which stretch up like giraffes, shapes morphing and shifting, shadows dancing. But all around me people are having second children, and my husband has always wanted two. And I do love being a mother more than anything. So one day on a mid-cycle burst of optimism we decide to try and of course then I am pregnant.
I like to do well at things so when I miscarry we try again. And again. And again. I think a lot about having a successful pregnancy, but not at all about having an actual second baby because every time I think about having another child I cry. In my heart I know I don’t really want one, not now. But everyone I talk to tells me it’s just my hormones and that once they wear off I will realise how nice it is to have two. I ignore the voice in my gut which whispers that I never felt conflicted when I was pregnant with my daughter. That her pregnancy was filled with uncontrollable desire and longing. I wanted her with every fibre of my being. This time round I am going through the motions, too tired to fully engage with questions of motive, too stubborn to press pause or admit defeat.
And so now, I am using these fucking pessaries that I hate so much. We come home from Italy and the vomiting is so much worse. I lie down in bed. I sip peppermint tea, or plain water that tastes sweet after vomit. I run to the toilet, and bring up cruel, agonising bile which pours out of my nose and mouth. I crawl sobbing and broken and filthy back to bed. Ten, fifteen, now twenty times a day I vomit. I listen to the Harry Potter audiobooks on repeat, Stephen Fry’s voice the sole thread connecting me to something that isn’t nausea. I become erratic in my progesterone taking because I cannot bare them.
Some days pass, and I am sitting in the Early Pregnancy Unit at St Thomas hospital, waiting to be called. I am sitting on the plastic chairs with awful Judge Rinder playing silently on the TV just as I have done four times already this year. The news has always been bad (though a part of me has always felt grateful, an unformed sense of a narrow escape). This time after I have pissed in a cup and been sick in the ward toilets I am sent to have a scan, and the beautiful sonographer tells me that the tiny shapeless blob on the screen means that perhaps life is stirring after all. It’s small though, smaller than she would have expected based on my meticulous calculations, and there is no heartbeat. I feel nothing. No hope, no fear, just nausea. Come back in two weeks.
Fourteen days later and I am back on the plastic chairs, sitting amongst women and mothers and women who want to be mothers and mothers who want to be rid of the title and the creature growing inside them. This time there is a heartbeat, a baby. The baby is still too small but it is unmistakably alive. I call it a baby because I am trying to convince myself of its reality, but it is not human. It is a shrimp, an alien, a collection of longing and fear and exhaustion and lust made flesh, a physical manifestation of possibility. It could go either way at this point. I feel some relief that the nausea is not for nothing but I do not feel joy. Everything is wrong. I do not know if I want a baby. I should be feeling happier. I feel so sick.
I return to my bed, my toilet bowl, my Harry Potter audiobook.
(I want to be able to tell you how my daughter found these months. Two and a half and a firecracker of sheer delight, words tumbling out of her mouth from waking until bed, an explosion of joy and wonder. I don’t remember though. All I remember is bed, pain, nausea. Hormones, misery and fear. I feel robbed and wretched when I think about how I will never get those months back. It still makes me angry.)
Vomiting a lot is supposed to make you slimmer but I grow fatter, swollen with carbohydrates and misery and the parasitical possibility of life, unmoving save to crawl to the bathroom to again. I start taking some anti-emetics my doctor prescribes after I turn up in her office a sobbing, retching mess. I stop taking the progesterone without telling anyone because I feel as though I will die if I take just one more and I do not want to die.
It is the end of November now, and my mother comes to sit with our daughter so my husband can take me back to the hospital yet again, this time for the prized twelve week scan. I am sick less often now, although I am permanently nauseous and I cry all the time and I feel violently sad. We sit in the waiting room and I remember us being here three years ago for the scan which told us we would be parents for the first time, young and fizzing with excitement and love and hope. The memory is so beautiful, so utterly different to now. Today I sob silently, sinking into S. I am not excited. I don’t really want another baby. Something is very wrong.
The sonographer is a man this time. I climb onto the bed and he squeezes the lube onto my stomach and I squeeze S’s hand and he squeezes mine back. I look at the sonographer and he looks at me and before he can say “I’m sorry” his face has said it first and in an instant I know that I already knew, that I had known since the start.
We are ushered into a curtained off cubicle in the ward where we sit and listen to other pregnant women talk to the midwives about their still-living babies. I am angry at the injustice of this arrangement and of the misery of the last few months, and I am sad and so sick. Tears pour out of me uncontrollably. S looks devastated. We wait a long time. Eventually we are brought into a room where a kind and pretty midwife is waiting and she explains my “options”, of which there are two. I tell her I want to have surgery and I want it as soon as possible. I just want to stop feeling sick. If I can’t have the baby, then at least I can have this. She talks to me about the “products of the pregnancy” and asks if I am happy for these to be sent off for genetic testing as this is my fifth miscarriage this year.
I know that I killed our baby because I secretly stopped taking the progesterone.
On the day of the surgery I arrive alone, wretched, miserable, relieved. The nurse shows me into a private room where I am to undress and wait, and I sit naked under my gown fighting the waves of nausea and wishing I hadn’t sealed away my phone and book, until I can’t bear it and I have to leave the room in my gown to ask someone to bring me a vomit bowl. Everyone is so kind and their kindness feels unbearable because I have done this to myself. I am wheeled into theatre shaking with fear because of course I have read all of the terrible stories about people who don’t wake up from general, but the sweet nurses make me smile as they count down and then I wake up and I am elated. I feel high, like I’ve just come up on good MDMA on a perfect night out with people I love. I lie there in recovery smiling and thinking how marvellous medicine is and really how lovely it is to go under general anaesthetic, but then the feeling fades and suddenly I’m not coming up but crashing down and everything is grey and I remember.
When the allotted waiting time is up I am shown to a cubicle to get dressed. I stand up and I realise that I am pouring with blood. I have no sanitary protection, and there is a growing pool of blood on the hospital floor, blood all over my legs, blood everywhere. I shuffle out of my cubicle in my gown leaving a shameful trail in my wake, the startling red beautiful against the pale floor. I flag down a nurse who can bring me some pads, and I shove two in my underwear whilst mumbling apologies about the cleaning. I join the rest of the patients, and a loud woman tries to talk to me and asks me what I’m “in” for. In that moment I hate her with a cold fury because I don’t want to share this moment with a stranger, but now I am the rude one for not answering. I ignore her. I feel like absolute shit – woozy, weak, sad – but I realise with a flash of joy that I do feel less sick.
S finally gets me home and my mum is there and my daughter is perfect and I climb into bed. The sickness is definitely fading already, and I feel gloriously happy all of a sudden, giddy with joy at my freedom from the nausea which infected my every waking moment for the last eight weeks. I feel guilty at my joy, but it is there nevertheless. In the coming weeks, when people ask how I am I say I am sad and heartbroken and I try to sound more devastated than I really am, because I don’t want people to think I am a monster who carelessly loses a baby – what kind of mother loses their baby, after all – and doesn’t even mourn. I want to mourn. I read account after account of miscarriages and the outpouring of grief that is shared makes me feel as though I am broken. Why is no one talking about how amazing it feels to not be throwing up? Am I the only person who feels, if not happy, then at least mixed feelings about miscarriage? Why is it that I feel relief rather than despair? I do feel sadness, and so angry that this time has been taken from me. But I also feel human again, and that feels incredible.
I stop being sick but I do not stop bleeding. Chunks and clots of unknowable substance fall into the toilet. I gush and pour. It should not be like this, I think, not after the surgery. This is not what the NHS leaflet told me to expect. It is nearly Christmas now, and weeks have passed and I am still bleeding. I teach a private antenatal class for a couple who are expecting their second baby. They are happy and I think I teach well, but I am bleeding and exhausted and I hate every second of it. Once more I find myself in the EPU. Once more I am scanned. “Retained products”. After everything I have suffered it feels like a cruel joke,. My options are more surgery, or waiting; my gut tells me to wait and I trust the feeling, allowing myself to let my body lead. Eventually the bleeding stops.
I am OK, and I am not OK. There will be no Christmas announcements, no photos of a toddler holding a blurry scan. But I do not feel sick, and I can take pleasure in my sweet daughter, and together we put up a tiny tree.
I find the letter from the hospital wedged in our too-small letterbox, slightly crumpled from being crammed in with soggy Christmas cards and bank statements and Boden catalogues. I tear it open and at the top in fat, black writing stand the words ABNORMAL RESULT.
“PCR analysis of uncultured placental material was carried out using markers specific for chromosomes 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, X and Y. The results are consistent with three copies of chromosomes 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21 and 22 and an XXX sex chromosome complement. These results indicate that this pregnancy had a TRIPLOID chromosome complement. This finding is likely to have been the cause of the fetal loss.”
I did not kill the baby because I stopped taking the progesterone after all.
When I look at the letter again, it hits me. XXX. Did that mean she was a girl? I try to push away the image of my daughter playing with her sister, and something small and precious inside me breaks.
I know I should feel relief, guilt assuaged, mea culpas unnecessary. But despite the words on the page, I know that the doctors are wrong. This did not happen because of extra chromosomes, or my uterus being too optimistic, or even because of bad luck. I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, this has happened because I didn’t want another baby enough. I didn’t want to split myself in two, to share myself with my daughter and another. I didn’t commit my heart to becoming a mother again. I jumped before I was ready, ignoring the voice in my head which screamed at the thought of another baby, and so my body acted on my behalf. I killed this baby because I was not ready to become a mother again.
I have another hospital appointment to attend, following more scans and tests which I attend so that I can tick the boxes and follow protocols and leave the door open in case there is a next time. This time I am in a different building, which feels kinder. I do not have a history with this building, with this train station, with this M&S where I will buy a wholefood salad and a TWIX to eat on the journey home. I do not have memories of vomiting in this hospital, or of bleeding here, or of birthing here. This place feels neutral. But as I sit on a plastic chair and wait my turn, I am a fraud. I do not know if I ever want another baby. I know from the countless Mumsnet threads I read late at night that I am in a small minority; most women who are being investigated for recurrent miscarriages are frantic with grief and longing, hoping upon hope that they will find answers to their questions. I am simply tired.
In the meeting I am told that everything looks normal; that my uterus and I have aced our tests. The chances of having five miscarriages back to back under the age of thirty is vanishingly small, but nevertheless, here we are: unexplained recurrent miscarriage. The doctor has a warm smile, and she tells me that this is a good thing. She is trying to reassure me – no doubt she has had many women sitting in front of her who are hoping that something will be wrong, so that the thing may be fixed. I tell her truthfully that I am pleased they have found nothing wrong with me. I get up to go, then falter. I look at my shoes and then at her face and I pluck up the courage to ask her the questions I have been mulling for months: Could the progesterone have made me sicker? Could it even have extended the pregnancy? The rest of my miscarriages were earlier, neater, less awful. There was no prolonged torture of nausea and sickness. If stopping the progesterone didn’t kill the baby, could taking it – because I wanted to try it, because I begged the young doctor who had no clue to give it to me – have been the thing which dragged out my suffering? The doctor looks at me, a look filled with a kindness and sadness that momentarily floors me, and says she can’t say for sure of course but that yes, it’s possible. I leave the appointment feeling an absence – of grief, of hope, of pain, of joy – an absence that is not nothing, not quite an emptiness, but not something either.
I do not want to be pregnant again.
2020
I am lying in my bed with my five year old daughter. Head on my pillow, she lies with her nose touching my nose as we chat and snuggle and laugh. She asks me to be Piglet, Kanga, Roo, and I willingly oblige with terrible accents and jokes about extract of malt. No rush to be anywhere or do anything, we lie there happy. When we finally go downstairs to eat breakfast it is past nine o’clock, and I drink tea over piles of books, our conversations flowing like the wax that drips from the beeswax candle on the table. Later that day we walk to the park hand-in-hand, stopping to smell every rose we pass, chatting, always chatting.
I feel thankful that I can be fully hers in these moments.
We are easy in one another’s company, our days together passing contentedly as waves of calm carrying books and candles and cups of tea lap at our ankles. I don’t really recognise the fraught exasperation so many describe. Our days are slow, peaceful, beautiful. We are growing together, dancing a dance that solely a mother and her only daughter can know the steps to, anticipating each other’s every move.
As she grows before my eyes, I see how fleeting her childhood is, how my days as a mother of a young child are numbered. I feel I will combust when I imagine no longer holding her hand in mine as we walk side my side, no longer kissing her when she falls, no longer being the person she turns to when she feels sad or delighted. Rather than prolonging this period by trying for another child, I wonder if instead I should just commit to loving my daughter as deeply as I can. She will never get another childhood, and I will never love any person as much as I love her. I imagine how painful it would be to cleave myself in half every day, how my attention and energy would be carved up leaving less for her and even less for me. I feel deep and shameful gratitude for the miscarriages in these moments. I love being a mother. This love has made me want another child less, not more. I don’t want to jeopardise our joy. I want to pour every drop of myself into my daughter whilst I have her.
But sometimes the weight of this love feels terrifying. I lie awake at night, torturing myself with cruel, inevitable visions of the future; my only child needing me less. Growing up. Leaving home. Gone. In these times I feel that I should protect my heart, hedge my bets. Maybe it’s not healthy for a mother to love her child so ferociously. Maybe I should try for more children to cushion the blow of loss when it comes, to cushion my affection so that it does not overpower and smother the person I love so much.
To try, or not to try, that is the question. Both times the answer comes back to fear and love.
When friends tell me they are pregnant for the first time, I feel a delicious envy. What I wouldn’t give to go back to those early days with my daughter, to that sweet fog of breastfeeding and sleeping and walking endlessly in the park. But it is the same pang I get when I lend someone a good book: I can’t believe you get to read this for the first time. I am delighted they get to do motherhood for the first time, and green-eyed because I know just how good it is.
When friends tell me they are expecting their second or third child, there is no envy. Just pure, sweet joy for them. That says a lot, I think.
I write a list.
Against trying for another child: I feel traumatised by the sickness, I could (would?) miscarry again, less time for F, it could ruin my relationship with F, I can’t go through that level of sleep deprivation again and be a good mother to F, it could end my marriage, it could destroy my mental health, we’d have less money, I’d have less freedom, we’d need an extra bedroom, life is quite calm and easy now F is five, no paid maternity leave because I’m self-employed, negative impact on my career, no time to write, negative impact on S’s career, homeschooling will be much harder with another child around, climate emergency, parents maybe happier with just one child, advantages to being an only child, it’s a big gamble, I don’t actually know if I want another child.
For trying for another child: Might regret not having another child when we are older, it could be quite nice to have another baby, F would be a sweet big sister and wants a sibling, S is a fantastic dad. If I had another child I would love them.
I have so many beautiful names I carry with me, and no more children to bestow them upon.
In the bath, she asks me again for a sibling. I give her the censored version of my argument: mummy would be very sick, sometimes a mama can start to be pregnant but it is not right and so the baby doesn’t grow, I love you far too much to share you, think how tired I would be. Not to be defeated, she has answers for everything. “Mummy I know you would feel sick but think of the cute result! And I would visit your bed every day and bring flowers, and if you’re tired I can look after you. I would be such a good big sister.” I tell her I will think about it.
These are the moments in which I feel the most lost.
I often think of a friend I had at sixth form. We both took A-Levels in Philosophy, Politics, and Classics, and sometimes studied together. I can so clearly recall how I felt when I went over to his house to revise: how well-adjusted his relationship with his parents seemed, how lovely and tidy his home was, how calm their family felt as we sat and chatted over pasta and a glass of red wine. How he was an only child.
It has been nearly three years since the last miscarriage and I have not been pregnant since. I am still not sure I ever want to be. I feel increasingly ready to draw a line, to make a decision out loud, to tell people and proudly claim the label of a one-child family.
I know that if I said out loud the words “I never want to have another child” I would cry in loud hiccoughing sobs and it would illuminate my grief for what would never be; big family Christmases, my daughter proudly holding her new sibling, my husband delighting in a tiny human, breastfeeding again. I would cry for my future self when she is old, looking back and wishing she had jumped and had more children, dreaming of a house full of grandchildren. I would cry for the door I had closed. But I know that after the tears, I would feel lighter, happier, free. Maybe.
I have just had my first book published, and I have tentatively started writing another. My work is going well and I enjoy it. I love home educating my vibrant, funny, delightful daughter. I devour books, make plans, see friends. My husband’s career is solidifying. We are not rich, but we do not worry about money either. I sleep enough. Life does not quite feel balanced, because we are in the middle of a global pandemic and everything feels surreal and fucked, but I am getting a glimpse into what life might look like in years to come. Husband, daughter, writing, friendships, time alone. Maybe a house in the countryside or by the sea instead of in zone three, hopefully less anxiety, more writing, but one thing is constant in my daydreams: I only ever seem to have one child.
We are away with friends and I am standing in the kitchen alone with my husband. It’s only fair to tell him, I say, that I don’t think I will ever want another child. I am sick of feeling paralysed by the question mark hanging over me and I want so much to move on from the endless “should we, shouldn’t we” discussions. The weight of the baby clothes in the loft feels suffocating. We agree to leave it open: if I change my mind and want to try then he will be happy, but if not, he will learn to be OK with one. Right now that conversation feels like the best we can hope for. I feel calmer than I have done in a long time.
I look at my daughter in the evening light, her head bent over her drawing, frowning in concentration as her golden hair falls over her perfect face. I know this is a question I cannot rationalise or argue my way around. No amount of books or research papers or conversations can decide this for me. This is an aspect of my life where I no longer believe in closing my eyes, diving in, and hoping. Perhaps one day I will feel the wild rush of desire for another child again, just as I did all those years ago; if I do, I have no doubt that I will jump, and that we will make it work because that child would be so wanted. But at this point, I cannot fathom it.
We are in the car and my daughter asks to listen to the Bob Dorough song “Three is a Magic Number”. We’ve been listening to lots of times tables songs, and I haven’t really paid attention to the words until now.
“A man and a woman had a little baby.
“Yes they did,
“And they had three in the family.
“That’s a magic number.”
And I close my eyes and tilt my face to the sun streaming through the open window.
COMING UP…
It’s nearly September, which means my course / community for home educating parents will be running again! If you’re interested do take a look here.
THANK YOU
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Eloise x
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This was wonderful. I think a gift we give to our children is helping them know they are chosen. This was an epitaph for choosing and I LOVE it. Thank you