A Miscarriage of Justice
I’d only told the baby daddy when I was sure. “So, you’re not getting rid of it then?” He’d said.
Keep mum until you've passed the first trimester. This is the gospel according to the matriarchy, and I’d followed it religiously. The latent fear is that miscarriage pursues you at your back like a winged chariot. I planned to publicly announce my tiny tenant on the first of the year, the day I would cross the Rubicon. Then I would talk openly about the baby and shop for stretchy-top jeans. Aunt Maud would suggest family names and prescribe a daily half-pint of Guinness for the iron. Granny would get out her double-pointed needles to knit booties.
On the last night of the year, I attended a wedding reception at a London club. I must have tried on ten outfits, settling on a forgiving black jersey dress with a low neckline revealing my more buxom bosom. I added high-heeled, red shoes, symbolic and sinful. As I twisted to James Brown in the oak-paneled, candlelit hall, sudden cramping made me crumple to my knees. I shuffled to the ladies’ room, pushing aside the bride, claiming an emergency. Three rolls of tissue failed to stem the hemorrhage. Abandoned, the red heels perfectly mingled with the giant pool of blood.
Before I registered what was happening, I stumbled out of the stall and collapsed. “My baby has come out, but I can’t find it,” I screamed. Then I spotted the bloodied remains. Grabbing an empty toilet roll, I moved across the floor to retrieve the little sac and placed it inside the cardboard tube. Someone called an ambulance. The paramedics arrived. They spoke in hushed tones, acknowledging both the severity of my condition and respect for the loss.
“How many weeks pregnant were you, Luv?” A woman medic asked.
“Twelve tomorrow,” I said with future inflection, while taking in the magnitude of the past tense word- were. I handed her the toilet roll coffin like an offering. I wanted to keep the baby, bury it, and plant a tree in memoriam. But the woman quickly sealed everything in an official plastic bag as though it were evidence in a crime. “The medical waste will have to be examined by the lab,” she said.
How large a dream can grow in twelve weeks, and how quickly it can be trashed as waste. I pressed my face to the cold tile floor and closed my eyes. I could not look down. I was nothing but blood and tears.
“Your baby at twelve weeks is the size of a plum with fingernails.” I read this in the pregnancy bible, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. It didn’t tell me to expect this, but as soon as it happened, they told me just how common it is. “Don’t worry darlin,’ it’s very common, you can try again,” the ambulance driver said as if a repeat fuck could replace the lost one. My devastation in a blood-stained toilet did not feel common — my visceral, silent grief for a baby that never breathed was anything but expected.
I was scraped out and hollow inside. No one at the hospital told me it wasn’t my fault, and I believed it was. What crimes did I commit? I ran through the list of charges. I didn’t want it enough, I wanted it too much, the father was errant, and I was a negligent hussy in red high heels. A gynecologist tells me, “nature is efficient in aborting the abnormal, it means things are working well.” Perhaps he thought I would find a modicum of comfort in the fact my body had successfully rejected a loser. Despite his expertise in the field, the doctor was utterly inept at dealing with my very female loss.
I put myself on trial. The verdict would come in much later, only after I had punished myself for years —a miscarriage of justice. There is no evidence to suggest she was in any way at fault, the judge said.
The world around me celebrated new beginnings that night. I lay wrapped in a hospital blanket in a fetal position and listened to Big Ben at midnight. The bells seemed to mark my endings.
“Is there anyone you need to call?” A nurse asked.
“Leave a message after the beep,” his voice said.
“I lost it,” I said. And then I did.
-Caroline Grobler-Tanner
Caroline Grobler-Tanner is a writer and international public health expert. She writes about matters that are often silenced from a personal and a professional perspective. She grew up in England and now lives in Washington, DC. Her essays and stories have appeared in Motherwell, Intima, and Flash Fiction Magazine.