The Girl Before

I could tell from the set, strained faces of the medical team as they went about their work that even for them, this was horrible and rare. But whereas for them professionalism could provide some sort of refuge, for me there was only an overwhelming, numbing sense of failure. As they attached the drip with its cargo of hormones to get me started, I could hear the howls of another woman, farther down the maternity ward. But that woman would walk out with a baby, not an appointment card to see a bereavement counselor. Maternity. Another strange word, when you thought about it. Would I even be a mother, technically, or was there some other term for what I was about to become? I’d already heard them saying postpartum instead of postnatal.

Someone asked about the father and I shook my head. No father to contact, just my friend Mia here, her face white with misery and worry as all our carefully laid birthing plans—Diptyque candles and water pools and an iPod full of Jack Johnson and Bach—were discarded in the somber rush of medical activity; not even mentioned, as if they’d only ever been part of an illusion that all was safe and well, that I was in control, that childbirth was barely more taxing than a spa treatment or a particularly fierce massage, not a deadly business in which outcomes like this were perfectly possible, even to be expected. One in two hundred, Dr. Gifford had said. In a third of cases, no reason was ever found. That I was fit and healthy—before the pregnancy I’d done Pilates every day, and run at least once a week—made no difference; neither did my age. Some babies simply died. I would be childless, and little Isabel Margaret Cavendish would never have a mother. A life would never happen. As the contractions started I took a gulp of gas and air and my mind filled with horrors. Images of abominations in Victorian formaldehyde jars swam into my mind. I screamed and clenched my muscles, even though the midwife was telling me it wasn’t time yet.

But afterward—after I had given birth, or given death, or whatever it should be called—everything was strangely peaceful. That was the hormones, apparently—the same cocktail of love and bliss and relief every new mother feels. My daughter was perfect and quiet and I held her in my arms and cooed over her just as any mother would. She smelled of snot and body fluids and sweet new skin. Her warm little fist curled loosely around my finger, like any baby’s. I felt—I felt joy.

The midwife took her away to make casts of her hands and feet for my memory box. It was the first time I’d heard that phrase and she had to explain. I would be given a shoe box containing a snippet of Isabel’s hair, the cloth she was swaddled in, some photographs, and the plaster casts. Like a little coffin; the mementos of a person who had never been. When the midwife brought the casts back, they were like a kindergarten project. Pink plaster for the hands, blue for the feet. That’s when it finally started to sink in that there would be no art projects, no drawings on the walls, no choosing of schools, no growing out of uniforms. I hadn’t only lost a baby. I had lost a child, a teenager, a woman.

Her feet and all the rest of her were cold now. As I washed the last bits of plaster off her toes at the tap in my room, I asked if I could take her home with me, just for a while. The midwife looked askance and said that would be a bit strange, wouldn’t it? But I could hold her for as long as I wanted, here at the hospital. I said I was ready for them to take her away.

After that, looking at the gray London sky through my tears, it felt as if something had been amputated. Back at home, raging grief gave way to more numbness. When friends spoke to me in shocked, sympathetic tones about my loss, I knew of course what they meant, and yet the word also felt deadly accurate. Other women had won—victorious in their gamble with nature, with procreation, with genetics. I had not. I—who had always been so efficient, so high-achieving, so successful—had lost. Grief, I discovered, feels not so very different from defeat.

And yet, bizarrely, on the surface everything was almost back to the way it had been before. Before the brief, civilized liaison with my opposite number in the Geneva office, an affair played out in hotel rooms and bland, efficient restaurants; before the mornings of vomiting and the—initially awful—realization that we might not have been quite as careful as I’d thought. Before the difficult phone calls and emails and the polite hints from him about decisions and arrangements and unfortunate timing, and finally the slow dawning of a different feeling, a feeling that the timing might be right after all, that even if the affair was not going to lead to a long-term relationship it had given me, unmarried at thirty-four, an opportunity. I had more than enough income for two, and the financial PR firm I worked for prided itself on the generosity of its maternity benefits. Not only would I be able to take off almost a whole year to be with the baby, but I was guaranteed flexible working arrangements when I came back.