Four Understandings of Miscarriage
(a womanifesto)
*Louise Bourgeois ‘The Birth’ 2007
1.The daughter
In the womb of my mother and in the womb of my grandmother. My grandmother, my mother. My mum.
A mother but not a mum.
You made me a mother, not you, but you. Tiny, but not too tiny to be held. Afraid I would drop you, afraid to look at you , afraid of you. Afraid of seeing you lifeless and covered in blood. The sensation of the contours of your body exiting mine. What would you look like? Like me.
Effort. Work. Labour.
A mother in a way I didn’t know about, in a way I never expected. But still a mother.
In the womb of your mother and in the womb of your grandmother.
Absence.
2. The grandmother
You are in bed when I tell you. You have been here for days. Tired. You muster a smile.
You think it is my mother’s news and not mine. You see an army marching past the window. People take money from you whilst you sleep.
I rub cream on your back. You are in pain. I feel your bones protruding. Shock. You have always been so big and now you are disappearing.
You can’t see and so I lift my clothes and press your hand to my belly so you can feel instead. You smile. I look across the room at your daughter, eyes meeting, the four of us.
You tell me not to work too hard.
3. The women
I imagine you all with me. Gathered. Unknown faces. Unknown names. You are all here. Eyes. Cells. Light. Gathered. Living in me.
Give me strength.
The experiences stretch back through time and across place.
How many others at the same time? A woman groans, screams and cries in the room next to me.
A woman who looks me in the eye and tells me it is time, she tells me what will happen, what had happened, she asks me to make decisions. I make them according to my feelings, there isn’t anything else.
A woman who comes to me and never leaves my side.
A woman who sings for me under a tree, holds my hand and my head, makes me laugh, she wraps her arms around me in the pouring rain, cooks my dinner, strokes my hair and leaves me be.
She doesn’t want to talk about what happened.
“I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to talk about it”
The woman who took you away and cleaned you, who brought you back to me wrapped in blankets, a yellow hat, placed in a basket.
(Even in this strange state I recognise yellow as the non-gendered colour. They don’t know your sex, can’t tell yet. I know. I would never have put you in a pink hat.)
The woman who placed you in my arms.
The women who hold these spaces.
The women who returned you to me weeks later as, my arms outstretched on my legs, I felt your weight resting on me.
The woman who said she had seen you. The women who showed you to her.
The woman whose art I craved and stumbled upon unexpectedly. Absorbed by the red painting, a crudely drawn female figure, foetus hanging between the legs. The time and the experience, time passing.
The woman whose words I pore over
“That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer
and I did not die”
The woman whose music I can no longer hear, our paths divide. They meet again and I hear the music differently. It is me that has changed, I can’t speak for her.
The woman who doesn’t know what to say.
The woman who assumes my life is empty. It is not.
The women who continue as I watch from here, left behind, taking a different route. The women who I glimpse sometimes from over here.
The women who tell me their stories and to whom I tell mine.
The woman who asks me how I am everyday.
4. The unsaid
The wildness.
The unstoppable-ness.
The inevitability.
The disgust.
The empowerment.
The force.
The frequency.
The everydayness and the domesticity.
The silence.
The want to retreat.
The need to be witnessed.
The wolves.
The care.
The secrecy.
The strength of the wind being blown from the sea.
The screaming.
The sobbing.
The silence.
The wildness.
The stories.
The secrets disclosed and those that have heard them.
The empowerment.
The connections.
The love.
The helplessness.
The waking up.
The wildness.
The knowledge of the body.
The body as home.
A dwelling built.
The seals who bring joy and look from afar.
The timelessness, placelessness, agelessness.
