I was definitely miscarrying. The bleeding took hold properly on my birthday, as if to underline the point. 42 years for me: none at all for the tiny life ending within me. 

Who gets accidentally pregnant in their forties? Me, it turns out. A teenager still, despite the wrinkles. Taking my love for unlooked-for gifts to extremes.

It is a strange pain to lose an unplanned child. You do not feel, lol, legitimate in your grief. This is not the much-hoped-for baby of a couple who long to conceive. This is something out of leftfield, a blow you never saw coming.

It would have been ridiculously tough to have had that baby. Not just for me and for their father, but also for the beloved people who hold up my life, who already carry a lot on my behalf. The timing sucked. I felt the shame of the circumstances like a slap, and I was so, so afraid for the future. But I was ready to love whoever that child was, like nothing else. Fiercely and forever, with claws and teeth. 

If only that could have been enough. It wasn’t. So many important things were not in place. As I was wrestling with what to do, the little life chose to leave me, like a kind ex that knows it should be over and sets you free. My not-to-be-baby saved me so much struggle. But the price was losing them. 

It has been a silent, stitch-mouthed sort of loss. Afraid of being on my own, scared of the impact on my life, the lives of my loved ones, I kept the pregnancy and its end to myself, as much as I could. I was forgetting that secrets sever you from others. When braveface becomes a mask you can’t take off, you’re trapped where no one can see you. 

It has been one of the loneliest experiences of my life. After the hospital appointment that confirmed yes, the pregnancy was over, I got back to my dark, empty flat and fell apart. I crawled along the floor like a dog and curled up around the pain. No-one was there, entirely because of my wonky choices. The part of me convinced I deserve all my sorrows was crowing like a rooster. My body didn’t care, it just hurt and hurt and hurt. I have never wanted to be held more in my life.  

It would be far easier to pretend none of this happened, that last summer was just like any other, that my birthdays will be just as they always were. But this is cheap, fake comfort. It is not the truth. If I say nothing, I feed the silence that surrounds this experience, the blood and the pain of it, the desperate, dashed hopes. And that small life disappears all over again, as I hide the fact they ever existed. 

Instead, I have to write. Lay what wasn’t to be my child to rest here, among the words. So that it is set down. There could have been someone new, someone I would have loved for the rest of my life. I feel them in flashes: their soft hair under my chin, their tiny fingers splayed against my cheek, their warm weight over my shoulder. That specific, crazy miracle, a human unlike any other. No-one needs to care but me; this is just how I remember, and I will always remember. 

Here, I can say – little lost one, you are safe now. As small, as secret as you were, you were mine, and nothing can take that away. I will carry you with me always. The tiny seed of light, planted at the very centre of my heart.