I took my daughter to the swings. This is nothing new. Some afternoons, I feel as though I have been standing behind a swing, listening to the hee hai of its metal chains, for the last eight years. But this time, the swings were the very ones that I had looked out on, two years ago, as I waited in the Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit to find out if I’d had a miscarriage.
At the time, as I clutched my notes, and listened to the opening and closing of doors, I found it rather odd that there was a set of swings, a climbing frame and roundabout right outside the window of this place. How cruel, I thought, to flaunt these living, swinging, stumbling children in front of us; us, the bleeding, the nervous, the vomiting, the bereft. Of all the places in all the world to put a children’s play area, why on earth would you build it outside The Rooms of Unpregnancy? The places where we lay on our backs, had our bellies or cervixes inspected and listened to nothing, saw nothing, had nothing.
Quite by chance, the friend I met at the swings this week was the very one who accompanied me to that appointment in 2025; who held my hand and stroked my hair and took me in her arms in that darkened room with the empty, hollowed screen. Neither of us had, I think, really considered this when we organised to meet up in a park, near a post office and a community cafe. It was somewhere I could cycle to, it was close to my son’s school, it had toilets and a baby changing room and it was free. Why wouldn’t two women with their toddling daughters meet there? It was only as I walked across the newly-greening grass, finally quenched by rain after a desiccating summer, that we really clocked the window. The laminated sign above one of the entrances. The view. Of all the places in all the world to put a children’s play area, we had walked into this.
I actually think it’s rather extraordinary that the two things are knitted so close together, now. As my friend and I stood at the swings, we talked about how close we felt to those women arriving for their appointments. How we had a sort of pull towards them that was not quite pity, not quite affection but something like intimacy. We had been where they were now – bleeding into a sanitary towel, unable to eat breakfast, existing in a skittering state of uncertainty – and one day, we hoped, they might be where we were now instead. At the swings. With our children. Doing something as prosaic and as magical and pushing a toddler in a swing.
Of course not everyone who loses a pregnancy goes on to enjoy a morning of rice cakes, discarded rain coats and tantrums outside a medical facility. Not all infertility issues get solved, not all bodies conform to our hopes and not all heartbeats can last. But it is, perhaps, worth remembering that miscarriage is not the end of the story; whether you go on to have a child or not. People who have lost pregnancies do, often, get pregnant again. People who lose pregnancies have lives with children in them, even if they never give birth themselves. Babies, toddlers, infants and children are everywhere and so are the people who care for them. So perhaps it’s not so remarkable that there are swings outside the Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit. Perhaps what is remarkable is all the things you don’t notice, until you notice. Until you know.