A Triumph of the Imperfect

They do tell writers to ‘kill your darlings’, but as much as I slayed each and every one of them, it was a story that would never see the light of day in its early years.

Brace yourself, but please don’t wince or turn away. In September 2001, my wife experienced total miscarriage. That is to say; it wasn’t just the kind of upsetting – even traumatic – miscarriage thousands of couples endure every year, but the result of an ectopic pregnancy that had implanted in the neck of the womb and stayed there for a month.

Friday, we have an ultrasound appointment – our second – in the hospital’s Early Pregnancy Unit (EPU). The radiographer is looking for clues why K’s hormone levels still indicate she is technically pregnant. It has become a gynaecological game of Battleship

It was a prolonged, cervical ectopic miscarriage - an exceedingly rare condition that will only affect between 0.003% and 0.02% of all pregnancies. As few as 3 in every 100,000. We didn't feel lucky, but I’m skipping ahead of myself here. Even before we could gauge our feelings on the matter, before there could be any grief expressed, there was a terrifying toll on my wife’s health to deal with. She lost a lot of blood and was at prolonged risk of a life-threatening haemorrhage for weeks on end.

The global mourning in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Centre suits the mood in the house well. K dozes on the sofa for weeks as funeral follows memorial on daytime television.

Around this time, I put my writer’s hat on and wanted to tell the story – what I felt would be a compelling story – of a taboo subject. I was struck by how miscarriage as a storyline is so often portrayed in soap opera as a 48-hour inconvenience where characters look pale for a single episode, only to be reabsorbed back into the script as soon as the consciousness-raising appearances on daytime tv’s sofas are over.

I wrote it at speed – 3000 words for the first draft, under 2000 for subsequent versions, all little darlings killed. It has been amended, rewritten, re-angled and focussed on and off for over twenty years now. It has been attached to so many emails, I’m convinced some of the pixels are eroded.

I have lavished days on it, overall, and I still don't like it. I don’t think I ever will. The only reason it exists is because of a miscarriage that put my wife in excruciating pain. Holding her hand, hugging her was insufficient; I had to write/right an un-rightable wrong. It has seen so many iterations, I suspect that it is now un-writeable and the wrong has gone to Hell.

Back then however, I had not become aware of the story’s limitations and an entire process grew up around getting it placed somewhere and, increasingly, anywhere. Koi Carp Magazine didn’t see it, because I could not find any particular pond angle, but the process was otherwise rabid and unreasonable. It was important to be heard, it was the second most important thing in my life.

I was crusading on bullet points:

• Tell it as a taboo subject
• Tell it from the partner’s perspective
• Recount it for the benefit of the readers’ friends who may have experienced something similar
• Make it a sweary, cuss-laden, cathartic belch of dark comedy

I hope I’m better as a writer now. I’m in a curious position; I don’t really like the article, but then again, I hardly enjoyed the research phase either. It is a part of me. It almost doesn’t matter how well – or badly – it is written, it is faithful to how I felt at the time and that, at least, is why it was the first story I uploaded to Vocal. The next personal story I wrote for Vocal was Of Sanitiser and Sanity. That was better – at least it had 31 views. 


This hasn’t been the place to recount the story itself, but the story of the first meaningful story I wrote – one I was truly invested in. It went off to be bounced around every market I could think of, subtly angled for individual publications but never finding a home. It garnered lots of sympathy but also 100% rejection. 
In terms of its subject matter alone, it was a fitting story to never make it out into the wider world. A private, perfect statement of grief, an act of cathartic indulgence. Not too loud, tastefully angry and now fully resolved – thanks in no small part to the two amazing and precious teenage daughters that eventually followed.