My spouse had six miscarriages… and I believed I used to be going to lose her

My wife and I started trying for a baby shortly before the first Covid lockdown in 2020, when she was 30 and I was 36. Over the following two years, during a time of social distancing and banned family contact, she had six miscarriages.

Each is etched into our memories.

The first came after the scan of our twins at eight weeks. Our eyes locked on the screen of the ultrasound — that circle of darkness, in search of form and movement.

There they were — two question marks arranged head-to-head, toe-to-toe — but then came the exhale from the sonographer. ‘I’m sorry… there are no heartbeats.’ Six times we went through scenes like these. The deafening silence of no heartbeat. 

Or, when the pregnancy was discovered to be ectopic, the shift in atmosphere, the panicked look of medical professionals. A rushed scramble to surgery. Cramps, fear and then blood…

And so, when we got a positive pregnancy test for a seventh time, in 2022, we weren’t excited, but flooded with fear.

My wife and I met at Cambridge in 2008 — I am an artist and I worked with Kiran, who is a novelist and playwright, to make some props for a play she was in — so by the time we started trying for a baby, we had been together for well over a decade and married for three years. 

For a long time, we weren’t sure if we wanted children, but once the desire arrived it felt like a magnetic pull, something we would find hard to let go of.

And yet each pregnancy and each loss made me increasingly aware of the distance between our experiences. Studies show that men believe the role in miscarriage is one of support, and of course the medical focus is on the pregnant body alone.

But how then, do we find a way for the non-pregnant partner to navigate and express their grief?

Research suggests it is common for the partner to suffer a kind of disenfranchised grief, a feeling of intense sadness with no clear outlet. 

From the moment the test confirmed her seventh pregnancy, Kiran became trapped in a cycle of testing, often multiple times a day, seeking some kind of concrete certainty that she was still pregnant. She was waiting for the inevitable, anticipating the arrival of a too-familiar pain.

But if she feared losing another pregnancy, I increasingly feared losing her.

I tried to understand her experience. The root of the word ’empathy’ means ‘to feel into’ or ‘to suffer with’, an imaginative attempt to inhabit the feelings and experience of another. Yet after all these losses I felt like a failure, totally incapable of comprehending Kiran’s feelings and barely able to locate my own.

She could place and articulate her feelings, the all-consuming nature of them, with a surgical and bodily precision. I struggled to move beyond the dull ache of numbness and detachment, from myself, from the situation, from the pain.

We became haunted by the losses. As we grieved, others celebrated. There were babies born to friends and family and I’d see Kiran looking at them playing, knowing she was imagining one of our could-have-been children alongside them. We saw the tired eyes of other new parents and longed for that once-dreaded exhaustion.

In the waiting room at the early pregnancy unit there was a window that perfectly framed a playground. We watched parents playing with their toddlers, holding their hands as they took those first clumsy steps.

The framing of the view felt like a movie of all we would not have. At each visit I saw them, the spectres of our lost children, little shadow toddlers wearing our faces, next to the others.

I saw these spirits not as what would have been, but as beings existing in another version of the universe. It made me dizzy with snatched-away possibility.

There were times I would share my grief with Kiran. When the ashes of our twins were split, so they could be scattered in multiple locations, I felt it was somehow an act of spiritual violence.

But telling her this was a cruel mistake. I wasn’t sharing as an act of connection, but pouring my own pain into her.

It was clear she felt ambushed by the confession and I felt a deep guilt at this process of emotional dumping.

As a result, I started to repress my feelings and doubt my actions.

The grief faced in two directions — we were mourning both the past, what was gone, and also the future that had been stolen from us.

As time went on it was clear I was burying my emotions in a hidden corner of the self. As Kiran fell deeper into her feelings, I drifted further from my own.

When friends and family asked how I was, or we were, I would look to minimise it all, to offer up platitudes or short cuts to ending dialogue. I was happy to talk about it with them, but I was always skating on the surface, deflecting any attention away from how I was feeling. I was incrementally alienating them.

A number of the losses were early: two were chemical pregnancies, meaning they were lost before five weeks. With the best of intentions, meaning only to soothe, people would say ‘at least it was early’. But that felt deeply unhelpful. It stole our permission to grieve.

Conversation became a kind of dance in which I would follow set moves to navigate my way out of it.

Perversely, if anything, I was trying to protect others from seeing the pain that existed beneath the surface. Yet the impact of that was to also hide my pain from Kiran, and to risk widening the chasm between our comprehension of each other’s internal worlds.

When our babies died, a piece of Kiran died too. She was not just carrying them, she made them. Foetal cells and DNA have been shown to stay in the mother’s body for decades after pregnancy. It meant each loss was felt at a physical as well as a psychological level.

Yet for me, it all felt strangely theoretical. Their lives were beyond me, in every sense. As a result, bit by bit, I withdrew. We both slowly turned inwards, away from the other.

It is a shameful, dangerous thing to acknowledge, but I was jealous of her grief, of its intense immediacy and of the unbreakable connection that she had had with our babies during each pregnancy. It was beyond my reach.

In 2021, after the ectopic pregnancy that ended in emergency surgery to remove a fallopian tube — our fourth loss — Kiran’s response changed. Her recovery was now marked by intense pain and seething anger.

Her fury was never directed at me, but almost always inwards. She was having increasingly toxic and monstrous thoughts, and there was a danger she might cause herself harm. I worried she was mistaking intrusive thoughts for reality.

The distance between us grew, an invisible barrier expanding exponentially. Indeed, she stopped telling me what she was thinking altogether, insisting her thoughts were unspeakable, unsayable.

Her rage was replaced by near muteness. When I held her she felt different, cold and unresponsive to touch. Her eyes were glazed over, looking at me from another world altogether.

She was sinking inside her own body, trapped in the very place she felt had failed her.

She has suffered depression of various intensities throughout our relationship, once describing it as an unmentionable weight. Slowly I saw her crushed by its return. She was entering an underworld, a vast labyrinthine landscape in which she was lost to me.

We went to see a couples therapist via Petals, the baby loss counselling charity. I can remember in our first session the therapist asking us both what we felt, and more importantly where in the body we felt it.

Kiran answered with absolute precision, clearly naming the feeling and its location. I fell silent. The truth was I could not locate it. I was untethered from my body and emotions. I cried, but it was as if I was split from my own body. I was, step by step, becoming that cliched model of masculinity and repressed emotion that I did not recognise.

In hindsight I was increasingly isolated and lonely. I felt oddly passive, full of a quiet guilt whenever I did feel anything. I was performing a type of stoic masculinity I didn’t remotely believe in. And I was becoming a partner Kiran did not recognise as the man she had fallen in love with.

We both found the losses creeping into our work. I started to make paintings of an Underworld, retellings of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where Orpheus enters the Underworld to bring Eurydice back. There was a recurrent theme in the work of one lover trying to rescue another.

Kiran found solace in podcasts, in books, in the words of family, friends and strangers. She posted with raw honesty on social media about her experience, a move I initially resisted, feeling the lack of privacy, as though the whole world was flooding into our home through a little glowing screen.

Yet the connection slowly lifted her back into herself. Her words were hands reaching out, and others returned, a murmuring of would-be parents urging each other on. She was less alone.

Despite one in eight pregnancies ending in loss, there are still stigmas and silences around the topic, at the precise time we need conversation and connection. Even in 2024, this is especially the case for men.

But the tide is turning. We were blessed that through family, friends, therapists, medical professionals and strangers we found so many forms of support.

Above all it was in our work that we found each other again. Kiran’s bravery and honesty opened passages of communication that allowed us both to share our stories. And in my paintings, I created a space to explore and articulate the feelings I could not express elsewhere.

Slowly, we found ourselves, not just coming back to each other, but we could feel the bonds built over 15 years becoming even stronger.

Throughout that seventh pregnancy, we went for long walks, sometimes in silence, hands linked. We knew too much by then to be certain of our baby’s birth, but we did know that whatever future path opened up, we would walk it together.

The idea of a life without a child no longer filled us with fear. Instead, we were able to hold onto hope. The hope of trying. The hope of knowing that if we stopped trying there was a future still, not with an absence but a difference.

I learned new forms of empathy. That love is as much about the differences and distances between us as it is the desire for connection.

Nearly three years after the date upon which the twins would have been born, our daughter arrived into the world.

A few days later, on the twins’ could-have-been birthday, Kiran sat beneath the painting I’d made for them, feeding our newborn. I thought of the waiting, the pain, the love. The version of them and us existing in parallel universes. I swear if I shut my eyes I can feel them, can see them, can finally feel it all, floating like charged atoms in the room.

Strange Bodies: A Story Of Loss And Desire, by Tom de Freston (£16.99, Granta)