JESSIE STEPHENS: 'I'm sitting in the hospital where I gave birth to my daughter. This time, there's no bassinet.'

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This is an extended version of a piece I read on a recent episode of Mamamia Out Loud. You can listen to that episode below.

This article originally appeared on Jessie Stephens' Substack, Dwelling. Sign up here.

In a cruel twist of irony, I am sitting in the hospital where I gave birth to my daughter almost exactly two years ago. My car is parked in just about the same spot. I pressed the button on the same lift. Except when I exited, I turned left, not right, walking head down to the Emergency room, knowing I had no business being anywhere near the maternity ward.

This time, there is no bassinet tucked in close beside the bed. There are no newborn squawks. Instead I am handing over urine samples, apologising for the additional blood clots, knowing that I've just had, or am having, a miscarriage.

When your life has become consumed by Getting Pregnant, there are no days of the week. There are simply days of your cycle. You live in a kind of purgatory, stuck in a state of endless waiting. Counting. Four days until I can test. Three. Two.

That day, the test appeared negative. But then, just as I'm sure women have done since time immemorial in moments of shameful desperation, I obviously took a photo and adjusted the contrast. There, I saw the faintest line. A whisper of a promise. Your life could be about to radically change. Or, as the case may be, not at all.

The next day the line was a bit darker. The next day, it was darker again. Certainly visible to the naked eye. I told my husband and my sister. I was so excited. I worked out the due date, and the gap between my babies. I was asked about a work commitment slated in for early next year, and awkwardly tried to pry my way out of it. They'd know soon enough.

I thought about it every second of every day. It's like the knowledge existed in my pulse and I suppose it literally did.

I'd been afraid of how much I wanted this. It feels dangerous to want anything so much. Months have passed. Negative tests. I didn't know until this year how much disdain one could feel for a pad. Or a tampon. How the tear of plastic could mark such total disappointment. It conjures up the image of Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up a hill with all his might, only to have it roll back down the moment he neared the top. Perhaps that myth was inspired by a woman trying to get pregnant, the beginning of her period meaning it was time to take a breath and start again, with no promise the boulder (sperm?) would stick.

But then. A positive test. No alcohol. No Nurofen. Pregnancy vitamins. The very best secret.

It was a Monday afternoon when it happened. We were at the doctor, Luna (my two-year-old) had a persistent cold, and I darted to the bathroom as we finished up. I'd been spotting for a few days, which I'd had with Luna, so I wasn't worried. But when I wiped there was blood. So much blood. Then a twinge in my lower back. Cramps in my lower abdomen. And a knowing. I knew what was happening.

That night as I laid in bed, having taken Panadol which felt like a betrayal of some kind, like I was muting an alarm, I felt lonely. They were gone. Disappeared. I'd so much liked knowing they were there.

Watch Jessie read some of this piece on Mamamia Out Loud here. Post continues after video.

I cannot imagine losing a baby further along, when they're a tiny thing your body has got to know, as familiar as your own shadow, a companion through everything. What I was grieving was hope. The future that I'd let unfold. A family I'd grown attached to.

Sitting in Emergency, I do not need tests to tell me what has happened. I was sent here by my GP, concerned I may be experiencing an ectopic pregnancy. If this is an early pregnancy loss, why is there so much blood? Why am I in this much pain? To my relief, there is no ectopic pregnancy. By this point, there's barely a pregnancy at all, and the pain and the blood is within the realm of normal. Having spoken to women since who lost pregnancies early, it seems that, yeah, it's really physically painful. Just as with birth, however, that's not what you remember.

Lately, other people's joy is all I see. She is pregnant. She has just had her third. She's walking down the street with two little ones, so close in age, with no idea how lucky she is.

I'm being assaulted by pregnant bellies and ultrasound pictures and family photos and they're beautiful but also brutal.

Not so long ago, I was them. A surprise first pregnancy, welcomed but unplanned. I think now about how that must have hurt women in the throes of pregnancy loss or infertility or simply the sometimes long process that is conceiving. Don't worry, I hate her now too.

Pregnancy is so deeply embodied. While everything within you changes, your very brain chemistry, your blood volume, the positioning of your organs, how you interpret smell and taste, the world remains relatively unchanged until the baby is born. The unseen transformation is made material. I was struck by how pregnancy is intimate and private, incommunicable to those closest to you. So when a pregnancy is lost, there are no words. How do you explain a relationship forged through cells? With an entity that was you and wasn't you? Whose meaning came from how desperately you wanted them?

I experienced early what so many women go through much later, and it is awful. To experience a desired pregnancy leave your body, however small, however early, leaves you with an emptiness. A silence. Something that is over before it ever properly began. There is impatience and frustration and grief and isolation. It feels like losing something you only ever really saw.

A positive pregnancy test is the starting line for what will be a long and at times gruelling process, that bears the greatest reward of all. And when you lose that pregnancy, or do not reach it in the first place, it feels like you're not even at the starting line. A mission you can't even begin. A going back in time.

Pregnancy loss does not only belong as a footnote to a pregnancy announcement, a story of victory over struggle, where it didn't matter so much because we got our healthy baby in the end. Right now, that is not where many of us are. We are not certain we'll ever get there.

So we sit in the silence and the emptiness, and we hate it here, stunned by how much it hurts. We dwell in a period not of transition, but attempting to begin a transition, where the future feels always just out of reach. We are Sisyphus, suffocated by that boulder toppling on our heads, hoping that one day it will hold.

Then we can breathe.

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Feature image: Instagram/@jessiestephens90