This summer I got engaged to my partner and we thought that was the happy ending – the stamp on our story. We have three children between us from the partners before and had blended and negotiated and worked out how to make a model that worked for us. It felt more than enough– but there was more.

“I fell pregnant”

It wasn’t planned and at 43 I was really surprised. I didn’t think my body had the capacity. I’d only believed in stories about perimenopause – honouring my menstrual cycles like they were the last jewels of my womanhood. Not ways to make babies. I didn’t think contraception mattered.

But maybe there was something about this summer that felt a little magical. Outside of nature – supernatural, in fact. It was all overspilling with love and marriage proposals and heat – it was a lovely bubble. Perhaps anything could have happened – and it did.

‘My body was older and behaving differently”

I worried. How was I going to do it again – my body was older. I didn’t have that bounce-back energy.  With Sylvie I’d been sick constantly – she’d let me know she was there all the time. This time it was quieter. My body still changed. My breasts got bigger, firmer – my stomach rounded quickly, and my jeans felt tight. But at times I didn’t feel pregnant at all.  There was less drama about this – perhaps because I could never quite believe it had happened at all.

Even unplanned I felt that bond. For a very short while I thought about not keeping it, but each week passed, and I settled into this future. My hand began to rest at my stomach. I felt more and more like its mother. I allowed myself to think of French names – Audrey was my favourite. When the placenta attached, I began to bleed and panicked. I went for an emergency scan. The midwife checked, and it was fine. Scans showed it was all going to be fine. Moving – living – alive.  I was just gone eleven weeks: fine. The statistics said a miscarriage would be unlikely.

“And then it wasn’t fine”

On Sunday evening and on the day before my daughter’s eleventh birthday, I began to cramp across my lower back and across my stomach – burning and hurt – I recognised this pain. It was like I was in labour. I took some codeine and lay on the sofa, curled to the right, breathing into the pain – and out of it again. The waves were tidal and overwhelming when they came – smaller and softer as my body gathered itself.

And then I went to the toilet – an urge – an animal impulse – to eject whatever it was cramping in my womb. And out of the lumps of blood came the small sac and little life – I was carrying. Bizarre, precious – even this was oddly magical.

My dear friend was a witness, and she said how beautifully I’d done it all – how much I’d known my body and understood what it needed to do.  It allowed the ending to come – in blood and tissue – without hysteria, or tears. An essential, perfect silence.

“My body believed and knew it could get better”

When I’d given birth to Sylvie, I’d wept and howled that I couldn’t continue – that it was too hard. I begged for help and relief. This time I trusted my body more. Somewhere, deep in muscle memory, my body knew it was going to heal. It realised it could manage this hurt.

I do wonder if my history of boxing helped manage physical pain – expectations of it, but also how to handle the way it thrashed when it came. Just when I thought my boxing journey was done – its lessons returned. Built-in to my system. My body believed and knew it could get better – because it always had.

I sat in a hot bath, and allowed for blood, tissue and lining to empty. I was my own doula.  I was my own mother. I thought how my body was so clever and brutal and wise. The way it decided to get rid of what didn’t serve it. In awe of my pain threshold – the way I was able to carry so much of it. That I was allowing it to do what it needed. I had understood this was a fight I needed to lose. I was so good at letting go.

“It will always be part of this story”

Giving birth is a private space that nobody can enter or understand – even if it’s a miscarriage. You’re there in the dark – with all that ache – expelling, breathing, and trusting it will get better again. The female body knows how to do pain.

We still plan to marry. But a miscarriage plays out hard for a couple. His grief is different. It didn’t land in his body the same way – it sits somewhere else for him. All we can do is love each other. There will forever be a dark spot, a little grit, on what is still a world of love. A sweet ghost that was part of this tale – something of us, forever. It will always be part of this story. The bitter endings and soft beginnings living together in my body.

Credit: James Barber

Soft Tissue Damage by Anna Whitwham (Rough Trade Books, 2025)

Anna Whitwham was born in 1981 in London. She studied Drama and English at the University of California, Los Angeles, Queens University Belfast and at Royal Holloway, London where she teaches on the MA in creative writing and runs a course called ‘Writing Men: The Burden of Masculinity.’ She was an Observer Best Debut Novelist in 2011 with her book Boxer Handsome, and the first female journalist to write for Boxing News. Soft Tissue Damage is her second book and is published by Rough Trade Books.

Tommy’s Pregnancy and Baby Charity

If you have been affected by miscarriage Tommy’s are a wonderful pregnancy and baby loss charity, funding research into stillbirth, premature birth and miscarriage and providing trusted pregnancy advice. For more information see here.