I am not a father.
When I walked into this room a minute ago, I was.
But now I’m not.
I tell myself this like a riddle as I watch the pale blur on the hospital screen and the curve of the doctor’s neck. I nod like I understand, but I don’t. I’m just a man in a chair in a room with white lights and I don’t even remember what I said to her when she looked at me like she was already somewhere I couldn’t reach.
We left it there: a smudge on the screen without a heartbeat, to wait it out at home.
More than two weeks passed before her body realised what had happened. The emails arrived. The texts from mates about football, dinner plans, life.
The world kept turning.
There was no one I could call. I played the lines in my head — my mother, her dad, an old friend I haven’t spoken to in months — but I couldn’t imagine their voice reaching the place I was in. I thought about all the books I didn’t read, the names we didn’t choose, the scan we never shared.
We left it there: a smudge on the screen without a heartbeat, to wait it out at home.
More than two weeks passed before her body realised what had happened.
I sat in the garden smoking rolled-up joints like I was back in school, thinking if I could just get the taste of stale weed in my throat maybe it would drown out saying “We’ll get through this” when I didn’t know what I meant, didn’t know who I was talking to.
And then one morning, the bathroom door was closed. I heard her muffled crying through it, and I stood there like an idiot holding a glass of water, useless as breath. She didn’t talk to it. And I didn’t talk to her, not really. All I can do is wait while she grieves this tiny part of us, bleeding it out alone. And I can’t even own my sadness without feeling like a thief.
I don’t know if I can sit in another waiting room with that same hopeful terror in my gut, pretending to be a rock when I feel like water.
I started redecorating, just to do something. Painting walls, hammering nails, as if it could heal anything.
She says she wants to try again and I nod, but I’m scared shitless. I don’t know if I can sit in another waiting room with that same hopeful terror in my gut, pretending to be a rock when I feel like water.
There’s a version of me somewhere who’s still walking out of that room with a scan instead of silence. That version doesn't avoid her eyes, doesn’t flinch when she brings it up, doesn’t bury his own grief in silence and thinks it noble.
The midwife said one in five like it was a statistic to comfort us, like grief works on percentages and if you just crunch the numbers right it hurts less. But it doesn’t, it just makes me think about the other four who carried on, the other dads who got to stay on the train while I’m stuck at a station with no timetable and no idea where to go next.
The midwife said one in five like it was a statistic to comfort us, like grief works on percentages and if you just crunch the numbers right it hurts less.
Sometimes, late at night, I imagine them — not like a baby, not a face, just something, some pulse we gave shape to, floating off into the dark. I imagine they knew us, however brief, that maybe we gave them something beautiful — two people who loved them without ever needing proof.
I told myself I’d write it all down.
This is all I’ve got: mess, rage and this:
heartbreak.
Fatherhood without a child.