There were two of us in the room
Mallory Jones
Almost every kind of trauma has one subject.
A car crash, an illness, a fire, a fall. One person, one body, one set of consequences. Even an assault, which has two people in it, has them in entirely different roles: there is someone it was done to and someone who did it, and we have courts, language and several thousand years of moral philosophy for sorting out which is which.
Reproductive trauma is not like that, and it is the only common category I can think of that is not.
It has an entry requirement. There must be two of you. Not two in the courtroom sense — two participants, equally necessary, neither of them the perpetrator. A pregnancy cannot happen alone and therefore a pregnancy cannot go wrong alone.
And then, within about ten minutes of it going wrong, there is one.
I wrote here recently about going back to Annie Ernaux at fifty-two, and about whether a woman is permitted to write this sort of thing down at all. That essay was about the page. This one is about the room, and about who is standing in it when the worst happens, and who is still standing in it thirty-three years later.
Start with what happens if he goes.
She carries both halves. Her own, obviously — the event, the medicine, the body, the remembering. And his, in the form of a question that only he can answer and that he is not available to answer. What was it for him. What did he think had happened. Whether he thought about it at all.
That second item sounds abstract and is not. It is an open file. It does not fade, because nothing acts on it, and it cannot be closed from this end.
Now take the more interesting case, which is what happens if he stays.
She still carries more.
Men grieve. This is established, repeatedly, in a literature that almost nobody outside the field has read.
A systematic review of twenty-nine studies found that men routinely take on the role of supporter to their partner, and that doing so comes at the expense of their own health and wellbeing — including, for some, heavier drinking afterwards.
A later review, of forty-six studies, gave the thing its proper name. Double-disenfranchised grief. They are mourning a loss that is barely recognised, in a role that is not recognised at all, and the authors note that the bereavement guidance has itself been written almost entirely around mothers.
And a 2019 Australian study — a small one, ten men, interviewed after their partners miscarried — is titled with a sentence one of them said: there was just no-one there to acknowledge that it happened to me as well.
None of this is new. A paper from 1997 is called The legitimacy of grieving. One from 2004 is called A grief ignored. The titles have been doing the work for thirty years.
So they are not fine, and were never fine. But note what the research says they do about it. They hold it back, on purpose, so as not to burden her.
Which means she is now carrying her own grief plus his silence — and in thirty years' time somebody will explain to her, kindly, that he is just a private person.
He stays, and she carries one and a half. He goes, and she carries two. There is no arrangement in which she carries one.
None of this requires anybody to be cruel. It is laid down in advance, in the paperwork, before a single person has had a feeling.
The appointment is in her name. The notes, the scan, the wristband, the consent form, the follow-up letter, the sick note. In England a termination needs the signatures of two doctors and he is not one of them. If anybody asks about him at all, the question is whether there is someone at home with her — which makes him a resource rather than a person who was there.
At no point is there a form on which he is the patient.
He is a partner. That is a relationship, not a role.
So every institution he passes through spends several months establishing that this is happening near him rather than to him. And then everyone else agrees with the institutions, for the rest of his life. Including him.
It is shifting, slowly. When The Lancet published its miscarriage series in 2021 it called for investigation after one loss rather than three, an end to the postcode lottery in care, and long-term mental health support. Tommy's, working from it, recommended that women and partners be referred for mental health assessment.
Partners. As a recommendation. In 2021. Which tells you exactly where we were starting from.
And then there is the thing that took me three decades to notice, because it is made entirely of an absence.
Nobody ever asks him.
I do not mean nobody asks whether he is all right; we have just established that nobody does that either. I mean something much narrower and much stranger.
As far as I am aware, in thirty-three years, not one person has ever said to the boy who was standing in that corridor: did you go back? Did you check that she was all right?
Consider what we do with anything else. If a man were driving and his passenger was badly hurt, every person he met for the next twenty years would ask whether he had been to see her. If he had been there when a friend collapsed. If he had got out of a building with somebody still inside. The question would be the first thing out of everybody's mouth, and it would never stop being asked, and no amount of time would make it an odd thing to raise.
He is not forgiven, because forgiveness requires a charge. He is not charged. He steps out of the category and it closes behind him as though it had only ever had one person in it.
Now I want to show you how far into a person this goes, because I found out by accident and it is the worst thing I know about myself.
I have spent two years writing a book about what happened. The book is not about him. It never was. That is the irritating part — people assume a book like this is a long complaint about a man, and it is not. It is about a girl of seventeen, and what the loss did to her, and the thirty years she spent being impeccable afterwards.
So when I went back through the manuscript, properly, with a system, I expected to find myself being hard on him.
Here is what I actually found.
I had protected him on every page. Mitigation after mitigation. He was only nineteen. His family did not talk about things. He had no language for it. He may not have understood what had happened. I cannot know his mind — a line I had written, in various forms, more times than I could count, always just before anything got difficult.
And her?
I had given her nothing.
No privacy. I put her in the worst rooms of her life in full detail and never once stopped to ask whether she would have wanted that. No defence. No context. No allowances for her age, which was two years younger than his. I never worried about how she would come across. I never wondered what people would say about her — because I already knew precisely what they would say, and by whom, and I had decided it was the price.
I did not protect her at all. I protected him the entire way through.
And I want to be clear that this was not fairness, although it looked like fairness and I would have defended it as fairness. Fairness is applied evenly. This was not even. I had one instinct running at full power, which was to make sure nobody thought too badly of him, and no corresponding instinct of any kind for the seventeen-year-old, because that instinct had never been installed.
I did not stop on my own. Other people had to tell me. Readers, going through it, who said: you are being so careful with him that we cannot see what actually happened.
That is what the arrangement does, in the end. It is not only that he is excused and she is not. It is that she will do the excusing. Thirty-three years on, with a profession and a vocabulary and no illusions left, sitting at her own desk writing her own account of her own life, she will still be working as his defence counsel, unpaid, and will not notice until somebody points at the page.
So here is the end of this, and it is addressed to a particular group of people, and I think a few of you are reading.
I am not writing to one man. I have no idea how many of you there are, and the research suggests a great many.
You are in your fifties or sixties now. A long way behind you there is a girl, and a pregnancy that went wrong or was ended, and you were there for some of it. You left, or you stayed and said nothing. It has sat in you ever since as an awkward shape you have never had a name for and have certainly never discussed with anybody.
You have told yourself one of three things. That it was a long time ago. That she will have moved on. That raising it now would only upset her.
All three are wrong, and I can tell you so with some authority, because I have been one of those girls, and because I have spent two years in the company of the evidence about the rest of them.
It was a long time ago for you. For her it is intact, exactly the size it was, because nothing happens to these things in storage.
She has not moved on in the sense you mean. She has built an entire working life on top of it, which is a different thing and considerably more tiring.
And it would not harm her. It might upset her, and those are not the same. The thing that has been doing the damage for thirty years is not the question. It is the absence of the question.
You do not have to apologise. I suspect the dread of having to perform some enormous apology is what stops most of you, and the apology was never the point.
You do not have to explain yourself. You probably cannot, and nobody is asking you to.
But do not reach for the one about being too young to know what to do with it. I have just spent several pages catching myself handing you that, and I am not going to do it again on the last page.
She was seventeen. She sat in a college library at lunchtime with forty minutes and a textbook and worked out, on her own, the things no adult in her life would tell her, because there was nobody to ask. If a girl of seventeen could think her way through it with nothing, a boy of nineteen could have thought to pick up a telephone.
You may well have been a coward. Most people are, at nineteen, about the largest thing that has ever happened to them. That is forgivable, and it is also not the point, because cowardice at nineteen does not come with a thirty-year sentence attached.
You can simply say it. I was a coward, I could not face you, and I have thought about it ever since. That is a complete sentence and it costs nothing.
And then have the conversation.
Because you are not nineteen anymore.
You are not twenty, and you are not twenty-five. You are a grown man with a career and a family and thirty-odd years of practice at being a person. You have words. You have feelings and you can name them — you do it about other things all the time, about work and music and your own father. You have a telephone in your pocket and her name is probably in it.
You have capacity.
Which means that from here it is not a limitation. It is a choice, made by an adult, repeatedly, every day that you do not make it.
Ask the question, or stay a coward and leave her in that room on her own for the rest of her life.
This is the whole of it.
Were you all right?
Four words. You will have to mean them, and you will have to stay on the line for the answer, because she may have been waiting a very long time and it may take her a while to get it out.
And here is how low the bar is.
In January 1992, in Leeds, before the worst of it had even happened, a taxi driver asked a girl of seventeen whether she was all right. At a red light, on the Otley Road, at about half past ten at night. He did not know her name. It cost him four seconds.
She is fifty-two now. She has remembered that man for thirty-three years.
That is what is sitting there, available to you, for the price of one phone call, from somebody who does know her name.
And she is still in that room. Still waiting.
Not because she is bitter. Not because she is resentful, or obsessed, or unable to let it go, or whichever of those words arrived in your head first — and one of them did, and you did not have to look it up.
She may be angry. She may be upset. Thirty years is a long time to hold something that nobody has ever come for.
But mostly, and this is the part that matters, she is simply wondering why you never asked.
That is all it is. That is the whole of what is waiting for you in there.
There were two of you in that room.
She is still in it, on her own, and she has been for a very long time.
Go and ask.
Sources
Due C, Chiarolli S, Riggs DW. The impact of pregnancy loss on men's health and wellbeing: a systematic review. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 2017;17:380. doi:10.1186/s12884-017-1560-9
Obst KL, Due C, Oxlad M, Middleton P. Men's grief following pregnancy loss and neonatal loss: a systematic review and emerging theoretical model. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 2020;20:11. doi:10.1186/s12884-019-2677-9
Miller EJ, Temple-Smith MJ, Bilardi JE. 'There was just no-one there to acknowledge that it happened to me as well': a qualitative study of male partner's experience of miscarriage. PLOS ONE 2019;14(5):e0217395. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0217395
Puddifoot JE, Johnson MP. The legitimacy of grieving: the partner's experience at miscarriage. Social Science & Medicine 1997.
McCreight BS. A grief ignored: narratives of pregnancy loss from a male perspective. Sociology of Health & Illness 2004.
Coomarasamy A, et al. Recurrent miscarriage: evidence to accelerate action. The Lancet 2021;397(10285), published 26 April 2021. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00681-4
Tommy's. Lancet miscarriage research: our recommendations to the government.