I ate corn chips during my miscarriage. Sitting cross-legged on the shedding cream carpet in front of my double bed as dappled sunlight flowed and receded through the sheer linen IKEA curtains, I sucked the salt and tangy flavouring off each chip and crunched through the waves of pain. Hours later, I curled on the bed and closed my eyes. A rumble of hunger was the only thing cutting through my numbness.
Next door, in the spare bedroom, my husband, Pat, lay on the floor, his head propped up on a pillow, listening to Tropical Fuck Storm then You Am I, King Gizzard, Magic Dirt, then someone else playing something else. The hum and patter of voices and guitars soaked through the wall. He slept there, on the floor. What else was there to do but close your eyes and wish it all away?
For almost three weeks, I held what was once a life with a beating heart in my body. During my lunch break one day, I was told by an Irish woman with an ultrasound machine that my baby no longer had a heartbeat. ‘I’ll be back in a moment, love,’ she’d said, as I lay there in the orange glow, shielding my eyes from the screen. A second opinion was sought. But it only confirmed the first. For the next three weeks, in an apricot-coloured nook outside an obstetrician’s office at Sydney’s Prince Alfred Hospital, I existed in a liminal zone: I was neither pregnant, like those around me, nor not. I sat for hours, waiting for someone to tell me about a pill or procedure, or to remind me there was no heartbeat. And I was constantly hungry, had been for months; just over three to be exact, since I’d learned I was pregnant. For the first time in my life, I had a constant growl of want deep within me, and I satisfied every craving.
When I visited the hospital emergency room for the final time, it was just past 8am on a Monday and the hunger hadn’t gone — it was my only constant companion. I had asked Pat not to come. The miscarriage was our loss, but it was my burden, and I squashed the grief alone in the time it took a taxi to drive from the hospital to my office at Sydney’s Circular Quay. I was at work by ten, quieter, pale.
And I started to see fault in everything. What I ate became a source of obsession, and questions about taste and texture were replaced with bigger thoughts about whether I was leeching on the world. Beneath it all, I was whispering: what did I do to deserve this? The shared lunch ordered for staff who rarely left their desks was spread on the kitchen table like a perverse offering: a pile of couscous salad on one plate, creamy red cabbage coleslaw on another. Tangy shredded chicken, slow-cooked lamb, buckets of hummus, piles of flat breads — a Lebanese-inspired feast for staff who only picked at the food. Half went into the fridge, and then into the rubbish bin the next day. Wasted…
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