I have been known to reach for my belly while watching a TV show or a movie as I feel for where I believe a baby should be inside my body. Sometimes, writers take the story in a darker direction and include topics such as miscarriage or stillbirth, which are doubly damaging to me. In these situations, not only do I feel the loss of not being pregnant but the additional loss of feeling what it might feel like to lose a baby
I've cradled my empty belly, crying crying crying in the shower so no one would hear me. I fell into the deepest darkest abyss. Never to see light again. Other women, who had fallen before me, and had found the way out, reached out with understanding and patience and love, so much love, that I would know it wasn't the end, that first a glimmer, then a ray, then a shaft of light would reach me down there and one day I would stand in the warm light of the sun again.
None of us craved this experience. It did not gratify us, fulfill us, arouse us. We were profoundly changed by it, yes, but the instinct to help those who came after us did not come from a wanton desire for gorging on another human beings pain. It was borne out of our own pain and the certainty that alone this was too heavy a burden to carry for most of us.
We would have, gladly, emphatically, gifted that harrowing experience to any man, however disturbed, in exchange for the babies we lost.
The resurgent grief I feel right now, 19 years later, the visceral recall of that desolate, forsaken void at my core, has finally defeated my socialisation. I feel no sympathy for the suffering of this person. I do not wish happiness, peace or fulfilment upon such a putrid, festering cesspit of a brain. I wish I could have stopped such hateful bile spewing out of this narcissistic, depraved mind ever being inflicted on the women in that group.
I'm sending love to them, to all of us who are sickened by these foul fantasies of a perverted soul. To the suffering, soon-to-be-ex-wife trying so hard to protect her children from their narcissistic father. And I especially hold all of you in my heart who have felt that loss.
And let this rage fuel our resistance to the ideology that enables such depravity.