The long road to...where?

On Saturday, I travelled to the seemingly eternally flooded Tewkesbury to meet my SP.

There, after eating a vast quantity of marmite sandwiches in the sunshine and reading Rebecca in the gardens of the Abbey with the sun shining on my skin, grabbing desperately at invisible drops of Vitamin D, my SP found me and took care of me.

She had bought me ginger and lemon tea, ginger biscuits, aromatherapy oils (checked and cleared for a lady of my condition) and a bag full of baby clothes and books from her sister. Due to my poorly controlled emotional state, even the thought of her kindness now makes me feel a bit blubbery.

There, in a hotel room, I talked and talked at her, about my worries, my fears.

I told her about my battle with exercise, how my figure, a constant source of resentment and unhappiness over years of teenage and twenty-something traumas, that had finally settled into some sort of aesthetic agreement with myself and my perception of my fatty deposits, had suddenly morphed out of control, inflating at speed, cascading over the top of my trousers, pushing hard and fast on jeans, taut and stretched and all a little too early from everything I'd read.

I told her about my sadness, jealousy, my aching for losing my pole classes. On Friday night I had dreamed, such a vivid dream, of dancing in class, of returning to my old class, to an unfamiliar studio, to a room filled with poles, and girls on these poles, to a place with a stranger that I had to share, self conscious and out of condition. I woke up that night, and ran over move after move in my head, praying I wouldn't forget, that I wouldn't lose it all, not completely. Not after what I'd achieved, where I'd got. In my mind, I inverted, I spun, I performed tricks and spins effortlessly, one after another after another.

Then I told her of my fears. How swiftly I bounced from my own selfishness of such superficial visual worries, to my inner terror, my dark place, my lonely place.

I told her my worry of losing this baby, this tiny collection of cells inside of me, this silent, motionless, creature, undemanding yet needing and wanting everything seemingly beyond perfection to survive these fragile, delicate months.

My bump, this thing, my...baby?...could be already gone, vanished, or never even properly evolved. The chances of miscarriage are frightening, I having already witnessed a few in my virtual baby community. Virtual meeting place, real people, real experiences, real pain.

It is such a very long road ahead. I am seven weeks now, or there abouts. I have such a long time to go before I am even allowed to know if there is something growing within me (apart from fat deposits which seemed to have jumped on the bandwagon excitedly at the thought of establishing themselves on my once generous, more recently economic, hips, of settling comfortably on the never quite conquered back fat, slipping back into their positions grinning satisfactorily, perhaps with a slight hint of superiority, a knowing 'I told you so' at their lips).

It seems an eternity before I even register for my scan. Then such a long, long journey ahead, and that is if that goes okay.

I never understood before the pain a miscarriage must cause. I have seen it, in friends, in handed down stories, in literature, in film. But until I became pregnant (I nearly wrote a mother - again, an uncomfortable betrayal of how I sometimes let my thoughts unravel), I couldn't have foreseen the tumbling of thoughts from cell cluster, from foetus, to dependent baby, to demanding toddler, to stroppy teenager, to drug taking rebellious youth, to adult.

The scenes collapse into one another with no control of my own. I watch as their life, and subsequently my life, unfolds like dominoes collapsing, too fast, never able to take moments back. I am scared for myself as a parent, I will have to toughen up to the harsh words of children, to their icily sharp observations, their bitter and cutting remarks, their casual use of hatred, of love.

I watched Neighbours during my half hour cardio session (a sweat and breathlessness arising after merely stepping onto the stepper these days, according to my midwife signs that I should stop my exercise...but does this apply to the suddenly painfully unfit?) and I noticed the remarks - nasty, bitchy, angry, venomous remarks that children flung at their forgiving, despairing, loving parents and sympathised, for the first time, with the parents' never ending battles for equilibrium, for love in return, for peace, for happiness.

But I am getting ahead of myself once again, in the way that my mind does at the moment. Now I am still buried deep within first trimester sickness, my bands not holding back the waves, although calming them somewhat (or at least distracting me), and scared for each day that passes, each twinge magnified, resonating throughout my inflated body.