We need to talk about another really tough passage in your life.
You talk about the miscarriage in the most painstaking detail.
To this day and possibly forever, I carry a sense of guilt that I miscarried the baby
because I had been conflicted about the pregnancy. It was very close to the 2011 Scottish election.
SNP would be going for re-election. I would have been six months pregnant at the time.
Will I be able to cope with it? I still carry a bit of that guilt. If I had been
genuinely happy about the pregnancy, if I genuinely wanted it unequivocally and unambiguously,
if I hadn't had all those moments of wishing I hadn't been pregnant, would the miscarriage not
have happened? Was that my punishment for not? It's totally irrational. I get how irrational that is.
You write about it in extraordinary detail.
I was in the toilet and I'm not going to get into the graphic detail, but effectively,
and I've heard other women describe it like this as well, I managed to call Peter through
and effectively we flushed what would have become our child in the toilet.
You vividly imagined this baby that you lost. Name, who she was. Just tell me that bit that
you wrote about her. I always felt it was a girl. I can see her in my mind's eye. Dark hair,
dark eyes. She'll be 14 now. It's a bizarre thing for somebody who, I've never had that
overwhelming maternal yearning. I don't feel incomplete because I don't have a child and yet
that little girl, I can totally conjure up in my mind and still feel a sense of loss over.
And guilt. She's a part of my story.
