It was a routine antenatal appointment with many weeks still to go until the birth. “Things aren’t quite as we’d hope,” said the midwife, a worried look on her face. “You need to go straight to hospital.”
The date was 8 April 1992. But also, it was 1 August 2024. The bump in 1992 was mine; the baby, who would be born the following day, at 29 weeks’ gestation (“term” is 40 weeks) was my daughter Rosie. The bump in 2024 was hers: 32 years on, history was repeating itself.
Like mine, Rosie’s pregnancy had been textbook up to that point. Like me, she’d had no warning that things could suddenly shift to red alert, with the baby in her uterus seemingly failing to thrive. And yet, of course, there was a warning – because patterns repeat in families. Sometimes, as perhaps in this case, it’s about genetics; other times it’s about something less tangible, a kind of inexplicable déjà vu. An illness that echoes something similar in a previous generation; a heartbreak that’s reminiscent of a heartbreak in another moment; a decision that seems to weirdly mirror a similar choice made decades before. And yet these “coincidences” take us unawares. Perhaps we can’t compute that the traumas of the previous generations will recur.
But they do. Pre-eclampsia meant Rosie was plucked out of my womb much too soon: my husband, Gary, and I spent two months sitting anxiously by an incubator at St Thomas’ hospital in London. And yet, more than three decades on when I heard the wonderful news that Rosie was pregnant, it never entered my head that a similar experience might be in store for her and her partner, Toby. They live in Amsterdam; the baby was due on 22 September last year. As we live in the UK, I booked an apartment round the corner from theirs for six weeks from that date. “The baby will probably be late,” I said to Rosie. “Most babies are.”
Just as I had back in 1992, Rosie was planning a home birth – easier to organise in Holland, where they account for around one in three births (as compared with one in 50 in the UK). Just as Gary and I had been, she and Toby were hoping they’d be able to move to somewhere bigger than their flat after the baby arrived; just as we had, they were planning to meet other couples at antenatal classes expecting a baby around the same time as them. It was all back to the future for me: this would be our first grandchild and everything Rosie said about her life and her hopes, their plans and ambitions, echoed ours when we were expecting her. I reminisced happily about everything to do with having a baby but, somehow, I erased the trauma of my own first-born’s actual arrival. So, although Rosie talked to her caregivers about the circumstances of her own birth, we didn’t dwell on them; in fact, we hardly spoke about them at all.
Everything changed when, at 32 weeks, Rosie went for a routine scan. When she called me, I was driving down the A3 en route to a meeting. I answered the phone on the car speaker; within seconds I was tumbling back three decades. I knew instantly the shock, the fear, the total disbelief Rosie was feeling. I pulled off the road and into the first car park I saw. Rosie, so upset she couldn’t speak, had handed the phone to Toby; he began telling me a story I already knew. They were on their way to hospital, where more tests would be done. Although she had no signs of pre-eclampsia, the scan had shown the baby was tiny, much smaller than expected for the gestation.
“It’s going to be OK,” Rosie kept saying. She was, of course, her own role model. She had survived; her baby would survive. I believed that too, but also, I knew what lay ahead. Suddenly I remembered all too well the long weeks of hoping and waiting. Weeks when the entire backdrop to life was a series of beeping machines with alarms that would go off inexplicably, living a twilight existence in a part of the hospital most new parents never see, neonatal intensive care.
It is physically exhausting and emotionally draining, because at the centre of it all is a new person, impossibly tiny, smaller than any baby you’ve ever seen or held before. In Rosie’s own case, she was so small and early that, at that time, there were no promises she would even survive. She was born around 12 hours after my routine antenatal appointment, by section, weighing 2lb 15oz. Ventilated for a fortnight, she failed to breathe on her own when she was first disconnected from the machine, and had to be back on it for another eight days. Even when we eventually brought her home, aged two months, at around the day when she should have been born, there were more difficulties in store: I was terrified of suddenly having sole responsibility for this minuscule infant. She only weighed 4lb at discharge.
On the day Rosie told me she was at risk of giving birth prematurely, these memories all came flooding back. More than anything, I wanted to protect Rosie and Toby, and this as-yet-unborn child, from the experiences I knew lay ahead. But I knew I couldn’t. Even when life is on repeat, the scenes have to be played out; there’s no fast-forwarding over the difficult bits.
Rosie stayed in hospital from the day she was admitted; the plan was to keep her baby inside until 34 weeks, when there would be the best chance of survival. Tests showed a continuing failure to thrive; as in my case with her, there was no option but to accelerate the birth by doing a caesarean. When the day came, she and Toby had at least been in hospital for a fortnight, and not just a few hours. There had been time to talk everything through, to plan for the first few hours and the first few days; to see the neonatal unit, to learn about the machines and the medics who would be caring for both them and their newborn.
Their little boy, Sol, arrived at 11.30am on a sunny morning (hence his name). When Rosie was born, I didn’t get to see her for the first 48 hours – all I knew was that somewhere in the hospital was a baby who was pink, because that’s what the doctor had told me (hence her name). But I saw my grandson within an hour of his arrival: being invited to be at the Amsterdam hospital for the delivery was one of the greatest privileges of my life. For Rosie and Toby, miraculously – or so it seemed to me – there would be no separation from their baby, which I’d found one of the hardest parts of Rosie’s birth. He was cared for in an incubator alongside Rosie’s bed and Toby was able to stay in the room. They were a unit from day one. When I insisted on running out to buy champagne, I was celebrating not only that the baby was here and alive, but that my daughter and son-in-law and grandson seemed in a much better place than Gary and Rosie and I had been 32 years ago.
Born at 34 weeks, Sol was bigger than Rosie – 3lb 5oz – and she had been able to take steroids before his birth, to help mature his lungs. For all of this, my heart was singing: it was déjà vu, but the re-run was a lot better than the original. Everything was going well and we were over the worst.
Two mornings later I was woken at 7am by a call from Rosie. The baby’s condition had worsened significantly overnight; he had been blue-lighted across the city at 2am to the hospital for the sickest babies, with Rosie and Toby following in a second ambulance. The doctors at the new hospital weren’t sure what the problem was: all we could do was wait and hope.
Wait and hope. I was back to where I’d been; and Rosie was back to where she’d been. Only this time she was the pale-looking mother who couldn’t take her eyes off the tiny baby in the incubator who was trying to stay alive.
They were tense, long days – the sort of days it’s hard to see beyond. But slowly, Sol rallied, and then grew stronger. Today he’s six months old – a plump, chuckling, diamond of a boy – and you’d never know what he’d been through. But, like Rosie, who believes, as I do, that the circumstances of her arrival shaped the person she became, his earliest experiences will always be a part of him. And while Rosie already knew about her early birth and was her son’s role model for survival, his early months have also taught her – retrospectively – about her own beginnings.
Patterns so often repeat in families and even if they tend not to forewarn us for the future, they do teach us about the past. In the end, however painful it has been, we are all the richer for the experience. Most importantly, Rosie and Toby have their Sol, just as Gary and I have our Rosie. And that is one example of history repeating itself for which we will be forever grateful.
