My first, and probably last, Lululemon purchase was not for Pilates. I bought it at Heathrow because I had miscarried at 30,000 feet and bled through every piece of clothing I was wearing.
Nearly £200. That was the price of looking like an ordinary traveller again while my entire world was quietly ending beneath airport lights.
I remember cleaning the blood from my body in a Heathrow bathroom, pulling on those new clothes and walking back into the terminal because I still had another flight to catch.
People around me bought coffee, watched the departures board and complained about delays.
Nobody knew that, minutes earlier, I had been staring at my blood-soaked clothes and trying to understand how I could board the next flight when the future I had imagined was no longer travelling with me.
A few weeks later, I am back at my desk. And beside me is this photograph.
I cannot put it away.
I was told it was an empty sac. I understand what that means medically. There was no baby developing inside it.
But it did not feel empty when we saw two lines.
It did not feel empty when we calculated a due date, imagined telling our families and quietly began rearranging our lives to make room for someone we already loved.
Medicine may call it an empty sac.
But it was full of our hopes.
Full of plans, prayers and the small, private happiness that begins long before anyone else knows you are pregnant.
Perhaps that is what people misunderstand about miscarriage. You do not only lose what was there.
You lose everything you believed was coming.
Today, the UK Government confirmed that from April 2027, women and their partners who experience pregnancy loss before 24 weeks will have a legal right to take up to two weeks of bereavement leave.
That word matters: bereavement.
Because too many women return to work while they are still bleeding. Too many partners grieve silently. Too many people call it “sick leave” because the law has never given their loss its rightful name.
I was fortunate. My managers showed me extraordinary kindness when no law required them to. But compassion should never depend upon whether you happen to work for good people.
The leave will be unpaid, and that cannot be where the conversation ends. Nobody should have to decide whether they can afford to grieve.
Still, today the law moved a little closer to recognising the woman who changed into £200 worth of clothes in a Heathrow bathroom, wiped her tears and boarded another flight.
And the woman who now sits at her desk beside a framed photograph she still cannot put away.
They called it an empty sac.
But there was nothing empty about the space it left behind. 🤍
No one will hire me for entry level jobs because I’m “too qualified” and no one will hire me for mid level jobs because the majority of my qualifications are in academia. I would be so happy to take an entry level job and build up my skills if someone just gave me a chance
Every woman you know has been harassed, stalked, followed, threatened, molested, groped, abused, raped, or groomed at some point in her life.
You might not like feminists hurting your feelings on Twitter. But that’s the reality.
I really don��t like too private of a relationship. I find it strange to not love your partner out loud. No posts, no flirting in the comments, you don’t like or repost their stuff. Lil stuff like that. idk I just don’t like that
Men want children in the same way kids want puppies.
They are not the one sacrificing their bodies to go through the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth, neither are they the primary caregivers
So of course, they want kids more.
My rapist said no one would believe me, so I secretly recorded his confession and sent him to prison. My rapist’s lawyer thought he could bully me in court, so I learned the law, complained about him and won compensation. And TONIGHT a BBC documentary will tell my story!