Nídia Tusal: "For three months I had a dead creature in my belly while the other was growing"

I remember going shopping for clothes with my mother who had that habit of everything having to be coordinated, everything having to match. There was that obsession with making sure any garment you bought matched the clothes you already had.This is no longer the case with your daughters. Do you have many arguments about clothes?

— It's just that they don't pay me any attention. And I like it already. Well, I correct myself. They do ask for my opinion, but they don't always respect it. From a very young age, they know very well what they like, what they want to wear.

Explain it to me.

— The older one goes by phases. Suddenly, she wants to go all sleek. Or with flared pants. Or with wide pants and t-shirts. The little one is in a phase of lots of colors, with skirts over pants, with mixes of dressier clothes with sweatpants. Now you make me think.

You work in costume design, but you are a co-author of a play.

— Perinatal grief always involves a mix of emotions, but, in my case, this mix was very hard. I had to stop the life of one twin while the other twin continued to grow. For three months, I had a dead creature in my belly while Aretha was growing. I had been able to save one daughter but not the other. This led me to a duality of feelings. I couldn't grieve, I couldn't say goodbye to the dead creature because I was still carrying her inside. On one hand, I was happy, on the other very sad for a daughter I already felt, who already had a name.

It had to be very hard. I'm sorry...

— I felt the guilt that my body had not been able to sustain the life of this creature, and the suspicion of whether at some point I did something wrong, perhaps one day I carried too much weight or ran to catch a bus. Guilt is a burden that weighs on women in particular, on mothers especially, and even more so on grieving mothers.

Heartbeats arise from this experience.

— I lived it in 2018 and I started to read, to investigate, even though the subject was not entirely unknown to me, since my sister had suffered several gestational losses, and even our mother had told us that it had happened to her. Even though it is a topic that has never been openly discussed in my family.

What did you discover in this investigation?

— I have discovered that it is vital to share this pain with other mothers. By sharing, you don't forget, but the weight is distributed. The work must serve for this, to share this pain, to make it no longer a taboo. Everyone has someone close who has suffered a gestational death and we are very emotionally unskilled, we don't know how to accompany a person who is hurting. They tell you "it's okay", "you'll have another one", "it wasn't meant to be", "nature is wise", and similar things that only serve to belittle your pain, to make it invisible.

Your daughters know the play, it is clear.

— They have grown up with the project because I started it six years ago. The eldest has been very interested in the whole preparation process, with the music, the lighting, the makeup, the costumes, the rehearsals. Furthermore, her father, Sergi Vallès, is one of the actors. When all this happened, we explained to Rita, who is the eldest, that the doctors had helped Aretha because both twins were in danger, both could die...

You get excited...

— One day we placed a star in the sky, the one that shone the brightest was Frida, which is what the daughter I lost is called.

And Aretha, does she want to talk?

— From time to time, the little one needs to talk a lot about her twin sister. She needs to understand... Excuse me...

I'm sorry to make you cry. I'm sorry.

— It's okay. She asks us very tough questions, like why she was chosen to live and not her sister. Or why did the doctors stop Frida's heart? She needs to talk about it a lot and an idea that comforts her greatly is knowing that she is the only person who could touch her while she was alive. They hit each other, they both spun around at the same time. They lived together for five months. When we explain all of this to her, Aretha gets emotional, laughs, feels happy, but at some point she also breaks down and tells us that she misses her twin sister very much.