So…where were we?
Yesterday began as every other day. I woke up, fixed my husband’s lunch, poured a
bowl of Cheerios for my son, cracked open a few hard boiled eggs for myself and
logged in to Facebook. Don’t shake your
head at me. You know you do it first
thing in the morning, too. “Facebook
with coffee” is the new “morning paper with coffee” to us lazy Millenials. Some of us would have never known that
Whitney Houston had died or that Albert Pujols transferred to Los Angeles had
it not been posted everywhere on Facebook.
I had to know what had
happened to all of my “friends” since nine o’clock the night before, when I last
checked. My brain was flooded with random
information, pictures of babies and food, political rants and hard opinions, as
my husband kissed me goodbye and I waved him out the door. A few minutes later, coming out of my stupor,
I suddenly realized that I had forgotten to get the mail over the weekend. I’m very busy, you know. I literally sprinted out to the mailbox
because I hate going outside when I’m not wearing a bra. The chances of someone noticing that I’m not
wearing a bra under my jammies from inches away much less twenty feet away are
slim to none, but still. Blame my mother for my modesty. (And my small chest.) I hurried back into the house with handfuls of
the usual junk mail, ads, credit card applications, what not, but then, something
else. A big box marked “ENFAMIL.” Two free containers of the formula were
wrapped inside of a cardboard box that read “good timing” on one side and “mark
the milestones” on the other. My stomach
dropped. It’s not the first of these
types of “gifts” I’ve received in the past week. The first was a Carter’s catalog along with a
number of coupons and advertisements for newborn paraphernalia. The second, a
set of leak guard pads and a trial tube of barrier cream to use while
breast-feeding. And now this. I wonder if the next gift I receive in the
mail will be a lemon, you know, so I can squeeze its tart juice into my almost-healed-but-now-slashed-wide-open
wound. It appears that I was put on some
kind of mailing list last December, back when there was nothing but comfort and
joy. These lists miraculously get the
good news, but unfortunately, not the bad.
I admitted to a friend of mine the other day that I have a
problem. Hello. My name is Carrie, and I like to know how
things end. It’s good to get that off my
chest. It’s why a few chapters into any
book I skip ahead and read the last ten pages before continuing reading. I look up online the spoilers to movies. I reassure my friends that no, you won’t ruin
(fill in the blank with the name of any movie) for me. I actually wanted to know that Bruce Willis
was really a ghost, that Harry Potter survived, and that Julia Roberts was
ultimately rejected for Cameron Diaz and didn’t get to marry her best
friend. (Still by far THE WORST ENDING
in the history of chick flicks.) My rationale
is this, why bother wasting time getting your hopes up if the ending doesn’t
pay off? My heart longs for resolution,
in all things, not just in movies and books.
In life too. About five years ago
I had a falling out with a good friend and I still can’t let it go. I need closure, or something, to know that
the journey was worth it. I’d like to
know that it all meant something. I
still fantasize about a tearful reunion, things going back to the way they were
before, as cheesy and unlikely as that sounds.
But I digress. Don’t get me
wrong, the journey, or what I call, “the middle stuff” is great, but I am and
always have been a “Where is this all going?” kind of girl. I’m not saying a good ending has to be a
happy ending either. My poetry professor
put it this way, “A poem isn’t sufficient unless it resolves itself, definitively
and as quietly as the sound of a box clicking shut.” But I’m a sucker. I like the sound of a box clicking shut as
much as the next guy, but I admit, I do like a good, happy ending every once in
a while.
I’m saying all of this because I have a story to tell. It’s one that I have been wrestling with
myself over whether or not to tell you for a good nine months. I want to do this topic justice. I have to say it right because the story I’m
going to tell you is not only mine, but could quite possibly be yours, or your
sister’s, or your friend’s or mother’s story. Women who, like me, have felt a
loss that only someone who’s had something this precious in the first place can
understand.
My beginning was early last December, when I called my
husband upstairs from working on the basement to come look at the plus sign on
a stick that I had just peed on. We
cried, laughed, kissed, and said a lot of thank you Gods. I figured I was about six weeks along then;
the baby barely the size of a bean.
The middle stuff happened so fast that I can barely call it stuff.
I told a couple of friends about the
news and how great I felt. They said
they thought as much, that I was glowing, and they were so happy for me. I was so happy for me too. I bought a couple of maternity shirts out of
sheer excitement, unknowingly submitting my name for those insufferable mailing
lists. We bought a t-shirt and an
ornament that said “Big Brother” for our son and stupidly, stupidly, gave him
the ornament to hang on the tree. We
told my husband’s family the good news the night we all went over to his mother’s
house to wrap presents. We were saving telling
my family for Christmas Eve, going to let our son announce the news by wearing
his t-shirt. We were in a delirium of merriment
and once again, it didn’t occur to me at all that I still wasn’t sick. Shoot, I even thought, I’ll have two more if
they are all like this.
I would like to tell you that I’m now the proud mother of a
newborn baby and that all the newborn stuff in the mail is being put to good
use. That I didn’t have to sit through
friends’ baby showers feeling jealous of those big round bellies full of life
and promise; healthy women about to have healthy babies. That holding someone else’s newborn baby in
the hospital just a few months ago wasn’t the most difficult and gut wrenching
thing I’ve ever done and that I didn’t go home and cry myself to sleep
afterwards.
But I can’t. No, my
story ended violently on Christmas morning as my husband watched me in the
bathroom, bleeding into the toilet, hunched over, convulsing and crying with
every passing clot. Later that day in
the ER there was more blood but no heartbeat.
And just like that, I wasn’t pregnant anymore. In writer’s terms, there’s not much falling
action after something like that happens.
Just a lot of internal monologues, external dialogues with God, and a
week of more bleeding followed by a week of diarrhea. I could use words like “empty” “despair” and
“failure” but I’ll save you from that. You
know enough of the gross details by now to know that the end was the end, so
there’s no need for an epilogue.
Nine weeks doesn’t seem that far along but you and I both
know, the minute you find out you’re pregnant, that’s it isn’t it? You’re a mommy. I talked to my bean, I sang to her, I just
knew she was a she. I wanted her so, so
badly. Since my miscarriage, I’ve had a
close friend and a relative who both went through the exact same thing. And as much as I tried to console them, tried
to empathize with and encourage them, I can’t lie. I myself am still having a hard time feeling
closure in all of this. I appear to be “over
it” because that’s what people expect.
Our fast paced society and even some of our friends don’t allow us to
grieve for very long. I know that sounds
cold, but it’s true. They look down on
you if you don’t quickly recover, as if there’s something wrong with your faith
or your sanity or your outlook on life.
But I say, give yourself the time you need. Screw everyone else. I mean, maybe there shouldn’t even be closure
to situations like this; maybe these types of things are always open
ended. These aren’t your normal stories,
not your normal endings. Maybe I didn’t
lose a child in the conventional sense, the way my mother did when my sister
died. I can’t even compare the two. But I lost something. The hope of a child. My baby was lost somewhere in the middle, and
had probably been gone for a while, maybe even as soon as it began, I just didn’t
know it. I never imagined it could have
ended that way.
Almost nine months have passed. Thank God, I did have a
certain amount of peace after it happened, the kind of peace I know only God
can give. I felt like at the time, I was given a choice: to fall into a pit of
depression or to climb my way back to normality. I climbed, tooth and nail. But I have to admit that sometimes, I don’t
know how else to put it except--my heart still feels it. That tiny, bean shaped hole that will always
be there. And despite having that
initial peace, I now have to come to terms with the fact that I also have a lot
of fear. I know that doesn’t make sense. If this has ever happened to you then you
know that it’s entirely possible to have a certain measure of peace about past
events but to also face your future with some fear. Who wouldn’t be afraid? Everyone, and I mean everyone, wants me to be
pregnant again. I want it too. But I’m really, really scared. I have heard stories about women having
multiple miscarriages and then finally having a baby. I don’t want to be one of them. If I get pregnant, I know firsthand that
there’s two ways it can turn out. Sometimes
I still think, if this is the way it ends, I don’t know if I even want to start
the journey. And sometimes I look at my
beautiful, blue eyed boy and think, but it can end this way too. Which really isn’t an ending at all.
If I’ve said this to you once, I’ve said it a million
times. I’m working on it. I think.
I’m honestly trying to prepare myself for anything, but then, how do you
do that? Right after it happened, a good
friend of mine told me that she dealt with her miscarriage by taking all of the
things they bought for the baby and putting it in a box, to always have a
reminder that this baby had a life, this baby mattered and still does. I loved the idea. I started to make a box of my own, with a bib
and the t-shirt that we bought for my son.
Last night I went back to the box and put the formula in it. When I closed up the box, I thought about
what my poetry professor said. A box
clicking shut. A quiet ending. But you know, not really.
Because my story, like all the best stories, goes on…
