If you're reading this now, I consider you a friend, and I've decided that it's time for me to open up about something. I don't mind telling you this now. If you're not a friend, then you're probably a stranger, and it won't matter anyway. What follows is a very personal moment in my life, one I'm choosing to share as a type of therapy. That is all.)
I suppose it's no coincidence that I was craving red meat. Judging by the quantities of blood settling into the crotch of my underpants, I was becoming iron deficient.
The fetus had probably been dead for a couple of days. I had exactly one week to enjoy the exalted feeling of being a mother-to-be. I was seven weeks, but only aware of my status for one.
After seven years of infertility (some actively trying to conceive, others pretending not to care, and lately trying to forget all about it) I randomly became pregnant, the old fashioned way. Like the stories you always hear. After ten years of trying, a couple gets pregnant when they least expect it. For one whole week, that was us.
And silly me, I allowed myself the luxury of believing that all would be well, even announcing the pregnancy to family and close friends (we had waited so long, we couldn't see keeping the news to ourselves). I had begun thinking about names-- well only one, as I was sure I was having a boy; clearing a few things out of the spare bedroom to make way for the hand-me-downs that were surely on their way, reading pregnancy books during every moment of my spare time.
The bright red stains appeared on the toilet paper during an afternoon of idyllic domestic bliss. I was making potato salad, preparing to move on to brownies, and then later, I'd hang some new window treatments. I was making mental notes of how great I felt; how healthy, alive, settling quite nicely into my newfound domesticity-- nesting, I believe they call it. There was a slight snap in the air, and for once, I wasn't dreading winter, but instead looking forward to hunkering down and preparing for our reward in the spring. Maybe I'd sign up for prenatal yoga at the Y.
Ha.
The first night wasn't so bad. Your mind has a way of playing tricks on you. The cramping was mild, the bleeding light, and maybe my dates were wrong after all. Maybe I was only 4 weeks, as the hormone levels indicated. It was probably too early to hear heartbeats anyway. Everything is possible. Hey, I was pregnant. Me. But then morning came, the cramping more severe, the bleeding heavy, sticky, icky. Tears came. Hot, fierce, cleansing. I pulled towels down from shelves. One for in between my legs, one to swaddle my naked body (breasts no longer tender,) one to bury my face and muffle the sobbing.
It became clear to me why I told my husband a couple of days prior that my breasts weren't sore anymore. Of course. Because the fetus had died.
I've known women who have had miscarriages. But no one prepares you for how awful it is. People don't talk about it. "Miscarriage." The word itself sounds efficient and clean. Like something that will take care of itself in one fell swoop. "Let me just pop over here and have this miscarriage, and then I think I'll fix a nice sandwich and go for a stroll." It doesn't evoke the days of barbaric cramping and bleeding that follow, the (thankfully?) unidentifiable chunks of matter that pass into your underpants and the toiletbowl. You literally flush your hopes and dreams down the toilet. Yellow, red, blackish. And the stench. Forgive my honest, but it stinks like death.
Like pregnancy, and I suppose like childbirth (I wouldn't know) you have to go through this alone. This is an altogether solitary path. You can have all the loving support in the world, but no one can absorb the pain for you. Not your good and true husband who waits in the wings, hoping to do something helpful, but an errand to the pharmacy for maxipads and Tylenol is about all the assistance he can offer. (Yes, Tylenol is the best the doctor had to offer. Something tells me that if it were men who went through this, there would be much stronger prescriptions. Still, I eat the Tylenol like candy. The less I feel, the less I have to think.) I try to keep reminding myself that this is happening to him too. I'm hurt that he seems detached, and I'm angry that he can't comfort me. By the third day, I realize there is no comfort to be had.
When we go for the steak, I begin to feel a bit like a person again, eating for the first time in two days, drinking a glass of wine that isn't as much salve as I had hoped. I ask him what is wrong with me, as a woman, when everyone else in the world seems to have effortless, carefree pregnancies resulting in beautiful babies. "I don't know," he says. I had perhaps expected a comforting response that there was nothing wrong with me as a woman. But, clearly, there is. It certainly feels that way. Your sense of feminine worth gets decimated. My womb is about as hospitable to life as a bowl of vinegar.
My grandmother had four children before she was thirty. My mom had two daughters, one when she was 36, the same age I would have been. My sister fell in love, and swiftly produced a child within the year. I'm replacing my pregnancy blog bookmarks with loss sites.
I say that I can't help how bitter I'm feeling. I can't stop the tears from falling in the restaurant, and I dab at my eyes with a cocktail napkin. I say that I don't think I can possibly abide one more pregnancy, one more birth that isn't mine, smiling stupidly with envious congratulations. To stand one more time in the baby isle of a boutique, trying to select another soft, pastel gift. A gift that once again isn't for me or for my baby. That as much as I love my beautiful niece, it's doubly hard each time I look at her and perhaps now it will be ten times so. "Life is cruel," my husband says, and concurs that he's feeling bitter. It feels good to have a consort; a partner in sorrow.
Before this, I thought it would be good to at least know that I could become pregnant, regardless of the outcome. That knowledge, short lived as it was, filled me with a smugness-- to know that I wasn't so nonhuman, so nonwoman after all. But now, I think I could have done without this. To be filled with so much hope; the wholesome, hormone-fueled happiness that so many others get to take for granted, only to have it snatched away like a trick tablecloth. I think I could have done without it. Yes, I could have done without a death in the family, which is what it will always be to me.
Everyone wants me to be okay, to feel better, to be strong. I want those things for me. But I'm so sad.
I was certain I was having a boy, and he had a name. His hair was curly and his skin was mocha. He had beautiful eyebrows and long arms and legs. He would have spoken so well for a little guy and he would have had the most amazing laugh. He would have been my son.
There were popsicles. And my adoring man. Lots of popsicles, and lots of adoring:
