Babyloss: A Fairytale

They gave me my wand before I left the first dark, interior room. Hours earlier he had splashed into the world, amniotic sac still intact. My water baby, my blessed and cursed only son. The wand was smaller than you might expect, dark, wooden, really nothing to look at. They tucked it on my lap when they put me in the wheelchair to travel to the recovery rooms, away from the instruments of labor, away from the eerie silence that haunts me still in my dreams. They wedged it between his body and the IV pole. “Quick,” they said, as they raced the wheelchair down the hall, “you are invisible!” I could see the photo gallery of babies; smiling, snuggling, living babies, but the other mothers couldn’t see me, shouldn’t see me. This power is not meant to protect you, I understood in a flash, it is for them. 

I tried out the wand on the social worker when she visited the next day. I quizzed her about insurance and autopsies after she asked if we needed help with anything. She stood there awkwardly, clutching her purse, shifting her weight between her feet as though she might bolt at any minute, “umm, well, I don’t really know about any of that, But here’s my card!” 

There were resources, of course, groups for people like me. Along with the pages of what-to-do-now-that-your-child-has-died (talk to someone, oh, whoops, not me, please, someone else), they told me to go to meetings with acronyms like HAND or SAND, the meaning of I could never remember. Suffering Alone, Not Dying? Hurt And Near Decay? Sad Adults No Descendents?  

I did go to the group a few times to tell my story and cry, and to cry some more at everyone else's story. This is the party that I’m invited to attend now. We are the outcomes they used to chide us for worrying about. Witches and 13th fairies. Shadows in the night. Medusas. Outcasts. The woman running the meeting had lost two children, late miscarriages, decades ago. “I was the 1 in 350,” she said. This is where I’ve landed, in the land of the statistical anomalies. The 1 in 160, the one in a million. The woman whose child’s condition was so rare only four children in the world had been diagnosed with the same fatal genetics.  

Probability is not a game I am willing to play. Anyone’s baby can die, even yours. You can say you have destroyed all the spinning wheels in the kingdom but someone’s daughter will find the secret doorway, someone’s child will prick her innocent finger.

It is dark in this lonely tower. No one blames me for my fate but no one wants to come around much these days either . I miss you, my child, my future. I miss the sunshine and the sound of children playing in the fallen leaves. I am invisible here; a mother, erased.

The crown they gave me was itchy. They sent me home with it to mark my difference, to shine to the world hello my son died what is your name, when are you due? Just yesterday I was like you and now he is ash and his name is removed from the preschool wait list. They said: “Put these cabbage leaves on your breasts, drink this sage tea. Here’s a bear filled with rocks, you can hold it instead.” The NICU moms, most of them, got brighter crowns; electric neon colors to match the surviving babies in their boxes of light. Their crowns, those warrior mamas, proclaim, “resilient” and “survivor” and “still fighting.” My crown was pale with the faintest glow. 

I gave it all back after my final child emerged screaming and impossibly perfect. This pregnancy had officially been deemed high-risk, a term that made me grimace and laugh because obviously this one wasn’t as risky as the last one. Didn’t this one have some probability of survival, after all ? Back at the same hospital, they punched holes in my spine. When the final epidural of three worked, just as the sun came up, they gently removed my crown. Here she is, just a normal, everyday miracle. Her birth certificate was printed on the same paper as his death certificate, her footprints in the same rainbow paint. I got to take the goody-bags home too, filled with advil and pads and baby blankets. Welcome back to the kingdom, the brochures said. You may now attend postnatal yoga classes with all the other real moms. You may pass down outgrown clothes, pick up fuzzy toys in the baby aisles and compliment all the little princesses on their birthdays. You may return, just please, please don’t talk about it. 

The magic slips away, day by day. No one can see the shimmer around my shoulder blades, or the scars under my skin. No one sees the little boy who is not, the one I carry with me always, luminous and silent like the moon.

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Who are you in the fairytale you tell yourself or in the tale that others tell about you?