Layers

I don't remember what I was wearing that day. I remember my long black winter coat because before I left I asked Monkey for a hug. But I don't remember what I was wearing under it, what I must've seen all day as I caught sight of myself-- my sleeves as I typed, my pants as I sat down, my belly as I balanced the laptop on my lap while I waited for Monkey at gymnastics that afternoon or as I waited for the kicks that never came that night. I remember the dinner I ate as I tried to coax those kicks, but I don't remember what the shirt was that covered the belly on which I balanced the plate. I remember that the radio was on as I drove to the hospital, and I remember that I thought the program was interesting, but I can no longer remember what it was about. Now that I know that the full moon was in fact supposed to be there, I can verify that the memory that started knocking on my brain's door recently, of the full disc as I drove, wasn't a figment of my imaginataion fabricated later on-- I really did see it. But I don't remember what I was wearing. Not as far as anyone else could see, at least.

I remember what I was wearing under my shirt. A bellybra, that wonderful contraption that distributes the weight of the belly over the whole back, making it much easier to function. Even if I didn't rememeber, this detail I could reconstruct, as I never went a day without it the last couple of months of A's pregnancy. But I do actually rememeber. I remember because the nurse asked me about it as she was preparing the probe to look for the heart beat. I gave her a glowing review, and she said she needs to remember it for next time because her back was killing her the last couple of months with her first-- what with being on her feet all day. I wonder, given what happened in the next 5 minutes, does she remember it now?

When I first discovered that I couldn't remember what I was wearing I thought of it as a good thing-- next time around, I reasoned, I wouldn't have bad associations with any of my maternity clothes, I could wear all of them again. Except for that bellybra, of course.

I am 28 weeks 4 days along today. If you come to my house, I doubt you can miss the belly. And yet, when I am out and about, I still wear a shawl. Unless it's over 90 degrees outside, and then I put on this net-like thing that goes over my head, is long, and a bit shiny, but is far less of a  disguise, though it still makes me feel a little covered, a little protected.  I waddle, by the way. Thanks to the pelvic pain that makes it hard to walk straight. So I waddle, and the belly sticks out farther then the boobs, and has for a couple of weeks now. And still I insist on having something that gives me some illusion of maybe fooling someone out there.

At first I thought that the shawls were my protection against the stupid that is out there, against the untouched who think a pregnant belly equals a live healthy baby 40-X  weeks from now. I didn't want to talk to them. I didn't want to deal with their "congratulations" and their "is this your first?"s. I didn't want to give them an opportunity to tell me all about their utterly normal life where assumptions of invincibility hold. A bit later I understood that I was also avoiding having to tell people that I am not jumpy and comfy because the baby before this one died. I didn't want to have to tell the story, anew.

It's a weird thing, really. I want people to know about A. How few people know that he existed used to be one of the biggest crazy-makers in my head. It's better now, the crazy is, but this particular thought is still sad to me. It seems, though, that I need to control the context in which I want people to learn. I don't know that it is even possible, but I seem to want to introduce him in some way that isn't all about pain. I want people to see that the pain is there because of how much we love him, how much we wanted him, how much we miss him now.

I remember, so very vividly, being pregnant with A, out and about with Monkey, and conscious of how lucky we were and of how much our luck can hurt to look at. I was thinking of infertiles at the time, but boy can a sight like this hurt a dead baby mama's heart.  I remember, too, last spring seeing pregnant bellies and babies wherever I turned my head. A veritable sea of happy that had no room for me. I started coping by making up sad stories for these happy people I saw on the street-- this one had five miscarriages before this baby, that one needed an IVF or three. I knew, even as I was making up these stories that they can't all be true. But that was what I needed to do to be able to navigate the world around me.

Recently some of the dead baby bloggers have been confessing to having a hard time with other people's pregnancies.  Is it any wonder? And what I realized, reading these bloggers, is that my shawls are a little about all of you too. If I can help it, if I can help it at all, I don't want to add to your hurt. I don't want to, as Bon so aptly put it, stab you with my roundness.

My sister is getting married this weekend. My parents arrived a few days ago and other family is about to descend on us in mere hours. To some degree, I have been measuring this pregnancy in intervals of and between significant events. For the last few weeks I have been terrified that this baby would die before the wedding, adding new layers of terrible to what would be horrific any day all on its own.  Before that I was similarly scared he would not make it through the week Monkey and JD spent in the Old City. 

That Monday, Memorial Day in fact, I wan't feeling as much movement as I had been used to. I tried the water, and the couch, I tried this, that, and the other. And finally I couldn't handle it anymore, and I went in to triage. A friend of mine is a high risk OB in my practice, although he didn't start there until last summer. When I first heard that he was joining the practice, I thought I didn't want him to ever have anything to do with my care-- I didn't want him to have to feel bad if shit hit the fan again. But as I pressed the intercom button outside of triage that Monday, I saw my friend walking down the corridor. And suddenly I very much wanted him to be there. I was alone and scared, and not until that moment did I know how much I wanted to at least not be alone.

It is good to be a friend of the attending, let me tell you.  He brought the shiny new ultrasound machine, not the old clunker that told the doctor all those months ago that A was dead. He was gentle, and kind, and attentive, and exactly what I needed. He didn't just do the one peak to make sure the heart was beating-- he sat there for ten or fifteen minutes carefully studying everything, watching my son wiggle behind my anterior placenta that with its movement-cushioning ways was the likely culprit behind that day's freakout. Twenty more minutes on the monitor and one fine-looking strip later I walked out of the triage room next door to the one in which they told me A was dead. I was light-headed, shaken a little.  But I managed to only be ten minutes late for dinner with a friend. And the next morning I took a deep breath and pulled that bellybra out of the drawer.

When A died, six months seemed like a ridiculously long way off, like it should be enough time to close the gaping wound, to let my heart scar over.  And now, nearly a year and five months out, what I am wondering is whether there is ever an end to the layers left to uncover. I suspect not so much.

once and again

I think I was probably well into my adolescence before I understood that the word "pregnant" could actually be spoken above a stage whisper.

When I was eighteen and groping my way blindly through the minefield of college sexuality, "pregnant" was one of the scariest words in my vocabulary.  When I was twenty-four and at my first real baby shower, traumatized by the balloons and the sorority-style squealing and those bizarre paper hats, "pregnant" felt like a word from some foreign language I couldn't fathom being fluent in.  When I was twenty-nine and in the midst of a divorce and a PCOS diagnosis, "pregnant" began to feel like a heartbreaking word, one that might slip through my fingers forever.  When I was thirty-two and the pee stick turned shockingly positive for the first time, "pregnant" became a magical incantation that I whispered to myself, secretly, almost in disbelief that such wonder had ever come to pass.

It was the next spring, at thirty-three and deep in the bone-numb grief of mourning my firstborn, that I lived all those incarnations of the word - the shameful and horrifying and foreign and heart-searing and secretly longed-for - all together, each time I encountered a ripe belly.  They echoed all the long weeks up to my due date: that could/would/should have been me. Bellies seemed to sprout up everywhere, the world a sudden minefield of them.  And each one, beautiful and poignant, full of possibility, made me gasp for breath and sent my shoulders hurtling up over my ears and my eyes skittering to the street.   To a babylost mother, there's little so evocative, so exposing and so wrenching as a healthily glowing pregnant woman, the Other, our opposite, blithely traipsing down a path that has dumped us remorselessly overboard and marked us Not Wanted On the Voyage.

Which makes the whole conversation about pregnancy after loss a little awkward, and being pregnant, in the company of fellow Medusas, a little like being the elephant in the proverbial room.

I am twenty weeks pregnant today...a round, portentious number in a body becoming more round and portent by the day.  I am on bedrest, that strange half-life, existing and interacting mostly online.   I am disembodied, in a sense, and perversely grateful for the cloak of this purdah, this enforced hiding from the world.  Because in being pregnant, I already embody enough of my own nightmares that I'd just as soon not trigger anyone else's while they're innocently out for groceries. And yet here, in this good company, I know my words have just the same power to wound as my silhouette would if you ran across me in the checkout...that in owning the elephant, I risk sending someone's eyes darting away from the screen, hot with tears; I tread on scars and the plaintive sorrow of why not me?

I don't want to, but I do, just in being here.  I know that, and I am sorry.

I know I am profoundly lucky that pregnancy after has come easily, or at least conception has.  I had my second son, then a nine-week miscarriage, then a positive pregnancy test that's brought us safe thus far to this midwayish point, all tenterhooks and cervical stitch and quivering, half-naked hope I can still barely look in the eye.  But it is in the hope where the luck resides: hope spins futures, however cobwebby.  And it is futures, dreamed and cast to ruin, that haunt those who mourn.

In the early weeks after Finn died, when I was still waking shocked to find my body empty and no longer pregnant, I wanted desperately to turn back the clock.  I felt wrong, robbed.  I wanted to be pregnant, to rectify this hole that had somehow ripped its way through the space-time continuum.  As acceptance began to beat its way into me, and I flailed like a fish on a line trying not to confront the weight of my grief head-on, I wanted again to be pregnant...to force the hand of fate and try to peek, somehow, into a future I could no longer imagine.  But these were not the clinchers, not the reasons that led me to throw caution and the pill back to the wind.  It was more a compulsion than a decision, ultimately...an inarticulate, animal pull, like a cat in heat.  I felt reckless.  I wanted to breed, to be fecund, to ripen, to throw myself at pregnancy with all the fierceness I could muster.  I wanted to make babies, hundreds of babies.  I wanted it like I have wanted nothing else in my life, like it was the brass ring, the hope that would bring back hope.

And yet when I locked myself in my bathroom to take that home pregnancy test, five months after the death of my baby, I didn't feel hope.  I felt ridiculous, exposed, foolish.  I imagined cackling harpies crowding at the door, taunting me: look at the crazy lady whose baby died, conjuring up pregnancy symptoms!  pitiful!  nutjob!  bwaa haa haa haa!  Even when the test turned positive, they didn't have the decency to disappear, those harpies...they just altered their tune a bit, drowning out any hope I summoned, reminding me that I had no reason to expect that all would go well.

I did not trust my body.  I did not trust my instincts.  I once again had something precious to lose, to fear losing, and oh, how I feared with all my heart.  I became fixated on dates, on counting, on parsing out days until the heartbeat, the ultrasound, the window for x to go wrong, the next ultrasound, viability, the gestational age at which Finn died.  

I still do it.  For a brief window last fall, I had the most uncomplicated few weeks of pregnancy I've ever known.  Even with Finn, I'd begun bleeding a few days after I found out I was pregnant, and had thought for a week or more that I was miscarrying.  With my second son, I bled from the day of the positive test, harpies bleating, and died a little each time I peed for the entire seven months after.  So when my pregnancy last fall hit the six, seven, eight weeks with no sign of blood, I began to strut a little, inside, began to race ahead of myself with hopes and fantasies...began to think, this is what it feels like to be normal.  I felt the strange conviction that all would go well.  Ah, hubris.  The nine-week ultrasound showed that the fetus had never made it past six weeks.

So this time too, again, I leapt in still bruised, still with healing yet to do.   I leapt in acutely aware that what I want and what I think mean squat, in terms of outcomes of this pregnancy, understanding that if we were lucky enough to get out of the first trimester there would be bedrest, possible medical complications, all these things that scare the living shit out of me.  I still forgot that for days before every ultrasound I would manage to convince myself, subconsciously, that the baby had died...and thus leave with good news but feeling worse, as if the inevitable torture had merely been postponed.  I still forgot that the societal discourse surrounding pregnancy - all bloom and celebration and oooh, fight stretch marks! and let's have a shower at twenty weeks! and if something were wrong, mama would know - would make me feel like drinking rat poison...or like feeding it to the oblivious smiling hordes, so certain in their entitlement, their claim to a "rewarding" pregnancy.  I still forgot that I would choke on the words, "I'm pregnant," just as if I were an adolescent or a frightened eighteen year old...that I would feel sheer terror at the prospect of having to expose that much of my secret soul - my fragile hope - to people even long after my body was negating the need for an announcement. 

What I did not forget is that it is a gift, this one more try.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

What is your relationship to pregnancy after?   Is it a possibility?  Something longed for?  Feared?  If you've had multiple losses, did you find your relationship to the subsequent pregnancies different?  Did you choose an alternative path to having further children? 

If you have been pregnant after loss, what was the experience like for you?

And lastly...is this a topic you're comfortable encountering here, and if so, under what circumstances and terms?

the crack in everything

ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack, a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in

- Leonard Cohen

I heard the lines above last night, a melodic crescendo, and was stunned into reverie. Down to the sour smell of smoke and sawdust that were in the air that night, I was, for a moment, transported viscerally to the time and place they'd last crossed my consciousness.  Three summers ago, almost.  With old friends, gathered from our scattered points around the globe, for a weekend of talk and wine and beer.  It was nine weeks after he died.  I was supposed to be thirty-five weeks pregnant for that visit: instead, I was raw, raging, humbled...unmoored.  but with those friends I felt comparatively safe and we talked about him, a little, and they talked about him, a little, and there was no sweeping under the carpet and I felt freed by that, grateful...even welcomed the strangely soothing balm of the eight month old boy one couple had in tow.  The group of them were some touchstone of normal - of the me I had been before - in a time when there was none, elsewhere in my life. 

But then Leonard's voice broke in through light chatter and mild drunkenness on the second night of our gathering. ring the bells that still can ring, he intoned, gravelly and sage.  and suddenly I was choking on smoke and tears, and I bolted from my chair and went stumbling across the yard in the darkness, almost blind.  What fucking bells?   Seriously, what bells were left?  I was broken.

I'd lost my job along with my child.  I was struggling to find a place in a community we'd moved to only months before, struggling to find other work, struggling to get up the courage to leave the sanctuary of the house on a daily basis.   I was a parentless child and a jobless professional...and we'd left our old life behind on another continent to come home and have a baby.  Without that baby, I could not figure out how to go forward.

I'd been, I think, in the denial stage of my grief.  I looked back to my friends in the circle of light on the deck, and realized, there really is no going back to normal.  fuck me gently.  And then I went inside and mixed myself a Southern Comfort Janis Joplin would've been proud of, and sat, numb, staring, bewildered.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The thing about grief - and in particular, the keening loss that was deadbaby grief for me - that blew my mind was how it robbed me of any clue about how to continue to live my life in a meaningful way.  I understood, factually, that I still had a reasonable semblance of a life, if one in a bit of a shambles at the time - but I could not connect to it.  I groped for the bells left to me to ring and came up clutching air.  It wasn't the overabundance of a sheltered life in my previous incarnation, either, that left me so bereft even of my self, of my survival instinct, my resilience: I'd been violated before, just by living...betrayed, divorced, disappointed, grieved.   But I'd never been stopped up short.

I wonder, sometimes, what it must have been like to grieve a child back in the days of our great-grandmothers, when infant death and pregnancy loss were common and maternal death a fairly regular outcome of childbearing.  I imagine it was still a lonely, isolated thing for many, particularly given the stiff upper lip with which loss would've been expected to be met in many communities and circumstances.   And yet...other than the fact that fewer of us would be present in this company of mourners, lost as we would have been along with our babies...there would have been one key difference between then and now: we would not, could not, have gone into pregnancy without realizing that a loss of this scale was very possible.

I realize, finally, three years on, that that has been the crack in everything, for me.

That pregnancy was fraught with bleeding from the early days.  At six weeks, I was told I was probably miscarrying, and sent home on bedrest.  It felt surreal, but not shocking.  I knew women miscarried.  I knew a number of women who had miscarried.  My partner had already lost two, with his first wife, so I understood full well that the risk of that loss was part of the bargain I'd gotten myself into.  But when the bleeding resolved and the docs said all clear and I sailed past fourteen weeks with no further complications and a perfectly normal ultrasound, I was naive enough to believe that I was pretty much going to be bringing a baby home.  I wasn't sure that baby might not have some minor health issues or delays...I worked in special ed, I knew not every child fits every norm, but to even consider seriously that my baby might die seemed beyond dramatic, frivolous, macabre. 

Such are the miracle assumptions modern science has taught us to espouse.  All other truths and possibilities - especially those that involve dead babies, unsavable, for no apparent reason - are silenced in the mainstream discourse surrounding pregnancy and birth, these days.  There is no norm left to us, and so we are unwelcome and awkward and exposed in the societal conversation surrounding how babies are made, marginalized because we can be, because medicine has made us anachronisms, relics.  

In retrospect, I see now that I've dealt with every other sorrow that's come my way in life by telling myself I expected it.  Each time, it was at least somewhat true.  Nature and experience shaped me as a cynic of sorts, a Cassandra, attuned to the emotional and relational roadbumps that littered most of the paths I ever chose.  I got wounded along the way, but seldomly truly surprised.  And that helped.  It didn't assuage the pain, not necessarily in the moment, but it left me semi-intact, with bells held in reserve still to be rung.  Until I was blindsided by the death of a child who had at least a 75% chance of survival even at the moment of his untimely birth, I had never had all the bells torn from me at once...even the small, cold, brass one marked i saw it all coming.   Without it, and without the baby in whose basket I'd piled all my hopes, I was - for the first time - bereft.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Last night, listening to Cohen and time-travelling, I wondered about what seems to me now like the naive and sheltered discourse that surrounds pregnancy in our day and age and culture.  And I sang along, frog-voiced but loud, proud, forget your perfect offering.  there is a crack, a crack in everything.

We embody the crack in the perfect offering of modern pregnancy sold to us by Parenting Magazine and BabyCenter and What to Expect When You're Expecting.  We embody it because our children are not here to.

The logical conclusion, of course, to my stretched analogy is, then, that we are how the light gets in.  A part of me likes that.

Conspicuous, and not

"Does Monkey have a brother or a sister?"

I consider the source, all three some odd feet of him.  Jake, the skinny kid from my daughter's pre-school, all eyes, the kid who seems to be carrying a torch for her, still, nearly a year after she said her pre-school goodbyes on her way to discover the bigger world that is kindergarten while he stayed for his final year, prisoner of his inconveniently young age. He noticed me where I was crouching into my chair, awaiting my pickup order in the neighborhood Japanese place while he and his family were wallowing away time having already placed their sit-down order.  He asked me first where Monkey was, then something else, and then, finally, THAT question.

His parents, having followed him over to my corner of the universe, now tense preemptively. They are nice enough people, but I can't tell whether they tense because they feel bad for me or because they are afraid I will answer truthfully. I don't know what it is Jake wants to hear either. He might be looking for a validation of a memory he can't explain, or he might just be asking about something just about every other kid he knows has.  Or he might remember something, Monkey talking about her soon to be born brother maybe, or maybe about her brother who died. Jake wasn't even four then. Can he really remember? Does he know what death is? I decide, eventually, that it is not my place to introduce him to the concept if he is not, by chance, familiar. Monkey's good friend and the daughter of our close friends didn't know what it was, and was trying, so hard and for so long, to construct an explanation that didn't suck this very much. So I decide it's not my place to educate, and I answer "No."

The truth is, of course, that Monkey has two brothers. A, the baby who died fifteen months less one day ago inside of me, and this new boy now in my belly. Jake's parents glance at my midsection, or maybe I am just paranoid. Either way, I am not about to make an announcement while I await my order. I am simply not in the mood. But it also means my sons, both of them, remain invisible, and my daughter, in her apparent only-childness, remains conspicuous. After the big ultrasound, walking down the street and chatting, me wrapped in my voluntary pregnancy disguise device, aka my big shawl, looking for all the world as a mother and her only child, Monkey, in response to nothing I can any longer remember saying, said with the air of a huge discovery and equal measure of happiness "But mama, you have three children."

Yes, yes I do. As jarring and scary to accept as that simple statement is, in my heart, I very much have three children. In the eyes of my religion, too, religion which allows full burial rites and full rites of grieving for fetuses over 20 weeks gestation, and which, therefore, has to acknowledge my younger son whatever happens with him from now on, I have three children. Even in the eyes of the law I have three-- as of nine days ago, same 20 week dateline, this new baby can no longer be considered a miscarriage.  And yet, I know full well people in general don't think like that, they don't understand. Even allowing myself to own this statement is terrifying, for it opens me up, somehow more realistically, more viscerally than before, to having to accept the possibility that things visible might remain the same, that we may lose again.

Medusas, though, medusas understand. Here I don't have to keep looking over my shoulder, wondering how others see me. I can both talk about allowing myself to love this new baby, despite not knowing whether he is coming home, and about not wanting or accepting congratulations because I can not let this part of the guard down, and I can't seem to want to let the people who think pregnancy automatically equals full-term, happy, healthy, live baby off the hook.  Here, in the woods, among my snake-haired sisters, I can take these steps I am discovering I need to take-- tentative and contradictory steps into inhabiting this mother of three persona. I need to learn to be her, whatever her visible score is. 

So thank you for being here. I am sorry you have a reason to come by.  What I learned in the last fifteen months is that we need each other, for sanity checks if nothing else. To rant and to rave, and to listen. To drink, to pour. To sit in silence. Welcome to the woods. Stay a while, will ya? I hope you do.