In June, my husband and I found out we were expecting a baby.
It would be the third baby we would lose in the last two years.
I call her baby, even though I know she was an embryo, her heartbeat fell silent at six weeks and two days.
I call her baby because I can feel her weight on my chest and see her eyelashes in my mind.
I call her baby to honor the pain of those who have lost babies that only existed in our bodies and minds.
Our babies who existed
as dreams and then as memories.
At night, I would close my eyes and worry about miscarrying again.
I fell asleep imagining that I could make my baby comfortable enough to stay.
I also imagined that a series of little lights hung around my hip.
Realizing that I didn't have to be limited by space in this imaginary baby room, I added in my imagination Paul, who was standing by the grill, cooking chicken coated in cayenne and brown sugar.
Here's your father, darling.
Look at her eyelashes.
Look at his goodness.
Stay here, I told him.
I struggle with the
weight of my despair
when I compare her to their tiny gestational ages.
Five weeks, six weeks, seven weeks.
The baby is expected on July 26, 2022.
Then for November 21, 2022.
A year of nights of effort and attempts.
So, the baby was expected on March 17, 2024!
But it turns out the baby never arrived.
As a midwife, I have encountered each of these gestational ages under an ultrasound probe, delighting parents in the advancement in development between six and nine weeks.
The spine develops first, which explains the shrimp-shaped curve that runs from head to tail.
Then the arms and legs sprout like willow blooms and the spine begins to straighten.
Nature repeats its designs: blood vessels head towards their destination like rivers towards oceans, like plants towards the sun.
From that experience,
I look for meaning.
I don't claim to know when other people's embryos become babies or if an unwanted pregnancy ever does.
Each of the sacred stories of clients seeking abortion services helped me articulate one of my core beliefs as a professional.
My responsibility is not to understand each person's experience;
my responsibility is to remember that I will never be able to understand anyone's experience better than that person.
When I was 20, I got pregnant with an embryo I didn't have.
I imagined the child I could become.
But the relationship I had then was not safe for me or him, much less for a baby.
I imagined that creature trying to get the love that I was trying to get.
I imagined her going after me, going after him.
The love that Paul and I have is the most constant I have ever encountered.
We bought a house with a patio for a baby who hasn't arrived.
My job in healthcare
didn't offer fertility coverage
, so I found a job as a cashier at a hardware store that did.
Although the initial idea was to work in both places, I decided to take a break from obstetrics after a failed egg retrieval and our third miscarriage.
Sometimes I look at the quietness of life after those decisions and wonder what I'm doing.
Every moment I'm not ovulating or hoping to be pregnant can feel like a time I just have to watch pass.
Paul knows these doubts and the depression that accompanies them.
He knows that I have questioned every decision I have made, but that
I never doubt him.
Five weeks plus six weeks plus seven weeks equals eighteen weeks.
Does that describe what we lost?
After our third abortion, I cared for a woman whose baby died at eighteen weeks of pregnancy.
On one occasion, late at night, I was recording the heartbeat of a baby whose mother was giving birth when moans were heard outside.
I hurried to the health center parking lot, where the woman was leaning forward between the open door of her van and the frame.
He looked at me, his face twisted with pain, and said:
“This is my health center.
It was".
I didn't need to know his story to tell him:
"No problem.
“You can stay here.”
It had been 22 weeks since she lost her son.
That was the night their baby was “
due
.”
I told him to stay as long as he needed, but I didn't ask him to come in.}
I was worried that he would hear the woman in labor giving birth.
I was worried that the woman in labor would hear her crying.
I asked him if he needed anything.
He told me no.
While inside the center, I wondered if I should go back to her.
I let the weight of my body fall from one foot to the other with the discomfort of existing between its different pains.
I felt my own.
I imagined how little use it would be to say outside:
“I lost a baby too.”
Mine was very small.
I stayed inside.
And she left shortly after.
The woman inside gave birth to her baby, who passed into the hands of her husband.
Our unborn baby on July 26th would now be twenty months old.
The baby who took these words from me was due to be born this month.
The baby I don't have is the same age as my desire to have a baby.
I know that these mathematics of pain are cruel, a tyrannical demand to justify my despair to myself.
There is no one accountable for the results of these equations.
I wouldn't subject anyone else's sadness to these calculations.
However, I also notice it outside of myself.
People who love me ask me: “How long were you pregnant?”
That question is a way of saying, “How can I calculate your pain?”
However, I also notice it outside of myself.
People who love me ask me:
“How long were you pregnant?”
That question is a way of saying, “How can I calculate your pain?”
Despite the incessant December rain, Paul built a closet in our entryway out of poplar and oak salvaged from a barn.
It was the first piece of furniture I had built since I met him.
Over the next two years, as we lost pregnancy after pregnancy, Paul built table after table: curly maple, spalled maple, ambrosia maple.
He ran his fingers over the patterns carved into the wood, explaining that burrowing beetles had marked them there while the tree was still alive.
Approximately one in four pregnancies ends in loss.
As a culture, our concession is
not to talk about pregnancy before twelve or twenty weeks.
Therefore, losses in the first weeks of pregnancy become
invisible,
and hope and expectations only live inside us.
What has helped me most is making my losses visible: Paul's furniture, this text, the rocks that Paul and I collected, and then threw into a river when we felt ready.
We gave them names we would never give our children because we still expect
to need those names.
Recurrent abortions are not frequent.
It may simply be bad luck, but it is more likely due to an
underlying health problem
.
In some cases, like ours, the result in all available tests is normal and the diagnosis is “
unexplained infertility
.”
Well-intentioned people have told me:
“You know you're going to have a baby, right?”
No, I do not know.
It is immensely painful not to know.
But I do not know.
If I wonder if we are “fertile” like the deep, dark earth, then I know we are.
I look at the life that Paul and I are building, imperfectly and despite the doubts, I observe certain signs that everything is full of life.
That a new life does not fit our calculations and plans may be the clearest sign of vitality in this situation.
Our son is already escaping all the perimeters we create.
When does nature submit to numbers?
Miscarriage is largely invisible.
Fertility is invisible.
Many griefs are invisible.
Invisible is not zero.
Invisible is innumerable.
The soft wood splits, revealing burrowing beetles, too fast to count.
The weight of loss.
The length of the wait.
My daughter comes towards me, but slowly.
I imagine her as a three-year-old girl, walking along a winding path of compact earth, cool under her feet.
Have you ever tried to rush a three-year-old girl?
There are many things you want to see.
The girl watches how the wind stirs the leaves on the trees.
Watch a leaf fall for as long as it takes.
Trees are their favorite rattle, the best baby mobile.
Soon he will take other steps towards me.
But not too many, because he wants to know what's under this rock.
And when you pick it up, there's a lot to see.
I can't interrupt her.
Nor rush it.
But she is calm.
The earth is still your mother.
And when I stop to watch the wind in the trees or the insects under the rock, she is close to me.
For a moment, I know that the same mother who now cares for her, cares for me.
I perceive it in the sun that warms the back of my neck when I lean over what is in front of me.
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