Until his or her first shocking gasp of air, the initial glaring
preview of bright lights, and the sight of a pair of strange hands reaching out
to pull them into the world, a baby shares a kind of secret identity with its
mother. She is usually the first to know of its existence, and the first to
recognize its unique personality and temperament. A baby whose movements go
unnoticed during the day, but who seems to host a dance party each evening will
be a night owl, while the child who kicks vigorously whenever mom eats ice
cream will have a penchant for sweets.
She alone bears the responsibility of protecting and
nourishing her child up until the moment of birth when she must share them with
the rest of the world. But for nine months, she has the satisfaction of knowing
that her child rests securely below her heart, an extension of her own body.
Just after R’s second birthday, I got pregnant for the
second time. My midwife estimated that I would be due around the end of April
or the beginning of May. We were very excited that R would be a big brother.
I was about 6 weeks pregnant when I decided to go out and
thin the hosta plants on the side of the house. I knew that I would never get
it done in the spring when the baby was born, and I had been feeling great (unlike
the first six weeks I was pregnant with R, and constantly felt like I was on an
ocean liner without any Dramamine). I dug and pulled and split, and when I was
happy with the results, I went in the house. That evening, I knew that
something was wrong.
An ultrasound the next day revealed a kind of bruise on the
lining of the uterus where the placenta had attached. The tech reassured me
that this sort of thing was very common and many times healed on its own.
Still, the slower than usual heartbeat, and the fact that the baby measured
almost a week and a half behind where it should left me with an ominous
feeling. They scheduled another ultrasound for a week-and-a-half later and sent
me home.
Just as a mother is the first to know of her baby’s existence,
I believe that I knew almost immediately when that little flicker of a
heartbeat officially stopped beating. I didn’t feel pregnant anymore, even
though I had had no more outward signs that that was the case. We waited
several more days for the follow up ultrasound, but when they went to look for
the heartbeat, the tech turned the screen away from us, and I knew that the
baby was gone. I should have been eight weeks pregnant.
First, I was consumed with guilt. If only I had been patient
and waited to thin the hostas, I might not have caused the bruising on my
uterus. (My midwife assured me that the bruise was there from conception, and
nothing that I could have done would have changed the outcome.) Then there were
the days that I stayed in bed, unwilling to face the rest of the world,
especially the people I felt that I had somehow let down by miscarrying this
baby.
Knowing that I needed to return to normal life, I decided
one day to go do some early Christmas shopping. I love the Christmas season,
and I thought that the decorations and the atmosphere might help snap me out of
the funk I was experiencing. I was looking through the ornament section at a
local department store when I came across the “Baby’s First Christmas”
ornaments. I fled the store, half-blinded by tears and drove home.
One night, R asked me to read the book “Horton Hears a Who”
before bedtime. It was a book we had read a hundred times. Horton the Elephant
discovers a microscopic world of tiny people called the Whos, and he saves them
from certain destruction. There’s a line in the book that reads, “A person’s a
person, no matter how small.” When we reached that line, J had to take over and
put R to bed that night.
Although we told few people outside of our families and a
couple of very close friends, I confided in a friend and colleague at work. His
wife had had a miscarriage between the births of their son and daughter many
years before. He shared with me how difficult the experience had been on them,
especially her. And then he said something that, although I couldn’t fully
appreciate the message in the moment, stuck with me for many months. In
retrospect, it was probably the most sage advice given to me during that time
period.
What he told me was this: “Looking back now, I know that
without what happened to us, even though it was so difficult, I wouldn’t have
my daughter or my grandchildren. I might have a different child and different
grandchildren, but not exactly these ones, and I can’t imagine my life without
them.”
K was conceived a few months later, and when I look at her
today, I find it impossible to think about my life without her. My sassy girl
with innocent blue eyes and full, pouty lips, her blonde curls cascading down
the back of her sweet baby neck. The bossy way she reminds everyone to put
their coat on before going outside, and how she must identify every person she
knows in a photograph before she can move on. What would my life be like
without her raspy little voice singing along to “I Love You a Bushel and a
Peck” or finishing each line in the Madeline books?
As the months went on, and I confided in more friends and
family members, I realized how common miscarriage is, and how many of us had silently
gone through the cycle of joy, hope, fear, disappointment and sorrow. I
wondered why this wasn’t a topic more widely discussed among women. There are
few things worse than feeling alone.
The baby we lost would have been three this May, and even
though the hosta-side of the house can still put me in a melancholy mood, and I
sometimes wonder whether it was a boy or a girl and what he or she might have
been like, I know that if I had been spared the pain of experiencing
miscarriage, I would also have missed the elation of being K’s momma. In a
roundabout way, I feel gratitude toward that tiny person the rest of the world
never got to know, but who for six short weeks lived under my heart, and who will
live for the rest of my life inside of it.
