While we wait for my mom’s sandwich to be prepared at the deli counter, we flip through baby gear in the gift section conveniently located near the counter. Mom is buying a travel sandwich for the long haul across the country tomorrow. Earlier she was filling up on cute onesies and books for her granddaughter—and my niece—Lyla.
“Isn’t that precious?” She says as I hold up baby t-shirts with pictures of gnomes, owls, and flowers on them.
“So cute,” I say.
Although I am not beyond feeling weird and slightly out-of-place in baby stores, I make myself face them and let the chips fall where they may. I try to remember how it felt to enter baby stores when I was a new aunt, thrilled to shower the first baby in the family with presents. It felt weird then too, but a different weird. Back then, a question mark hovered above my head as I browsed through tiny pants and striped hats. Will I ever have a baby? Now the question mark joins with an exclamation point. Will I ever have a fucking baby?!?
Near the deli counter, Mom and I coo over the cute offerings.
“I think I’ve gotten her enough already,” my mom says as she attempts to resist the ghome onesie.
A fifty-ish woman of the aging urban hippie variety approaches us, holding a card. “Excuse me, are you a new mother?” She asks me.
I shake my head.
“Are either of you mothers?”
I point to my mom. “She is.”
“I’m her mother.” My mom squeezes my arm.
“Can I get your advice on something?” The woman asks.
A friend of hers is recently pregnant. She is hunting for the right card. She pulls her hand back to reveal the one in her hand. A fat baby with “Alive” printed on its diaper and a mushroom plopped on its head stretches its limbs. It was exactly the sort of card that I would have loved to receive. Strange but joyful.
“So, what do you think? Is this a good card?” She asks.
“I like it,” I say. “It’s weird for sure, but good-weird.”
She holds the card up to my mom. “You’re a mother. What do YOU think? Too weird?”
I don’t exactly reel from her segregation of the two of us into mother and non-mother camps. I steel myself as I have been doing all weekend. I wanted my mom’s visit to be all silly family stories and laughter and shopping for shoes and baby stuff for Lyla. Whenever miscarriage threatens to intrude on our weekend together I grit my teeth and mutter some seemingly emotionally present thing like, “There are ups and downs, but we’re good.”
At Lauro on Friday for Mom’s birthday dinner, I remained seated throughout the entire dinner although my bladder threatened to burst. The one server, our favorite server, who we told about the pregnancy—more accurately she dragged it out of me when she didn’t believe my blithe comment that I drank cranberry juice instead of a martini due to “doctor’s orders”--is working.
As she zips by our table, I conjure an awkward conversation about how she really should not have pressed me about the cranberry juice.
“Why couldn’t you have chalked it up to some sort of cleanse?” I want to ask.
I drink my martini in salty slurps. Does she see me? Has she put the pieces of the puzzle together? Whatever happens, I pray she doesn’t throw me a pitying looks. I’ve had my lifetime fill of pitying looks.
I don’t want to let my mother into this mine-laden wasteland of undeveloped fetuses and tears. The misery in her voice when I told her of the first miscarriage haunts me still. I can only imagine how hard it is to witness your children suffer. Maybe this is my rationalization for my temporary denial. Maybe I really am my mother’s child and am not as comfortable expressing my emotions as I’m always claiming. At least not with her.
My mom considers the card in Aging Hippie Woman’s hand, casting a sideways glance at her for her disregard of my childless opinion.
“It’s cute,” she says.
“Oh, but it’s so early. Maybe I shouldn’t.” The woman says. “You know—“
Her trailing off voice contains the sum of my pregnancy experience. I am a boogeywoman. All the “you know” happened to me.
“That’s always a danger,” I say, forcing my way back into the conversation.
My mom rubs my back quickly, a band-aid swipe for all the “you know.”
“Well, you could always get it now and then keep it for a few months,” Mom says.
“That’s what I’m going to do,” the woman smiles. “Sorry for bothering you. Thanks.”
She walks away with her card. I lead us out of the baby stuff aisle and pick up a box of cute dog stationary before Mom can say anything about the interaction. “Isn’t this adorable?”
Only cute can save us now.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Monday, November 3, 2008
Due
The due date for Primo was October 19, 2008. I remember finding it out via the Fertility Friend.com due date calculator. My first thought: that baby better not be born on my birthday! Then, oh sweet, our kiddo will be an October baby. One of a fine breed if you ask me. I wrote “Due Date!!!!” on my desk calendar and etched the number in my mind. October 19. Of course, after the first ultrasound of doom, the date took on a confused character. I scribbled out my exclamation points in my desk calendar, but wiping it from the brain proves more difficult. I had plans to do something special in honor of Primo on the 19th.
“Like go out for dinner?” Mr. Crud said, knowing that I am wont to mark any special date, positive or negative, with a dirty martini (so convenient how you can use drinking for celebrations or as an emotional crutch) and a plate of fried calamari and Piri Piri sauce at Lauro.
“Maybe. Or light a candle or something.” I said.
Mr. Crud and I intend to mark the loss of both our babies-to-be-that-never-were in some way, but haven’t stumbled on something that feels organic, that feels like us. Mr. Crud’s cousin remembered her first pregnancy loss by saying a prayer then releasing an apple into the river, waving good-bye as it floated away. I loved that image. We considered making a paper boat, the S.S. Primo, and sending it off into the Columbia during a visit to Astoria a month after MC #1, but it was too soon and we wanted a weekend away from thinking about the miscarriage after being immersed in it for so long.
On lazy Saturday mornings, the issue of how to remember Primo, and now Dewey, floats to the surface during our drowsy chats. We remain unable to commit. Probably on some level, reluctant to say good-bye, to invite that overwhelming sadness back in even as it runs strong through our veins.
Friday night I met up with my yoga buddy, Mirjana, to celebrate her upcoming trip to India to study yoga with the grandson of the guru of our style of yoga. Over glasses of rose, I lost track of Primo’s upcoming due date. My tongue loosened after a half of a bottle, I attempted to explain the difficulty of Miscarriage World, how—as an awesome reader and friend of crud pointed out—language is inadequate to talk about miscarriage. Is there a word for the shitty swamp that envelopes me whenever I read a Facebook status update about a friend’s excitement over her pregnancy? I love my friends. I am glad to the depths of my heart and soul that most have not been privy to the sadness of infertility or pregnancy loss. Still, I feel left out, wistful. When I found out about my second pregnancy I was so excited to be able to share my symptoms, joy, fear with my pregnant friends. Now I feel torn. Ripped, in fact, between wanting to be there with them and share in their experiences and wanting to pretend it isn’t happening, that I am not THAT friend, the unlucky one with the clingy uterus and failed eggs.
Of course I am far from alone. I list the names of the other women who have been through this, who are going through this in their own Miscarriage World sublets. I whisper their names when I see that another old friend is pregnant. A new form of affirmation to replace the twice failed “My baby is healthy and safe” that I once repeated daily after my yoga practice.
As we stumbled into the cool fall night, Mirjana told me that she was here for me, that she didn’t know what to say, but that she was here to listen and witness.
“That is totally enough,” I said.
On the up side, nobody has told me that this loss was “meant to be.” In part this is due to the fact that I haven’t shared the news with any of the past meant-to-be-ers. Meant-to-be speak is now an automatic disqualification. “It was G-d’s way” will also get you thrown out of the exclusive club of Crud pregnancy updates. Poor you.
All weekend I felt the loss bubbling beneath the surface. During my massage, tears sprung to my eyes. And then the dam broke.
Saturday night Mr. Crud and I went to a play courtesy of a coolio actor coworker who just happens to be part of the hot theatre company in town. Through a perfect storm of bad timing moments, I ended up in the bathroom when the doors closed and the performance began. Oblivious to this fact, I walked back to the door where I had entered the theatre, which also happened to be the door close to the stage. I pulled on the handle. A blonde woman flew from behind the folding table that served as the box office. She pushed the door shut, hissing, “What are you doing?”
I felt like I had been punched. “I thought the play started at 8:00,” I said.
“No! 7:30.”
“Oh my G-d, I’m so sorry,” I said and skulked away, tears of shame burning my eyeballs. Guess I’ll be spending my night sobbing in the bathroom, I thought. At least until intermission.
The coolio actor coworker came up behind you. “It’s okay. She thought you were sneaking in. It’s fine. I’ll just let you in here.” He marched me up to the back entrance, opened the door, and I slipped down the aisle, taking my seat a minute into the play (or so I was assured by Mr. Crud, “You didn’t miss anything.”).
Around me people laughed at the brilliant dark comedy happening two rows in front of my hunched form. Try as I might to dam the tide, the tears flowed freely. I did my best to keep my gusher to myself. I waited for the big laughs to sniffle. I licked the snot that got away off the top of my lip. I dabbed my tears with my shawl. All in all, Mr. Crud rated my performance at pretending not to be totally weeping during a play to be top shelf. “I barely noticed,” he said.
The more I thought about the fact that I was crying my eyes out during a comedy, that the actors on stage might be able to see my tear-stained face, or catch a snippet of my sniffles made the tears fall even harder. I am an inappropriate weeper. It’s a blessing and a curse depending on the moment. A blessing because in theory I am letting the emotional rivers flow, letting go in a physical way. After a jag, I feel tired but clean. A curse because it can be damn embarrassing. Crying in front of a class full of people has happened at pretty much every age in my educational career. Not to mention the inevitable moment when I get all bubbly-eyed in front of my boss, which has happened with every boss I’ve ever had. Some roll with it better than others. Most are willing to trade my competence for a few uncomfortable moments. It doesn’t happen every time something doesn’t go my way but when I’m experiencing undercurrents of emotional craziness the tears are close to the surface. Pinch me and I bleed.
After intermission I stemmed the teary tide. Then came the late thirties female lead yelled, “I want a baby!” and a few more dribbled out.
Mr. Crud and I blasted out of the theater as soon as the play ended. Had I seen the hisser or my coolio coworker, I would have burst into tears afresh. We escaped without any further damage to my makeup job.
“The way I see it, you weren’t going to get out of there without crying,” Mr. Crud said.
“Good point.”
“I don’t think you were crying because that lady yelled at you,” he said.
We shared a laugh over the play, which though advertised as a comedy was most definitely not a comedy. More accurately it was a relationship drama about people who used comedy to keep from being sucked under by the tragedy.
“I felt very meta. I tried laughing to cover my crying while the characters were masking their own misery by laughing but then everyone ended up miserable.”
Sunday brought more reasons to be sad. A couple of weeks ago one of Mr. Crud’s colleagues committed suicide. She was a beautiful, smart, neato woman of our age. A wife, a mother to a five-year-old and someone I’d casually met at his office functions and the grocery store where we shared a laugh about how she, a feminist academic, was buying her daughter doll toys. Mr. Crud had interviewed her and her husband as part of his thesis research. It seemed totally inconceivable that she was dead and that she had made the decision to die.
Mr. Crud and I attended the memorial service at a retreat center in the Gorge. I was sniffing back tears as soon as I took a seat. Who am I crying for, I wondered. Is this for the tragedy that I saw in all the faces around me or for my own sadness? For Primo who was supposed to be born today? Am I piggybacking on someone else’s funeral? Several times during the shared remembrances, the reading of poems and music I had to restrain myself from breaking into hysterical sobs. Too much, too much, I kept thinking.
After the remembrances we moved outside. The air had turned chilly with a layer of fog resting on the evergreens across the gorge. The husband read a poem and then took a photo of Mr. Crud’s colleague and burned it over a bowl. He looked into her paper eyes and wept. I could only watch him for a second before turning away. Too much, too much. Was the burning cathartic? I had already thrown away the pee stick from Primo but still had an ultrasound photo and pee stick leftover from Dewey. Maybe burning is the way to go. A release.
I can imagine myself years from now pulling open a box filled with the paperwork from my D and C, the ultrasound photo, and other random effluvia of these two doomed pregnancies and crying more tears for my babies-to-be-that-never-were. My ghost children. Every morning I say a prayer for them, I wish them peace and imagine that my father and grandmother are watching over them. I think of the pregnancy loss counselor’s image of the babies-to-be-that-never-were being absorbed into the ocean of the universal consciousness. Maybe it is better to burn and let go than to keep objects to fondle in moments of future sadness.
I’m still figuring it out. And glad that due date #1 has come and gone. I have until April 17 to come up with my miscarried baby mourning system.
“Like go out for dinner?” Mr. Crud said, knowing that I am wont to mark any special date, positive or negative, with a dirty martini (so convenient how you can use drinking for celebrations or as an emotional crutch) and a plate of fried calamari and Piri Piri sauce at Lauro.
“Maybe. Or light a candle or something.” I said.
Mr. Crud and I intend to mark the loss of both our babies-to-be-that-never-were in some way, but haven’t stumbled on something that feels organic, that feels like us. Mr. Crud’s cousin remembered her first pregnancy loss by saying a prayer then releasing an apple into the river, waving good-bye as it floated away. I loved that image. We considered making a paper boat, the S.S. Primo, and sending it off into the Columbia during a visit to Astoria a month after MC #1, but it was too soon and we wanted a weekend away from thinking about the miscarriage after being immersed in it for so long.
On lazy Saturday mornings, the issue of how to remember Primo, and now Dewey, floats to the surface during our drowsy chats. We remain unable to commit. Probably on some level, reluctant to say good-bye, to invite that overwhelming sadness back in even as it runs strong through our veins.
Friday night I met up with my yoga buddy, Mirjana, to celebrate her upcoming trip to India to study yoga with the grandson of the guru of our style of yoga. Over glasses of rose, I lost track of Primo’s upcoming due date. My tongue loosened after a half of a bottle, I attempted to explain the difficulty of Miscarriage World, how—as an awesome reader and friend of crud pointed out—language is inadequate to talk about miscarriage. Is there a word for the shitty swamp that envelopes me whenever I read a Facebook status update about a friend’s excitement over her pregnancy? I love my friends. I am glad to the depths of my heart and soul that most have not been privy to the sadness of infertility or pregnancy loss. Still, I feel left out, wistful. When I found out about my second pregnancy I was so excited to be able to share my symptoms, joy, fear with my pregnant friends. Now I feel torn. Ripped, in fact, between wanting to be there with them and share in their experiences and wanting to pretend it isn’t happening, that I am not THAT friend, the unlucky one with the clingy uterus and failed eggs.
Of course I am far from alone. I list the names of the other women who have been through this, who are going through this in their own Miscarriage World sublets. I whisper their names when I see that another old friend is pregnant. A new form of affirmation to replace the twice failed “My baby is healthy and safe” that I once repeated daily after my yoga practice.
As we stumbled into the cool fall night, Mirjana told me that she was here for me, that she didn’t know what to say, but that she was here to listen and witness.
“That is totally enough,” I said.
On the up side, nobody has told me that this loss was “meant to be.” In part this is due to the fact that I haven’t shared the news with any of the past meant-to-be-ers. Meant-to-be speak is now an automatic disqualification. “It was G-d’s way” will also get you thrown out of the exclusive club of Crud pregnancy updates. Poor you.
All weekend I felt the loss bubbling beneath the surface. During my massage, tears sprung to my eyes. And then the dam broke.
Saturday night Mr. Crud and I went to a play courtesy of a coolio actor coworker who just happens to be part of the hot theatre company in town. Through a perfect storm of bad timing moments, I ended up in the bathroom when the doors closed and the performance began. Oblivious to this fact, I walked back to the door where I had entered the theatre, which also happened to be the door close to the stage. I pulled on the handle. A blonde woman flew from behind the folding table that served as the box office. She pushed the door shut, hissing, “What are you doing?”
I felt like I had been punched. “I thought the play started at 8:00,” I said.
“No! 7:30.”
“Oh my G-d, I’m so sorry,” I said and skulked away, tears of shame burning my eyeballs. Guess I’ll be spending my night sobbing in the bathroom, I thought. At least until intermission.
The coolio actor coworker came up behind you. “It’s okay. She thought you were sneaking in. It’s fine. I’ll just let you in here.” He marched me up to the back entrance, opened the door, and I slipped down the aisle, taking my seat a minute into the play (or so I was assured by Mr. Crud, “You didn’t miss anything.”).
Around me people laughed at the brilliant dark comedy happening two rows in front of my hunched form. Try as I might to dam the tide, the tears flowed freely. I did my best to keep my gusher to myself. I waited for the big laughs to sniffle. I licked the snot that got away off the top of my lip. I dabbed my tears with my shawl. All in all, Mr. Crud rated my performance at pretending not to be totally weeping during a play to be top shelf. “I barely noticed,” he said.
The more I thought about the fact that I was crying my eyes out during a comedy, that the actors on stage might be able to see my tear-stained face, or catch a snippet of my sniffles made the tears fall even harder. I am an inappropriate weeper. It’s a blessing and a curse depending on the moment. A blessing because in theory I am letting the emotional rivers flow, letting go in a physical way. After a jag, I feel tired but clean. A curse because it can be damn embarrassing. Crying in front of a class full of people has happened at pretty much every age in my educational career. Not to mention the inevitable moment when I get all bubbly-eyed in front of my boss, which has happened with every boss I’ve ever had. Some roll with it better than others. Most are willing to trade my competence for a few uncomfortable moments. It doesn’t happen every time something doesn’t go my way but when I’m experiencing undercurrents of emotional craziness the tears are close to the surface. Pinch me and I bleed.
After intermission I stemmed the teary tide. Then came the late thirties female lead yelled, “I want a baby!” and a few more dribbled out.
Mr. Crud and I blasted out of the theater as soon as the play ended. Had I seen the hisser or my coolio coworker, I would have burst into tears afresh. We escaped without any further damage to my makeup job.
“The way I see it, you weren’t going to get out of there without crying,” Mr. Crud said.
“Good point.”
“I don’t think you were crying because that lady yelled at you,” he said.
We shared a laugh over the play, which though advertised as a comedy was most definitely not a comedy. More accurately it was a relationship drama about people who used comedy to keep from being sucked under by the tragedy.
“I felt very meta. I tried laughing to cover my crying while the characters were masking their own misery by laughing but then everyone ended up miserable.”
Sunday brought more reasons to be sad. A couple of weeks ago one of Mr. Crud’s colleagues committed suicide. She was a beautiful, smart, neato woman of our age. A wife, a mother to a five-year-old and someone I’d casually met at his office functions and the grocery store where we shared a laugh about how she, a feminist academic, was buying her daughter doll toys. Mr. Crud had interviewed her and her husband as part of his thesis research. It seemed totally inconceivable that she was dead and that she had made the decision to die.
Mr. Crud and I attended the memorial service at a retreat center in the Gorge. I was sniffing back tears as soon as I took a seat. Who am I crying for, I wondered. Is this for the tragedy that I saw in all the faces around me or for my own sadness? For Primo who was supposed to be born today? Am I piggybacking on someone else’s funeral? Several times during the shared remembrances, the reading of poems and music I had to restrain myself from breaking into hysterical sobs. Too much, too much, I kept thinking.
After the remembrances we moved outside. The air had turned chilly with a layer of fog resting on the evergreens across the gorge. The husband read a poem and then took a photo of Mr. Crud’s colleague and burned it over a bowl. He looked into her paper eyes and wept. I could only watch him for a second before turning away. Too much, too much. Was the burning cathartic? I had already thrown away the pee stick from Primo but still had an ultrasound photo and pee stick leftover from Dewey. Maybe burning is the way to go. A release.
I can imagine myself years from now pulling open a box filled with the paperwork from my D and C, the ultrasound photo, and other random effluvia of these two doomed pregnancies and crying more tears for my babies-to-be-that-never-were. My ghost children. Every morning I say a prayer for them, I wish them peace and imagine that my father and grandmother are watching over them. I think of the pregnancy loss counselor’s image of the babies-to-be-that-never-were being absorbed into the ocean of the universal consciousness. Maybe it is better to burn and let go than to keep objects to fondle in moments of future sadness.
I’m still figuring it out. And glad that due date #1 has come and gone. I have until April 17 to come up with my miscarried baby mourning system.
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