Exit Laughing (6 page)

But my sister, Elaine, isn’t happy with this. She thinks my dad is betraying my mother and his marriage. So she calls a meeting with the staff psychiatrist at the nursing home. I drive in from Ottawa. My three siblings sit on a sofa together, my dad in a chair off to the side, almost out of their line of vision, and I am in a chair on the other side. My sister lays out the reason for the meeting: my dad shouldn’t be seeing this Other Woman.

The psychiatrist puts an end to this notion with a brushstroke: our mother is so mentally incapacitated at this point, she has no idea whether my father is even visiting her. There is no reason he can’t enjoy life.

I’m relieved: Elaine’s been at war with my older brother and me for too long over our belief that our father can still visit my mother
and
have a life.

Regardless, he doesn’t change her mind. Over the next years, Elaine refuses to allow this woman to come to any family dinners, making my father choose between us and her on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

That is a sad outcome. But there is a brilliant one that eventually changes my life. The psychiatrist does something astonishing: he turns on my father—the same man to whom he’s just given this support for a richer life—and asks him a question so simple that we are stunned. He asks, “Why?” Why did he do the bidding of a woman who was so clearly troubled? Why did he beat his children at her command? How could he have done this to those entrusted to his care?

Where this doctor’s information comes from, I don’t know, but this is the first time any of us has heard the suggestion that my father had a choice. With one word, I realize he wasn’t a man obliged to follow her bidding, but chose to hurt his children so that he could live in peace. He sacrificed us—with beatings and, in later years, acquiescing to her demand for solitude, including thwarting the visits of his own children—to stop her from arguing with him.

I’m thunderstruck. The man we thought of as our savior—he seemed so balanced, she so off the rails—is actually the
guard at the concentration camp, the guy who pulls the trigger because he is told to, the guy who has no responsibility for the scars his children will bear, scars that insecure and abused children bear throughout their lives.

My father doesn’t answer. We all wait. We sit silently. The psychiatrist presses him again. No answer.

Now I am silently screaming for an answer.

But that’s it. The session is over.

Over the next few years, I try to figure out how to approach my father with this question. I can’t believe I haven’t thought about it from this perspective.

What happened has affected all of us profoundly, but not in the psychobabble ways some psychiatrists warn of with their damaging—to the damaged—talk of unbreakable cycles.

We’re not violent because our mother was. My younger brother is a mother hen to his children, a dad who sacrifices everything for their well-being. My sister would do anything for her kids and, later, her grandchildren. My older brother showers love and presents on his nephews and nieces, and on the children of the women he loves.

For my part, my career will be propelled by the sense of right and wrong and the injustice I’ve lived through. I feel so responsible for my students at a university where I teach that I meticulously create a plan to protect them, should our classroom ever be invaded by a shooter. I mentor young women who work with me. I launch a charity for girls around the world to help them get an education. Though I’m never blessed with any of my own, I focus on protecting children. I build relationships of love with my nephews and nieces and later
choose a husband who has two bright, engaging young children from a previous marriage. When people ask if I’m taking on too much in this relationship, I’m astonished: I am blessed!

It’s a long time before I realize that maybe this focus on children is actually a
gift
derived from my experiences as a child.

I begin to wonder how anyone could sacrifice their children for anything. It eats at me. I fight with my older brother about it years after my father dies. He is describing how horrible our mother was: he still sees our dad as the victim, not the perpetuator and enabler.

My father, I realize, is one of those guys everyone in the office likes. He’s funny, social, bright. But he doesn’t have that core of inner strength that says: stand up and fight for what you believe in.

Stand up and fight for your children.

Deal with your wife so she feels loved, not trapped.

Don’t let her take it out on your kids.

And for heaven’s sake, don’t deliver the blows on her behalf.

He’s a courier. A flower delivery boy. A schmuck.

A weakling.

But he’s my father, and there is a blood bond, and all my life, until I can figure it out as an adult, he’s the one in the house who was fun, and whom I thought loved us the most.

So I’m standing beside his coffin, and I lean over, hug him, and cry. He’s not the invincible guy wielding a belt. He’s a man with weaknesses, flaws, and a sense of preservation that, sadly, outweighed his obligation to his children.

He’s human.

And he loved us.

Of that much I’m sure, all these decades later.

I straighten up and look down to see that I’ve left a blotch of mascara on his white shirt.

My sweet older brother comes into the room and puts his arm around me. We look down at our father, who looks like he is having a good Saturday sleep-in and could be awakened any moment, and Brent says, “Should I get the ice-cold facecloth, or should you?”

We scream with laughter, and our siblings come in, completely bewildered. And we are, for that moment, one happy family.

When I saw my baby on a sonogram screen for the first time, the image reminded me of looking at the planet Saturn through a small telescope: a grainy round oval with a dark ring that circled its center, floating in a black abyss.

“It’s measuring at eight-and-a-half weeks,” the doctor said. It should have been measuring closer to ten.

Sitting there, I remembered the day the pregnancy test was positive. I’d called the doctor, a bubble of excitement in my voice. But her office wasn’t able to schedule me for an appointment until the end of the month, even when I begged to be seen earlier.

“December twenty-ninth is the best I can do,” the receptionist said.

“But I’m pregnant.”

“Nothing much happens in the first few weeks.”

This was my first baby. Everything was happening. My body had changed overnight. An extra layer of fat suddenly circled my abdomen. My breasts were bigger. Even so early in my pregnancy, only four weeks along, the embryo was elongating, giving its first hint at human shape. It was busy developing delicate organs. A spinal cord. A heart. Didn’t I need prenatal vitamins for that? Ron and I were going to be parents.
The priorities of our lives had shifted in an instant. Didn’t we need doctorly advice?

By the time I arrived for my appointment, I was seven weeks and one day into my pregnancy. The embryo was on the verge of becoming a fetus. Our baby’s face was taking shape, developing nostrils and eyes. He or she had two little paddles for arms. A nurse drew blood to test my hCG levels (known as “the pregnancy hormone”). High levels are usually a good indicator of a pregnancy that’s progressing normally.

When the doctor came into the room, she listened to my list of symptoms and confirmed that these were more good signs. I had morning sickness. Tender breasts. Frequent urination. Sleepiness. An enlarged uterus.

“Any food aversions?”

“Not really.”

“You will. I couldn’t eat lettuce,” she said.

I was dressed in a gown. The doctor ordered me to lie down for a Pap smear. I did what I was told. I had just had a Pap smear in the spring, right before Ron and I left Los Angeles to move across the country so he could take a different job. But this was a new doctor in a new city. I was a new patient. She held an empty folder, a new file.

Back then, I didn’t know that the only reason for a Pap smear is to check for abnormal cells on the cervix. I thought maybe there was another purpose—maybe Pap smears were routine for pregnant women who are seven weeks along and having their first prenatal visit. I didn’t know that a new doctor in a new city holding a new file is going to automatically order a Pap smear because the doctor doesn’t know the patient’s history.

She could’ve asked.

She could’ve said, “When was your last Pap smear?”

I would’ve said, “April.”

She could’ve said, “Can you send the results?”

I would’ve said, “Yes.”

She also didn’t ask how long it had taken me to conceive. A year and a half. A big red flag. I didn’t think to tell her. I believed our difficulties were over. Maybe the doctor would have taken more precautions to preserve our baby if we had talked a bit. If I had known better, I would have taken precautions, too. Instead, the doctor poked and scratched around inside me with a long skinny instrument.

“There’s blood,” I said after the exam.

The doctor snapped off her gloves. “Lots of women bleed after Pap smears,” she said. And she left the room.

The books and experts all say Pap smears don’t cause miscarriages. Maybe they are right. Maybe the scraping of my cervix had nothing to do with the fact that my developing child died inside my body. All I know is this: my hCG levels were soaring before the exam (as the blood test later confirmed). After the exam, I was bleeding, and the bleeding never stopped. A few weeks later, the bleeding got worse, and I went for an ultrasound exam. I cried when the doctor told me my baby was dead. I cried again during the car ride home. I cried at the dinner table as I pushed food around my plate, and I cried on the phone with my mom when I croaked, “I lost the baby,” before I had to hang up because I couldn’t speak another word.

I was paralyzed by the thought of a D&C, but miscarried
naturally within days. First the bleeding turned dark and heavy, then my contractions started.

I called the doctor’s office about my labor pains, and I was relieved the doctor on call turned out to be someone other than the woman I’d seen for my appointment. The new doctor was male, and he listened patiently as I explained my predicament through gritted teeth. He informed me that by the time I made my way to the emergency room, the miscarriage would be over. So I collapsed on the bathroom floor, my whole body in pain and discomfort, as Ron sat on the edge of our bed scribbling down the length of time between my contractions: 11:04
PM
, 11:09
PM
, 11:13
PM
. I turned my face aside when the sac dropped in the toilet. Afterward, I crawled into bed, and Ron rubbed my back as I wept.

In the aftermath of my miscarriage, comments by friends and family, although well meaning, didn’t ease my pain or grief either, let alone make me laugh. Mostly, they made me angry, teary, and frustrated:

Friend #1: “Get pregnant with another baby as soon as your doctor clears it—even beforehand, if you think your body can handle it.”

My inner monologue: I don’t want another baby; I want the one I lost.

Friend #2: “Your baby probably had a chromosomal abnormality. It was for the best.”

My inner monologue: The fact there may have been complications floods me with even more love for the little guy or girl. I’m full of sorrow that I couldn’t protect my struggling child.

Friend #3: “I had a miscarriage, but then went on to have two healthy children. It’ll happen to you, too—you’ll see.”

My inner monologue: It took us so long to conceive this child, and now my doctor is telling me I have endometriosis and he has to remove one of my ovaries, maybe both.

Once, in a surge of bereaved emotion, I wrote a poem about the day Ron and I searched the sonogram screen for a flicker of life, only to discover there was no heartbeat. It was the loudest silence I had ever heard. I also spent hours writing in my journal. All the thoughts, questions, fears, and confusion clattering around in my head needed an outlet. Some entries were furious. Some were sweet. None was funny.

There were days that winter—too many days—when Ron would come home from work at 6
PM
to find me under the covers. I told him I had gotten ready for bed early, but I suspect he knew I had been there all day. Despite being in on my secret, he never rushed me through my grief. He was hurting, too, and he would simply come home, set his briefcase on the floor, and rest on the edge of the bed so he could rub my back again.

Eventually, I migrated to the couch downstairs and began working, if only in fits and starts. In February, an editor called with a travel writing assignment. She wanted to send me to Mexico. Ron and I both thought the warm sun and ocean breeze would lift my spirits.

In the warm Mexican mornings, I wandered along the white sand beaches, soft as baby powder, and let the waves lap my feet. In the evenings, I’d return to the beach to sit
alone in the darkness. The stars illuminated the night sky, and I wondered about my child. Did he or she have a soul? Did the soul live on?

Three years later, I still wasn’t over my miscarriage. My prolonged grief probably had something to do with my inability to conceive again. Month after month, as Ron and I tried for another baby, my empty womb only served as a reminder of the child we had lost. We were neck deep in ovulation kits, herbal concoctions, and medical consultations, trying to figure out the magic combination that would lead to another pregnancy.

In the midst of infertility treatments—the poking and prodding of my private parts, the roller-coaster of emotions, the sadness I would sometimes catch in my husband’s face when we visited friends with young families—I stumbled upon an essay by writer Wendy Miller. She had written a humorous story about her three miscarriages. At first the idea offended me, but when I moved my mouse to close the window, the first sentence caught my eye.

I began reading, “Having a miscarriage isn’t all bad. Last time I had one my gynecologist validated my parking. Shut up, it’s like twenty bucks to park at the hospital, and she never validates. Plus I got a bunch of Darvocet.”