Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (13 page)

How could this be happening? After all these years, I had finally convinced myself that I was content without children in my life. Then this surprise pregnancy turns my life around, and now here we are on our way to Miami, like two dazed zombies guided to do some unknown deed.

Since I was so far into my pregnancy, labor was induced so that I would actually deliver the baby. The room was dark. I was cold and confused. I was given so many drugs, I lost track of time, fading in and out, with so many people coming and going.

Tom complained. “I’m freezing, and this chair is so uncomfortable I can’t sleep. I have to go home for a while.” How I wanted him to stay with me—I was scared, but as usual I didn’t say no to him. He had
another baby to tend to, his business. The truth was he had to meet an inspector to get a certificate of occupancy for this new building.

The next few hours were a nightmare. I had drug-induced labor pains, and when my water broke, I had no idea what was going on. My knowledge of delivering a baby was what I had seen in movies: boil the water, get the clean towels, scream, breathe, push, and voilà—a baby.

“Push,” I heard someone say. “Push again, harder, breathe.”
Is that my doctor’s face? Why is the room so dark? Why am I wet?

Finally, after about two and half days the ordeal was over, and I delivered a baby. By the time Tom returned, I was sleeping. When I awoke, I was angry, hurt, and confused.

“Why did you leave me? I needed you,” I cried. “Why is your company always more important than me? We just aborted a handicapped baby, and we should have been together for all of it. You should—”

I was interrupted by a nurse who said, “Do you want to view the fetus?”

My mouth fell open, and Tom and I looked at each other. Neither one of us initiated discussion; we just nodded yes.
How would it look if I said no—if I said, I don’t want to see the baby, take it away.
I remained silent.

They brought the little boy embryo into our room all wrapped in a blue blanket. I felt a rush of mixed emotions as I looked at him—anger, betrayal, sadness. We could see, even at this early stage, signs of Down syndrome: the lowered ears, upward slanted eyes, the strange-shaped little hands. We said good-bye to our baby.

As I dressed to leave, still in a drug haze, I saw that I was wearing a maternity top that I had designed and sewn. As I made the long walk from my room to the elevator, I thought,
I’m so humiliated, how can I wear a maternity top? I’m not pregnant.

At home, I walked by the stack of dirty dishes piled in the sink, threw my maternity top in the trash, and crawled into bed in a state of lone depression. Tom did what he did best—he went to work. In retrospect, work was his escape, his way to deal with the pain.

Since abortion stirs up so much emotional turmoil, we told our friends and family that I had lost the baby. So, I couldn’t share my feelings with anyone. My depression lasted for months. I walked down the baby aisle at the grocery and burst out crying. I received a teddy bear in the mail from a formula company and lost control for hours.

Years later, I cannot look at a Down syndrome person or watch one in a movie, especially a child. I just close my eyes. Seventeen years later I am plagued by a recurring dream of an infant that I just keep forgetting—either the baby is on the beach by the water, or I realize I haven’t fed the baby, or I will look and see the baby just lying unsecured in the backseat as I drive the car. The baby in the dream has no identity, no face—it just appears, and I awake in a panic.

No one recommended a therapist or counseling group. It would’ve been comforting to know that over ninety percent of women caring a trisomy 21 baby choose to terminate pregnancy. If it is so prevalent, then why don’t people talk about it? Why did I feel I couldn’t share this experience with anyone and perhaps get the help I needed?

Do I regret my decision for an elective abortion? No. Instead I am sorry that I did not produce a healthy baby, and I’m further saddened because of the silence that followed.

Slowly, I poured myself back into work. Tom and I briefly discussed trying for another baby or adopting, but as time went on, we just fell back into our daily routine. Only it was never the same.

Jane Blanchard

Don’t tell me that I’ll have another one.
I must still mourn the life just lost. I know
That there’s a lovely little girl to go
Home to hold. But I haven’t yet begun
To get beyond the pain of what was done
To me these past two days—the aching, slow
Dilation—the quick mask and gas that throw
Oblivion over memory lest it run
From sanity—the reluctance to return
To life and feel the emptiness within
The awkwardness of greeting visitors
The worry how a soldier will soon learn
His child is gone—the sudden anger when
A friend, who tries to help, just makes things worse.

First published in
The Stray Branch
(Spring/Summer 2012).

Jane Blanchard

The dream recurs
often enough
to be unsettling
except that the infant,
sometimes a girl,
sometimes a boy,
is always
so calm,
so comfortable,
in my arms.

Is this the one
lost in the womb,
held only as a longing
in the early morning?

First published in
The Seventh Quarry
(Summer 2013).

Kelly Smith

T
he air was thick with the smell of sweet summer wheat as my daughter Halle and I rummaged through old items in the living room closet. We were moving in just a few weeks and this was the last “room” to be tackled. I’d saved it for last because it was the catchall of the whole house and a complete disaster. Board games, craft supplies, and old boxes of baseball cards were all bulging out over the edges of overly burdened shelves. Beads of sweat pearled at my nape as I shoved things aside and tried to group the chaos into piles that made sense.

Halle’s breath caught, and I turned to see her gaping at something she’d just pulled from the back corner. A padded hatbox covered in thin, gauzy fabric, it was certainly intriguing, especially so to a little girl. Against the green stood gold-leaved tulips embossed deeply, frozen forever in perpetual bloom. The rounded shape of the box brought to mind the fine ones of old; the kind that made you wish you had a stiff brimmed hat to put inside, maybe one that was tall with a luxurious flower placed just so, pink silk ribbons trailing down the back. The kind of hat Rhett would give Scarlett; just the sort of thing a little girl could appreciate. Thick gold ribbon lined the base of the lid, drew the eye, and begged the casual passerby to pause, even if just for a moment, to lift the lid and have a quick peek inside.

I ran my hand gingerly over the fabric, tracing the glittering threads that ran around each meticulous flower. I closed my eyes, my
hand trembling upon the box, my heart racing, palms wet. Unlike my daughter, I knew very well what was buried inside.

“Can we open it, Mom?” she asked breathlessly, excited about the goodies she was sure we’d discover.

“I’m not sure this is the time, sweetheart,” I said carefully, watching her face fall with disappointment and knowing even then she wouldn’t be dissuaded. “Maybe Daddy can show you later. There’s nothing exciting inside anyway,” I told her. “Just some stuff that belonged to your brother.”

“That’s okay!” she said, brightening. “I still want to open it!”

There was a time when the sight of the hatbox could turn my blood to ice. A time when I hid it from myself just so I wouldn’t see it by mistake. I was always moving it, always hoping the new spot would afford me a reprieve and that, this time, it was truly hidden. But there’d been more than a handful of times when, standing on tiptoe to shuffle things around on a dusty attic shelf, or lying facedown on the floor to stretch underneath the bed frame in a perpetual search for that one basket that was just the right size or for the stupid Christmas wreath that hangs on the front door, I’d been unexpectedly surprised by the box sitting innocently behind broken picture frames and high school band instruments. It was always a sucker punch to the stomach.

I suppose if I’d really wanted to, I could have just refused her, made up a story, or changed the subject. Trains of thought are not so hard to derail in five-year-old minds. But I was tired: tired of hiding from the box; tired of moving it only to have it find me again; tired of being afraid. I smiled at her then, nodded, took the box from her, and placed it on the floor. We knelt down in the small closet, the box between us. I held my breath and pulled the lid from the top.

Carefully placed inside were the small pieces of me that I’d boxed away years ago. They’d sat quietly in their dark coffin all this time, strangled for breath, anxious for the light of day. The sweet and antiseptic aroma attached to them was instantly in my nostrils, thick with memories, laced with heartache. Halle peered expectantly over
the edge. The items themselves were just as I’d left them, just as they’d been when I’d last peeled away the lid.

A knit hat. The kind they put on babies right after they’re born. The one with the pink and blue stripes, made from waffled fabric designed to contract and expand, to fit snugly onto fat, pink-cheeked babies. A miniature medical bracelet, cinched unimaginably small—small enough to slide onto my thumb. The perfect size for the ankle of a baby at twenty-five weeks gestation.

An infant blanket, images of baby carriages dancing softly across brushed flannel, a small stain still on the corner. A book given to me in the hospital that fall day in 2003 titled
Empty Arms: Coping After Stillbirth
. I’d taped a piece of paper over the cover art—a mother’s empty arms reaching in vain for her child—almost as soon as they’d given it to me. That image made me crazy. Running down the hallway, screaming at the top of my lungs crazy.

A white envelope, the edges worn soft from the opening and the closing, filled with the only pictures I’d ever have of him, hat still on, blanket wrapped round, hospital bracelet in place. A tiny blue onesie, an exact replica of the one I’d ironed and delivered to the funeral home so I could remember what we’d buried him in. And finally, the announcement card onto which they’d pressed his perfectly still hands and feet, laden with black ink.

Halle happily removed all the treasures. Together we lifted them, touching and smelling, breathing in a moment past and always present. After everything had been explored and she was satisfied, she planted a kiss on my cheek, wrapped her tiny arms around my neck, squeezed with all her might, and then skipped away in search of yet another adventure.

I sat quietly for a while, memories spread about me like a fan, my hands buried in a grief too old for my thirty-three years. I picked up the knit cap, pressed it to my nose, and breathed in the scent of the hospital room, somehow perfectly preserved in the tiny hat. I closed my eyes and smiled; saw myself holding him quietly again, my lips pressed to his forehead; could feel again the nervousness of the
nurses who stood alongside my husband and me, waiting patiently for us to say our good-byes so they could take him away.

Six years. Had it really been six years since the world fell apart? It was true, I didn’t think about him constantly anymore. I’d moved past spending every waking moment wondering what I’d done wrong or how such a terrible thing had happened to me. The true bottom for me had come and gone years ago and now, for the most part, I could navigate my way through life normally again. And yet, the box could still bring back that familiar and sharp stabbing sensation in my middle—the feeling of having been run through by an unseen enemy who walked away, leaving me doubled over and groping at my stomach, the question on my face.

Sometimes it still seems like the fog of one of those relentless dreams that repeats itself, over and over, night after night. When I wake, just for a second I feel the relief of having been asleep; the fleeting joy at having thought it was a nightmare. They are priceless: the quiet, sacred first breaths upon waking when all is at it should be and I am whole again.

I laid the knit cap down, placed the lid back on the empty hatbox, and pushed it aside. Slowly, methodically, I packed each of his things into an empty cardboard box and sealed it with packing tape. Then, in permanent black ink, I marked it simply, “Elijah.”

Jessica Killeen

“W
ake up, Maggie, I think I’ve got something to say to you!” I was belting out Rod Stewart as loudly as my now squished lungs could manage. My two-year-old daughter, Molly, giggled as I grabbed her hands and twirled her around our living room. My nine-months-pregnant belly prevented me from attempting anything too acrobatic, so we contented ourselves with mini rotations and elaborate flounces. My husband Joseph and I were just a week away from meeting our own “Maggie May,” and I happily indulged my need for sentimentality. In my giddy excitement,
Rod Stewart’s Greatest Hits
had been a permanent fixture in the CD player. I imagined myself singing this tune to my baby girl every night as I rocked her to sleep. It would be her special song, I decided.

Instead, Maggie died, unnoticed, on a Thursday. Or at least, that’s when she died to us. It seems likely that she passed away early sometime the previous morning. That Thursday we arrived at our obstetrician’s office buzzing with nervous excitement for our final routine checkup before the due date. When our doctor struggled to find Maggie’s heartbeat, despite her calm reassurances that the baby was probably just “hiding,” my own heart leapt into my throat. But it was not until the nurse wheeled in the rickety old ultrasound machine, kept for emergencies, and we all saw Maggie’s completely still and lifeless body, that I felt the sensation of a cliff crumbling beneath my feet. The doctor took my hand, and I reluctantly met her gaze, the weight of inevitability unbearable: “I’m sorry…I’m just not
seeing what I need to see.” The words were unreal, unleashing a wave of sickening shock. I barely noticed anything else going on in that little room, except Molly leaning over the bed and stroking my hair: “Mumma…Mumma,” she murmured.