Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss (17 page)

In class the students knew nothing of my pain. Just as they lived their lives from one day to the next (no dwelling on pain of the past), they were not counting the days until my baby’s death, but were rather—innocently, with no agenda—expressing to me joy for his current life.

I listened and took in their enthusiasm. I pretended their remarks fit my situation. Eventually, I quit confusing the pregnancy with the trauma, and I began to believe their comments. I felt joy for his life right now. I did not line up the days and months to count him into a bona fide baby as people do. Rather, once I let go of the mental constraint of Time, I was free to love him as deeply as eternity would allow.

Two days before the end of the quarter, I went into labor. I called my supervisor and told her I wouldn’t make it to class. I imagined the students smiling when a substitute teacher would arrive to take my place, because they would envision my being bestowed the greatest blessing to them of all; that is, to have a child.

They were not wrong. My son was born into eternity, beyond Time, and for that long will he be my child.

Julie Christine Johnson

E
ach of our children has a name. Each name is derived from an ancient language, lovely to the eye and gentle on the tongue.

In those early, giddy days of our first pregnancy, I recalled a name from a beloved novel. I researched the name’s origins and meaning and said it aloud to Brendan one spring morning.

“This is her name,” he said, working his mouth around its flowing Gaelic syllables. “This is our daughter.”

I can name the children who began their lives with such promise, whose hearts beat in tandem with mine. But I have no name for the rage, bewilderment, and unfathomable grief of losing a baby.

Our first pregnancy was unexpected, yet desired and celebrated. We began trying to conceive in 2002, when I was thirty-two. I followed the natural fertility method by charting my cycles and calculating our best dates to conceive.

After a year of failure, we each underwent a battery of fertility tests. A diagnosis of unexplained infertility was rendered, followed by the usual advice: relax, let it go, and you’ll probably get pregnant; consider adoption—and you’ll probably get pregnant; accept your infertility—there is more to life than children.

A long period of anger and grief followed the diagnosis of infertility and our decision not to adopt. Following each announcement of a pregnancy by a friend or colleague, I would implode. I wanted someone to take the blame for my inability to conceive. I wanted someone to hurt as much as we were hurting.

Moving on wasn’t a conscious decision, not at first. Two years passed, and we began talking about living overseas again. That first seed of excitement—the idea of radically changing our lives—blossomed into a plan. We became determined to live a life of joy and adventure, even if it wasn’t the life we had envisioned.

In 2006, we moved with newly minted visas to New Zealand. We lived in a bungalow in a tiny village by the Pacific Ocean, and we worked side by side in the vineyards of North Canterbury. It was a life less ordinary, one many dream of having the chance to live.

Our family of two began to feel just right. We were content with our
now
, and we embraced a country that surrounded us with creative energy and natural beauty. We remained in New Zealand for two years before returning to the Pacific Northwest to be within easy reach of aging parents.

Early in June 2009 I sat on my yoga mat during a predawn class, wondering if I’d make it in time to vomit into the trash bin just outside the studio door. The nausea passed. Two days later—same time, same place—it returned. Suddenly, I knew its cause.

Hours later Brendan and I stood at the counter of our neighborhood medical clinic, crying in wonder as we learned I was several weeks pregnant. The next two months passed in quiet joy.

Our baby died during my eleventh week. “Spontaneous abortion” is the notation in my medical file. The ob-gyn assured me that nothing I’d done or neglected to do caused the miscarriage; first trimester miscarriages are very common. Despite all indications that the fetus was developing normally, our baby was simply not strong enough to survive.

My physician recommended I undergo a dilation and curettage (D and C), a procedure to remove the fetus by scraping or vacuuming it from my uterus. In my grief, I was determined to hold on to my child as long as I could. I rejected the D and C.

It took three agonizing weeks and two rounds of Misoprostol, a drug used in lieu of surgical abortion, to complete the miscarriage. Brendan felt so helpless. My body was beyond his reach to heal. The most he could do was hold my hand and support me.

I’m not certain how we functioned in that time. Friends came for a weekend visit in the middle of our ordeal. We showed them around Seattle, which sparkled in the August sunshine, without saying a word about the pregnancy and miscarriage. Neither of us missed a day of work. I started running again.

Late one afternoon I filled multiple sanitary pads with thick, ropy blood. I lay curled on the living room floor, my belly roiling with cramps. After one final trip to the bathroom, I knew it was over. She was gone.

We healed slowly and unsteadily in the year following our miscarriage. Our wounds reopened often, such as when we learned of a friend’s pregnancy, conceived after her husband’s vasectomy, or when friends who didn’t know of our miscarriage or years of struggling with infertility proclaimed that Brendan and I would make great parents. “You’ve been married so long! Don’t you ever want children?” They’d ask.

Three years, nearly to the day after we learned we were first pregnant, I quietly purchased and took a home pregnancy test. We were shocked to learn we were pregnant again—we’d long since given up hope.

It was impossible not to give in to joy, not to allow our hearts to swell in anticipation of meeting the life we had created. It was impossible not to name this child. Yet we tried to prepare ourselves for heartbreak. The wounds from our miscarriage in 2009 reopened, and we admitted our deepest fears. We proceeded with caution, telling no one but our parents and handful of close friends.

In a moment of twisting around to look at a less-dark side, I said to Brendan, “When we lost the first baby, I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t creating anything. I had nowhere to voice my grief and rage. But now, if the worst happens, I have a voice. I have a place to go that gives me hope and joy and meaning. At least, if the worst happens, I have that.”

A few weeks later I attended my first writers’ conference, an event that filled me with purpose and confidence. Late Saturday afternoon, just before the final session of the conference, I dashed into the bathroom for a quick pee. I pulled down my panties and saw what I hadn’t felt.

A streak of bright-red blood.

I sat on the toilet with my head between my legs as the world went gray.

When I walked into that bathroom, I was ten weeks pregnant. When I walked out, I was…

Empty.

The cramps began that evening, not long after I returned home. They were bad. Then they got worse. By the next afternoon I was writhing on the living room carpet, crying and gasping as my uterus ripped itself apart.

I refused to let Brendan take me to the hospital. Women have been giving birth to life and to death on their own since the beginning. These were the only labor pains I would ever know and it was pain I would own, pain I would remember, because I had nothing else. At 10 p.m., I finally crawled into bed, my body no longer sharing space with another.

I wasn’t pregnant long enough for those first ultrasounds to reveal either baby’s gender. Yet we claimed and named those children who I hoped would have my auburn hair and musical inclinations and their Daddy’s chocolate-brown eyes and sweet temperament. I am aware each winter of their due dates, each July of their deaths. I still whisper their precious names. And I write, because writing is how I create life.

Brendan took me in his arms when I returned home from the conference, in the quiet moment before the pain thundered through me.

“It’s going to be just the two of us,” I said.

“That’s fine by me,” he replied.

And we cried, because nothing was fine.

But it will be again, someday. We have accepted the presence of sorrow and realized that within the sorrow are moments of incomparable bliss.

Robyna May

I am one of the broken people.
The people who are hollow.
The people made of glass.
The people made of sorrow.
You might not know it—
think me the same as you.
But look a little closer—
you will see straight through.

I am weightless, groundless.
I am battered, I am broken.
I am bruised, I am tired.
I am words left unspoken.

I am acting when I›m smiling.
I am pretending even now.
Appearing to be living,
when I have forgotten how.

I go through the motions.
I wake up every day.
Do the things that need doing.
Say what I am supposed to say.

But this vessel is broken, empty.
It is cracked beyond repair.
And sometimes when you see me,
I have vanished into air.

I am living on the outer,
each breath hangs by a thread.
I am halfway between the living.
I am halfway to the dead.

One day I’ll find my feet.
Feel the earth and remain.
But even when I make it there,
I’ll never be the same.

Because now I am so fragile.
Heart shattered on the floor.
And though I am made of glass now,
I am somehow stronger than before.

Keleigh Hadley

P
re-pregnancy, I was great at lying imagining what type of mom I would be.

I wondered if I’d be Earthy Mom—a vegan who breast-feeds, co-sleeps, and uses cloth diapers. She is so carbon-footprint-free that she hovers, wears the baby as an accessory, and serves organic meals on Fair Trade plates woven by Ugandan women. But I had a special place in my heart for burgers and leather sling-backs, so Earthy was out for me.

Sporty Mom is skinnier after pregnancy, has playdates booked months in advance, runs around town pushing a $900 jogging stroller, and joins Baby Gym, Gymboree, Baby Yoga, and Baby MMA. I prefer the mental workout of a good book vs. actual sweating, so I wouldn’t be Sporty Mom.

There is Crack-the-Whip Mom, who is no-nonsense, no frivolity, “no wire hangers!” She carries a well-worn copy of
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
, insists that her newborn will rise to meet her expectations, disciplines other children in the grocery store, and side-eyes mothers who coddle. I practiced my “Don’t you even think about it” look in the mirror but couldn’t keep a straight face. Frowns give you wrinkles.

I didn’t fit any of those types, but I wasn’t worried. I’d be warm and firm. Loving and strong. I’d have the chef skills and craft finesse of Martha Stewart and the enthusiasm and endurance of Mary Lou Retton. Plus, I’d be artsy and smooth like Lou Rawls. I’d be a Black Martha Lou Rawls.

I envisioned myself as Warrior Mom, clad in thigh-high boots and a Spanx-lined utility belt (packed with an iPad, Purell, and lip gloss), with my baby in a sling and a blinged-out
W
on my chest.

D-day came, and my robust son was delivered via natural childbirth. Daily I awoke to a new purpose, a new passion, and a baby on my boob. Life was good, everything seemed rosier, sweeter, glossier—
insert record scratch here
.

My son was two weeks old when my husband said, “Imagine if Jireh had lived. We’d have two boys.”

I nodded my head and murmured, “Uh-huh.” On the outside I was calm. But inside a horrifying thought resurfaced. One that I thought was dormant.
Babies die.

Old people die. Sick people die. Drug addicts die. Not babies.

Six years before, I had suffered the loss of my first child when I was ten days from my due date. It was a Sunday, and when I woke up, I immediately knew something was wrong. We needed to go to the hospital. I was seen by a nurse who did a sonogram. Her face remained impassive, and her tone was remote. She would find a doctor. Two more nurses came and did sonograms. Same reaction and response. I felt like I was drowning in a frozen lake, and each person that walked through that door, with the passive expression of a serial killer, pushed me further below the icy water. The doctor finally came and performed a sonogram, tried the heart monitor that produced a resounding silence, and gave me the news. For some inexplicable reason, my son had died.

I delivered a physically perfect stillborn. I still have no clue as to why he died or what went wrong. I couldn’t bear the thought of an autopsy, so we had a memorial and buried him in a ridiculously tiny, white casket. I could finally answer the question, “What is more painful than childbirth?”

I couldn’t attend baby showers, seeing kids at the mall made me burst into tears, and I
hated
the thought of people pitying me. I would forever be the girl whose baby was stillborn. But it didn’t really hit me until the first anniversary of his death that I had lost a son. I fell into a paralyzing depression. Yet, as time promises, my wounds healed, and I grew strong.