Home

My husband and I became engaged a few months after moving out of our cohabited rental apartment.  He was visiting me from his new job and temporary apartment on the East coast; I was roughly 900 miles west of him with a one-semester gig, living in a rental room within a house of students.  We giggled nervously about our lack of communal abode, and then I said, with love-struck naivete, "Home is where you are."

***

It was one of those developments were you got to pick your model, and within, some variables of your new house.  We thought we lucked out with location (down a long driveway off the road, backed up into a grove of trees with a creek and trailhead beyond), and set about selecting tiles and cabinet faces.

It was a unique, open floor plan with quirks -- not your typical prefab house -- and yet, it never felt like ours.  We made decisions with an eye toward resale.  Even though my husband had just started a job here, and I moved my dissertation writing to my new office, we never thought we'd be there forever.  (That said, we had no idea where on earth we might otherwise be.)   We chose white where I would have preferred color; tan where I would have preferred black.  It was pretty, composed, and put together.  I cringed every time I put a nail in the wall for a picture.  It wasn't us.  

From my windows I espied foxes, deer, and turtles.  Woodpeckers, blue heron, cardinals, finches, the occasional hawk.  We welcomed our dog Max into our home here.  The bedroom where I lay despondent after discovering I was miscarrying was a lovely deep blue-gray with high ceilings.  I labored with Bella all night in the living room, my cat Tucker (who had journeyed from the midwest with us) by my side.  We brought Bella home here, through our attached garage.  She had a lovely yellow westward-facing room on the second floor.  We dreamed of another baby here.  And yet, the house lacked soul.

When I pulled out of the driveway for the last time, Bella in the backseat, 12 weeks pregnant with Maddy, I got a little teary, but I realize it was probably stress more than anything.  I left behind no close friends, and save for one, no fabulous neighbors.  The memories that occurred in that house were less tied to the house and its structure as much as they were simply knotted up with my life.

***

I realized I wanted to live in my current home about 10 feet beyond the front door.  It was warm.  Even though it was enormous, it was comfortable.  It felt like an old sweater. (A one-hundred year old sweater, in fact.)  It had soul.

We moved and I immediately began taking down wallpaper and painting and choosing what I wanted -- this was my forever house.  I picked bold colors.  Defiantly nailed holes in the walls where I wanted my stuff.  To this day I find myself staring at features -- the window on the second floor landing, the arched, leaded windows around the front door.  The dutch doors, the views of the yard out the southern-facing windows.  The beautiful renovated master bathroom we inherited.  And some mornings -- even one I distinctly remember only days after Maddy died -- I often find myself stopping in my tracks, staring out of a window thinking, "I can't believe I live here."

***

I knew from experience that the baby wouldn't sleep in a separate room until at least six months of age, so we never set one up before she came.  But I had it mind -- the two back to back rooms on the third floor with the cute window seats, funky angled ceilings, and amazing night views would house my children.  We'd re-do the god-awful third floor bathroom, and I could hear bathtime in my heart, bouncing off new white and glass blue tiles.  Tucking one in, padding a few feet over, and then the other.  The big room on the second floor, across from our bedroom, where Bella slept for the moment, would become the playroom.  I envisioned moms sitting on the U-shaped bank of window seats warming their backs in the window while children played on the floor in front of us.

I am thankful I did not have to take anything down, close a door, or redecorate.  My father quickly dismantled the bassinet we had set up next to our bed, and chucked it in the attic.  Thus ended any physical presence of Maddy in our house.

Bella remained in her room, the would-be-playroom, and does to this day.  Maddy's would-be room  is now my husband's office, which was not a difficult transition seeing as we never even painted.  The god-awful bathroom is still god-awful.  Bella's would-be-room is her incomplete playroom, a project I started with a vengeance, but now have trouble finishing, wondering about the permanence of sky blue paint and those pesky nail-holes.

Don't get me wrong, a large part about why I love living here lies just outside of these four stone walls.  My new neighbors are the best I've ever had in my life.  The medical community in my new location is top drawer.  We're closer to family than we were in the other house.  

But when Maddy died there was never a question about whether we were staying or moving.  And a large part of that, was the house.  Maybe it was because she never saw it, she didn't literally die here.  Maybe it's because I was fortuitous enough not to have painted or decorated or moved furniture or even set up a changing station.  Maybe it was because her presence was never given enough time to make this its home, that the house does not make me miss her more.  Maybe it is because home, the dilapidated shotgun version with both doors blown wide open so you can see right through from one  yard to the other, with the wind-stripped walls and craggy, leaky roof, barely covering my family huddled under a table, lies within my heart.

I know people who have moved from their houses when disaster struck, and were blessedly relieved to leave that part of their life behind.  Growing up, I knew a family who designed a home with their two children in mind -- and one died of cancer shortly after they moved in.  They sold it.  I remember thinking I could never live in a house where a room was already designated, if that person had ceased to be.  I know people who would probably love to move from where they are, to escape those ghosts of rooms stark empty, but the current housing market or jobs won't allow it.  (But then, I'm also asking, given the chance, would you move anyway?  Was the death just a push out the door?)  I know people who have moved because it hurts too much to wake up to the familiar, and seemingly cursed, sense of empty.

I feel extremely fortunate that my house welcomed me back from Children's Hospital on a bone-chilling February night, and never let up its embrace.  There should be more footsteps here.  Another voice.  Another occupied room.  More toys littering the stairs.  Maybe it's because she was never here; maybe it's because the house is so full of ghosts to begin with that Maddy gets lost in the cacophony.  

What was your relationship to your house after your child(ren) died?  Had you already created a space for them?  What happened to that space?  Did you move or wish you could to escape the memories that are intricately tied with the space in which you live?

replacement

With our surrogate, Kyrie, just a few weeks away from what we hope will be the safe delivery of our son, I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between this possible new baby and the twins we lost a little more than two years ago. Of course, this new child can't be a literal replacement for the twins. But there's less to distinguish them than one might think.

 Part of that is simply the mechanics of IVF. One afternoon in April 2006, on the third floor of a big hospital in the Northeast, ten embryos were coaxed into being. Curled in their petri dishes, cells dividing, the embryos, from my point of view, were interchangeable. I hoped that at least one of them would grow to be my child, but I didn't care which one and I didn't give much thought to what would happen to the others.

The doctors chose two embryos -- call them A and B -- to transfer and froze the rest. A and B became the twins and we all know how that turned out. So, in April 2008, they unfroze embryo C, which is now, at least theoretically, the baby due at the beginning of January.

Although the selection of which embryos to transfer wasn't entirely random, chance clearly played the guiding role. Right now, I could just as easily be mourning the loss of embryos D and E or cautiously celebrating the impending arrival of F. And that cascade of contingencies make it that much harder to attach significance to the individual identity of any of them.

Moreover, over time, the twins themselves have become mostly an abstraction. I have almost no actual memories of them -- a positive pregnancy test, a dozen increasingly ominous ultrasounds, a month or two or flutters and kicks. What memories I do have are really about myself, my hopes, my wishes, my painting an imaginary future in pastel shades of pink and blue. And, though much more hesitantly, I find myself now thinking almost the identical thoughts, transferring the old dreams to this new child and wondering whether I can see this child -- at least in some non-literal way -- as one of the twins returned to me.

Because I tend to think in metaphors, and extended and heavy-handed ones at that, let me put it this way. Imagine you're looking into a series of lighted kitchen windows at dinnertime. In one lucky house, all the chairs at the table are filled with cheerful family members. In the house next door, there are chairs with no-one sitting in them, but you notice that they're drawn close to the table, still part of the family circle. In yet another house, the table at first seems full, but if you look in the next room, you'll find the unused chairs carefully, lovingly stored away.

And then, in the house I hope one day to live in, there's a chair that, in the manner of Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously occupied and empty.  And in it sits a little boy who is at once here and, well, absolutely elsewhere.

Your thoughts on the concept of the replacement child? A dangerous or unfair idea? An understandable rationalization? Something in between?

What does your dinner table look like?