It's All Fun and Games Until the Baby Dies

Just so you know, this was my submission for this blog's name, but I was overruled by the less cynical.  Hmph.  

But truth be known, it's not really accurate -- in my case anyway.  My pregnancy with Maddy was hardly fun and games.  A subchorionic bleed from weeks 6-18w, low-lying placenta through 28w at which point they discovered the echogenic bowel, which disappeared by 32w, all overclouded by extreme exhaustion brought on by selling my house in a volatile market, moving to another state, and continuing my role as the primary caretaker of my then 2-year old.  I should’ve been daintily sipping water, fingering fabrics for a unisex nursery (Maddy was a surprise, to say the least), going to the gym for mild exercise every few days.  Instead I ran off to the emergency room a few times when blood gushed down my legs, spent every two to four weeks on my back under the ultrasound wand, and daily implored my toddler to please, please just lie down for a few minutes so mommy could have some “quiet time.”

Maddy was in fact my third pregnancy; my pregnancy in 2002 ended in miscarriage around 8w.  So Bella wasn’t exactly fun and games either, even though hers at least kept the blood and ER visits to a minimum.  I go through pregnancies tentatively, cautiously optimistic that things will work out fine, but knowing full well that often they don’t.  With Bella I managed to remain detached enough to question the return policy on her nursery furniture – delivered when I was 36w; with Maddy I decided not to even set up the room.

One of the smarter moves I’ve made in my life.

In retrospect, I missed a lot of signs -- falling anvils, blinking red lights, screaming horns, black cats --  during Maddy’s pregnancy that perhaps were the universe’s way trying to tell me things would not end well.  A lot of bloggers talk about the “I knew I’d never really have my child with me” syndrome, but I guess I wasn’t that prescient, or I had my fingers in my ears, or had read enough mystery novels to blow a lot of it off as red herrings.  I kept waving my “perfect” amnio results around to bat away the bizarre plague of locusts.  But I kept my distance, and hindsight is 20/20 and all that:

There was the overwhelming amount of blood.  Which they repeatedly told me was not unheard of, and the baby was always fine, heart ticking away.  Which they told me in the post-mortem might’ve been my body trying to rid itself of the pregnancy and failing.

There were the little things that began going wrong in clusters, not just the echogenic bowel, but the car stalling out on New Year’s Day.  The washer/dryer collapsing around 35w.  The plumbers screwing up the installation of the new set.  The newly set deadline at my husband’s job, days before the due date.  Going to bed that week, praying for the baby not to come while her daddy was far away.   Going over my due date.  Going a week over my due date.  The sink was broken in my delivery room, and a plumber worked on it as I tried to sleep through the gaps of my induced contractions.

Not wanting to jinx anything, but letting it slip to a few people that this was absolutely my last pregnancy.  Never again.  I was never going through the stress and exhaustion again.  Period.  My husband always wanted three children, I always held up my hand and said “we’re stopping at two.  And I hold the trump card, dear.”

I didn’t want a shower (I didn’t with Bella either), but no one sent anything.  With Bella, a few people finally caved when things got close.  Not this time.  Maddy had nothing waiting for her on the other side.

Standing in my lush yard on a warm autumn day, examining my new forever-home, marveling at my lovely, gracious neighbors, and telling my husband I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.  And then placing my hand on my swollen tummy, and asking out loud, “what if the baby is the other shoe?”  He smiled and said nothing.

Never being able to look beyond the date of the baby’s birth.  That day to me was my goal, my dream.  Everything from that point would be all right.  I could finally put down the Doppler, and allow myself to accept the pregnancy as successful.  I never fantasized an older baby, a toddler, a child.  I dreamed only of getting the baby out of me so that I might better control things on the outside.  So I might spend two weeks, with my husband ensconced at home caring for my toddler, curled up with a newborn alternating between feeding and sleeping.   Sleeping.  I dreamed of rest for myself.  Peace in my head.  Relief.  Exhalation.  I never dreamed of the baby.

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I’m always so impressed?  bewildered?  slightly perturbed?  by women who tell others of the their pregnancies when the second line turns blue, create a registry after the first OB appointment at 10w, pick names after the big scan at 20w, hold showers at 26w, enroll in their Lamaze and breastfeeding classes at 30w, and then pre-order their announcements, stock their freezers, and paint and decorate their future baby’s room.  Frankly, if none of this had ever happened to me, I don’t think I’d be one of those people anyway, not my style.  But now I’m so thankful I’m not.  I’m constantly heartbroken when I read women’s stories of canceling their showers, wondering whether and how to return gifts, and perhaps most gut-wrenching of all, dismantling their child’s room.  If you had prepared like this and then were clocked upside the head, I’m so sorry.  I feel as if I had it easy, that somehow I knew, that somehow my mind was telling me to create some distance, just in case.  I had very little to deal with materially after my child died. 

I knew things could go wrong, just not how wrong.   And I missed a lot of signs.  I did dream of this baby, without acknowledging it.  I did pick names, even though I never dared speak them aloud.  (The one we most wanted adorns her death certificate.)  I did figure out which room in my house would be hers, even though I never moved furniture or lifted a paint brush.  (It’s now an office.)  I did, eventually, around 38w, run some clothes through the washer/dryer and buy some diapers.  (They are all, diapers unopened, in plastic blue bins in my basement.)  I think I did know something was wrong, something about the way things were going, that it couldn’t possibly turn out well, that eventually the testing and the scans and the blood draws would come home to roost.  It was fun and games, my entire life until that day, I just didn’t know it until the day had passed.

what's in a name

When well-intentioned people ask about the twins' names, I hestitate for a moment, then say, "I didn't give them names." Which is true, as far as it goes. But like most truths, it only goes so far.

As a child, I pored over books listing baby names and their meanings. First, it was to find names for my imaginary future children -- two boys and a girl, I decided -- whose names changed over the years from Alana to Aislinn to Augusta and from Bradley to Brennan to Bartholomew. Later, it was because I liked learning that Deborah meant bee and David meant beloved and Dennis paid homage to Dionysus, the god of wine. And still later, I justified my obsession as a kind of historical/sociological study, as I worked my way through the Social Security website, with its list of the names given to babies born in the US, arranged in order of popularity, for every year back to 1879.

In college, at the very end of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, I read and was haunted by the phrase: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. I had barely enough Latin to translate it as meaning something more or less like: all we have left of the rose is its name.

In other words, as Peter Abelard* said, long before I came to vaguely understand it, even after all the roses are gone, we can still say "there are no roses." The name persists even after the thing it names has vanished; we can speak of what is lost and of what never was. Remembrance lives longer than what it remembers.

But when the time came to give names to the twins, I finally saw the double-edged nature of Abelard's words. It was unendurable to contemplate that nothing more than their names would survive, that, for the rest of my life, I would hear the names over and over, and, each time, be reminded with a twisting pain that that was all I had left.

The first twin died before he was born, so, according to the laws of the state where I live, I didn't have to give him a name. The second twin, however, lived for four hours and because of those four hours, she had to have her own birth certificate and her own death certificate. The nurse in charge of providing such information to the bureau of statistics called me again and again as I lay in my hospital bed, doped up with magnesium sulfate and grief. Finally, tearful and exhausted, I told the nurse to just write down her own first name.

A few months later, I took the train to city hall and stood in line with smiling parents carrying babies or pushing strollers. After I finally convinced the dubious clerk that, yes, I needed a birth certificate and a death certificate, I got the official documents and walked out into the cold bright day.

I unfolded the papers, and, for the first time, I read my daughter's name. It was a name I would never have chosen, would never have even considered. It's a name that I never want to see or hear again. But it was the right name, the perfect name, the only possible name. And if you read this post carefully, paying close attention to the empty spaces between the words, you'll find that you already know what it is.

*The 12th centrury philosopher and logician, remembered mostly, if at all, for his affair with his student Héloïse and his subsequent castration by her uncle.

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where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
oh, where have you been, my darlin' young one?

- A hard rain's a-gonna fall
Bob Dylan

I used to daydream, in the dark early days, that i could see him in the faces of little boys i saw in stores, or playing in the park.  I'd never paid much attention to little boys, before...but suddenly the veil of my disinterest lifted and they seemed to be legion, be everywhere, all knees and ears and motion swirling on the periphery of my world.  Other people's boys.  They brought me up short, made me catch my breath with wonder and longing.  Would he have tilted his head like that, held his arms just so?  Would the dark fuzz of his baby hair have grown into cowlicks, like that one's?  Would he have had a husky laugh?  Would he have come running into my arms pell-mell like the little fellow who nearly knocked me off my feet one day at the mall, racing towards his mother, squealing?  Would he have liked my stories, my tune-challenged guitar-playing?  Would he have had a crooked smile?

Every boy I saw, I wondered, and I ached.  Too late, I had discovered the beauty of boyhood for the first time, and I could not tear my eyes away.

That was a long time ago.  It's rare now.  Occasionally, if I meet a boy of a certain age, or if I catch my younger son and his cousins with their heads bent over a sandbox or a train table, three boys together, the shadow of a dark-haired fourth looms before me, almost waving.  It's bittersweet, now, this presence in absence...it is the closest I get to the sense of him being with me.  But that shadow is still - and forever - painfully indistinct, compared to those could-have-beens, those other boys.  They are technicolour...and he?  He is only ashes. 

What I believe, I suppose, is that we will all be ash and dust someday.  That he has gone ahead, though quite possibly into nothing.  I do not believe in angels.  Am ambivalent about souls, hopeful but ultimately unsure.  Thus his potential nothingness, his erasure, is the hardest aspect of grief for me to reconcile.  He was my child.  I believe that he mattered, that he was someone, a boy all his own, even if the world never got to unwrap what he carried latent in that small self, that tiny body broken by birth.  I believe this, but I do not know how to believe the rest...the what he is now, the where he might be.  My unbelief wounds me.  I fear that I long for something that is utterly gone.  And I fear that he is not utterly gone but out there alone, somehow, needing his mother.  I fear that I am failing to mother him, and I fear that I am trying to mother something that is only a memory, not even a spectre.

And yet I knew him, though I will never lay eyes on the boy he might have become.  I knew him, knew the kick of his feet inside, the wild, soaring leap of him when I placed headphones on my belly.  I knew, when he was born, the shape of his brow as my own, his small feet as the twins of his father's.  And I knew from the fierce grip of his tiny hand on my finger, reflex though it well may have been, that he knew me, smelled me, sensed my presence.  If he is only shadow now, he was not, not then. 

All those other boys out there who wove in and out of my peripheral vision for so long, taunting me with what might have been, what I had lost...they have faded with time, become the shadows, blurred.  They were never mine, only other people's boys.  Whereas that little body that housed my son and the boy he might have been, ashes though it is, is burned on me brighter and deeper than all their myriad of laughing faces.

Wherever he may be, I hope he knows.