I was completely unready for another pregnancy when I had that first miscarriage, so I had moments of feeling relieved that it ended, which further complicated my feelings that it was my fault and that I had somehow caused the miscarriage by being so stressed out about it. I want anyone reading this to know that those thoughts are completely untrue and self-sabotaging. We do not cause our miscarriages. They are not our fault.
Sometimes women choose to end pregnancies intentionally, for a number of reasons. Through my pregnancy with Wolfgang, I thought a number of times that I would have to consider termination because the doctors thought there would be severe genetic abnormalities. These kinds of choices are also an extremely painful, and judgment should be suspended.
12.20.17
Maybe I didn't want to know the date.
It hurts.
How can I ever believe it wasn't my fault?
Torn-edged tissue left my voided body, fell red in the bottom of the tub, and that hole will always be there. Who knows if there have been other smaller voids I never knew about, never will.
I wish I'd never known. Even in not wanting it, I wanted it.
I have to rethink my life. I need presentness and calm.
I scooped its body out of the toilet where it fell. By Grace did I not just let it go, flush it away. I needed to know, because the sound was wrong. The sound of what left my body hitting the water was wrong.
Ambrose was there for me. He followed me into the kitchen because he saw I was crying when I reached for my phone. He wouldn't leave my side. He held me, a pillar of calm. I saw something I didn't exactly quite know was in him.
It has rained the last two days.
When I scooped up what fell in the toilet, it looked just like the pictures I had seen on a pregnancy website earlier in the day, but real and perfect. Hands and feet reaching forward. Oversized head, dark eye spots. Tail gone. A proper fetus. Such early, small stages of becoming. Its heart was beating sixty hours ago. I heard it.
I buried it under the cherry tree out front, and I placed it near the roots, and it will be in the blossoms in the spring, still in perfect pink. It has always been with me, in part, since before my own birth.
I couldn't lift my hand from the wet dirt. I kissed the earth and pressed my hand to the raw place and couldn't lift my hand away, because that would mean I accepted that it was over and that all I was leaving out in the rain in the cold earth was tissue, not a person out there alone in the cold earth by the tree roots in the rain all night, wouldn't leave a child out there alone. But I told my brain, told and told it, that holding it in my palms would not make it live. I couldn't bring it back, couldn't save it. Not by scooping it out of the toilet or putting it in a cup inside a paper bag, not by carrying it around with me or by clutching it to my belly. No warmth or love or milk or words or medicine would make it be.
There are four of us, as there have been. We walk together. It is good.
You have no name. I will never forget your name or what you looked like, my tiny pinkness.
All of parenthood is learning to let go of your children because they do not belong to you, but usually you have the rest of your life to do it. You don't have to do it all at once. You get to know them first.
It hurts.
I spent most of today with my babies, and that was perfect. So. Watched them play together. Fed them, took them to the grocery store. Held them. So.
I got to hear its heart twice. Many women miscarry without experiencing that. I am blessed among women.
Maybe some of its cells are in me.
3.20.18
20 December, 20 March. 24 July, 24 October. When we don't know how to place emotions, we start lending significance to numbers. But I can't quantify the hiss of silence on the monitor, the terrible static silence, death silence. Another baby lost. Another ending before a story could even begin.
I had Brian meet me at the doctor. I was out standing in the mist of rain by the time he arrived. I didn't want us to be in that place together, the place that held the death silence. In the rain we held each other and I found strength in propping him up in return.
23 March 2018
I don't even want to feel better, because healing means drawing away from my place of closeness, this place where I somehow believe this isn't happening. Healing means accepting the loss. I don't think I've accepted. I'm still kneeling on the ground with my hand over that place in the earth, in the rain. I'm not even sure that the fetal tissue has come out. It must have, but I can't be sure because I haven't seen it. I still cramp and bleed, so something must still be there.
A deep pull of nameless longing becomes me. I want to be anywhere but here, outside my body and its confusion of suffering. As blood gathers and sloughs away, I want something more taken with it. I want to bear out my sorrow but it . . . you can't. There's not a way to do that. It leaves in its own time, perhaps? I wish to purge it, not to feel it. Maybe I'm just tired. I am tired.
"Stormy Pinkness"
by They Might Be Giants
Stormy pinkness
human weakness
fills my Johnny cup with gloom
Your progression,
my digression.
40 days this afternoon.
The things we cherish
are small indeed
So much larger the need
Stormy pinkness
Set me thanklessly free.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHQVOBCrzZc
No comments:
Post a Comment