Tiny, Hard Little Heart

My uterus has shrunk back to its normal size, but I still feel soft in the middle, as if there is space there, pliant and vacant.  I have been seeing an acupuncturist for over a year now, first to support the pregnancy, then to help me get over the loss, and then again to support the second pregnancy, and then again, the loss.  This week I went because it hurts to take a deep breath.

For the last 10 days have I felt nothing, nothing at all after having lost the pregnancy. People can't believe how strong I am. I seem to be moving on.  I felt strangely fine and report this to my acupuncturist. Sitting in the quiet privacy of the treatment room I tell her the whole story of losing the baby.  I can hear my words enter the air and drop like stones onto sand. It's as if I am reporting facts about someone else. I watch her surprise, how it enters and involves her face, changes just slightly the way she is sitting so that she is leaning forward as if to hear more clearly, as if to comprehend better what I am telling her. Her shock and dismay are curious to me to me and I think, Wasn't this an inevitability? This hard fact? This quiet fate?

There is something about her sincerity that induces a softening, my insides feel like they are beginning to liquify, like I am filling up with water.  I can hear a thickening in my voice as I explain the events. "I can't feel my heart," I say finally. She stills herself almost imperceptibly and nods, leans back. She lets my talking wind down and then takes my pulse. "You're right," she said, "Your heart's pretty disconnected from the rest of your body."  She leaves the room and returns, moments later, with needles. She administers the needles into two points: one in the deep, tender part of my armpit, and the other three ribs down to the left of my heart just far enough so that I can feel the warm pulsation that means she has tapped into my chi, the life-giving force that flows like a matrix of rivers throughout the body. She follows the same procedure on the right side of my body and then leaves me to rest.

The moment the door closes, I begin sobbing.  The sobs came from some dark distant place in my body thundering into the quiet room. Somewhere in the building someone turns on a vacuum cleaner. My body shakes and convulses. Slowly, the sobbing subsides  so that, empty and ragged, I do rest.

When my acupuncturist returns quietly clicking open the door, I explain my wet cheeks, and bloodshot eyes. She nods, "The points we worked on today, connecting the heart and the spleen are often disconnected by shock." So this is not strength I guess. This is denial.

I leave the office feeling as if my joints have been disconnected from my body, like everything has been washed out of me. I don't feel better. In fact, I feel worse.

Days pass. Without the shock, I have only sadness to carry around and it is not elegant or beautiful. It doesn't look strong. It is not impressive. Truthfully I'd rather skip this hurting part because I have already done it once, not so long ago for another baby. I don't want to feel it all again, but I'm afraid I have no choice. I cannot skip the steps of grief and if I try I think that it may infect my life, slowing welling up, hindering my ability to feel other things, like pure joy, like contentment. So I have begun looking at my grief, feeling it, trying to take care of it tenderly as if my sadness were my baby and needed me. Hello sadness, I say to myself. Hello baby. I have even begun to imagine that I might hurt the sadness by denying it, and maybe then I would also be denying the life that was beginning inside of me. So I let the grief live with me for now, for as long as it lasts, hoping that in doing so, I am making room for whatever lies ahead.

Rainier Maria Rilke--10th Elegy

That someday,
at the close of this fierce vision
I may sing praise and jubilation to assenting angels!
That my heart's clear-striking hammers won't fail
to sound from landing on slack, doubtful or broken strings!
That my streaming face might make me more radiant
That my humble weeping might bloom.
Oh, nights that I weeped through, how much you will mean
to me then. Disconsolate sisters, why did I not kneel
more fervently, bending to receive you, and lose myself more
in your loosened hair? 
How we squander our sorrows,
gazing beyond them into the sad wastes of duration
to see if they have an end.
But they are our winter foliage,
our dark evergreens,
one of the seasons of our interior year,
-and not only season,
but place,
settlement,
lair,
soil,
home.

Coming Down

         The loss goes underground this time and is not a beautiful grief. I grieve the world; the violence in me, the imperfection, the the shuddering nonchalance, the contradiction, the war.  I do not feel close to this baby. I do not feel close to myself.  I long for what I once felt for another baby.


                                                                 Things noticed:
                                                                                  
At Micheal's soccer practice, little girl in a billowing yellow dress is climbing a steel post in a playground beside the school. She is maybe six years old. Her back is to me. The dress is a balloon, a parachute, a flower. She uses her bare feet to grip the post and hand over hand pulls herself to the top, fueled, it seems, by pure determination. She clamps her feet around the post for the last stretch and taps the top with her sunny little hand. She slides down and the dress billows around her muscular legs.  It begins to rain but she doesn't notice.
                                                                                   
I am walking home from the coffee shop. It is sunny and dry, an October so perfectly lit that the body forgets it's a human thing and wants to follow the geese south. I spy a squirrel who acts, as squirrels do, apprehensive at my approach, hop-climbing out of sight, and without really thinking about why, I pause and speak to it. "Aren't you a beauty? You are so pretty," I tell her, "so delicate and well-made." To my surprise she stops, and hop-climbs toward me, rounds the trunk so that I can take in her perfect profile gripping the base of the tree. She is suddenly curious and unafraid. I continue to compliment her and she stays still, twitching her head and her magnificent tail as if to show them off.  I think how observant her eyes are, how plush her tail. I think she is the size of my lost babies.  A bicyclist whizzes by and she is gone.
                                                                                           
I dream that there is a baby, my "Turner's Baby," but it's not real; it is a model shiny and plastic, not a living thing. "Oh," I say to the doctor, "but it's a boy."My husband takes my arm. "That's not our baby," he says.
"Are you sure?"I ask as he leads me away.
                                                                                             
I dream of rivers colored by tannin and carrying traces of cyanide.
I dream of totem poles, ancient and cracked being dipped into the rivers and coming out new.
There are babies everywhere and their faces are dirty.  They are crying for mom, for not-mom, for something to put in their mouths.
I wake up and my body craves a tiny body beside it. I can tell you, you who think that this is in my mind, that it is in my body more. My body craves the heat of the child it made, craves the fingers and toes. This is not something I ever knew to long for. This is the craving of my milk-engorged breasts, of my aching middle.
                                                                                             
And still the year rambles on with her births and her deaths, humming her common, melancholy refrain.

Rainier Maria Rilke

These lines from the poet keep running through my mind this month.


Now I am still
and plain,
no more words.

The Body’s Vanquished Possibility:

       

to discover pleasure,

    to utter sounds,

            

floats up and away like

            the Green Moths

            haunting my Mud

Hut, throbbing

softly under strobing lights.

It is true,

surgeons have no faces.

In the aftermath,

                                                      

I am a

a gutted fish

robbed of glut

            with swollen insides

            and a laborer’s breath.

          
            My fingers grub around for memory

            but the child is not here.

          

            Little pantomime,

spinning sufi

                        fetal emperor, unfolding your

            soft digits, fanning

                        the flumes of your almost-gone gills,

            

            I am your almost-mother.

            My eyes marble and flatten,

            Magnolia blossoms fall

            from my thighs.

Ellipses

The last time I was pregnant, it was like the baby was speaking to me. Last time my senses were heightened. I wanted bananas, cottage cheese, a pile of greens. I could smell fragrances like the odor given off by different weeds, some spicy, some sweet, even a smell I determined as "sticky". I was offended by certain scents, like morning breath, the first slinking odor wafting from the rubbish bin, and morning pee.  An odor could bring me to heaven or make me want to die on the spot; I could smell precisely what my husband had eaten and calculate the amount of time since consumption if we spoke from within three feet.

Not so this time.

For three months it was as if the child was mute to the world, and dumb to it too, but my middle enlarged, I was moodier and tired. That was my only sense that I was growing a baby.  This time I was not infused with a sense of my own living increasing exponentially, and I had no awareness, as I had before, of the deftness of my senses connecting me, and thus the baby, to everything.  Rather, I was concerned about the silence that I felt.

Maybe I was protecting myself. Maybe the pain of the first loss prepared me to wait for test results, to be realistic.  All of this is rational and likely.

But I was right in my concern.

At 13 weeks the ultrasound showed that the baby was packed in her own fluid, caught in a swelling sack of her own skin, alive, but unlikely to survive. The doctor suggested, half-pronounced "Turner's Syndrome." If this was the case, and it most likely was, the child was missing a chromosome, was an X without a Y or another X to complete it, carrying half of its sexual genetic code, but only half. Fetuses, he informed us, gently, kindly, with this syndrome, don't usually make it to birth. If they are born they are usually stillborn. If they are not stillborn, then they are cognitively and physically impaired, sometimes unable to speak, often suffering from heart defects and other abnormalities resulting from having just half of a sexual chromosomal code.  There is a spectrum, we were told, but with the severity of our case it was difficult to foresee a positive outcome for us or for the child.

If you look up Turner's Syndrome, the list of maladies is long.  I studied it, but I already knew.

I am out of the hospital now and already my waist has shrunk noticeably due to the amount of extra fluid that was around the baby.  My mind is quiet, but not mute.  I am not devastated, nor am I relieved.

It is the middle of the night and I am thinking of the silence of a child unable to speak, an X with no Y or X to complete it;  thinking of the three months of silence into which I listened and heard nothing discernible; I am haunted by unfinished sentences and halting grammar, sequences that are abbreviated, DNA strands with broken chords, a stranded chorus stripped of sound, lost tunes, afterthoughts, recollections that play at the periphery of the mind, half-formed.  I imagine half a child, a fetus packed in fluid: a floating clause, nonsequitar of a life, a living phrase ending in ellipses...

Your Baby

Micheal and I are driving to the grocery store listening to 107.5 f.m., the pop station that plays one song for every ten minutes of music. Though it makes me feel like an old woman to admit it, the vast majority of the songs aren't what I would call "catchy"--Where's the music? I often complain. I can't make out the lyrics either which reminds me of my own mother whose gripes against the Top 40 Countdown would be endured every Sunday as we drove to church.
          I agree with Micheal that at least Lady Gaga's songs are catchy. "Oh, turn it up," he reaches forward to do it himself. "This is my mom and Ryan's song." The August wind is rolling in through our open windows and Rosa Parks is almost clear of cars.  It's early in the morning, a day barely formed and Micheal and I are making up the day as we go.
          "What kind of music will your baby listen to?" Micheal asks. At just 11 weeks pregnant, I am barely beginning to show. I have gained 2 pounds, but this time around, my stomach began to bulge earlier and Micheal, with his astute observations doesn't miss a thing.  He's known for 2 weeks now.
          Yesterday he asked what food my baby will grow up eating, if like me, the baby would be mostly vegetarian, with occasional exceptions for meat, or if the baby would be like he and his dad, "omnivores".  I don't know, I'd replied, but whatever the baby grows up to be, I hope it eats a lot of vegetables.  At that Micheal had rolled his eyes and smiled as if to say, 'of course you do.'
           I consider his question for a moment. "Well, Where did you start listening to pop music?" Micheal shrugs, "School, my mom."
           "I'll tell you, the person who will probably have the greatest musical influence on any brother or sister of yours, is you."
           He considers for a moment the possibility, nods, looks out the window and smiles.
           "Then it's probably going to like Lady Gaga a lot."
           "I think you're right."
He turns up the next song and begins humming to it. "Do I know this one?" I ask, to which I get a smile and an eye roll.

Loss and it's Aggregate Forces

    Less than a month ago, when I told my aunt about my pregnancy, she looked at me, moved, and said it was a miracle. "Maybe so," I agreed, "but a common one." I regretted my response almost immediately.  In that moment, I forgot, briefly, the long ordeal of her efforts to get pregnant.
     For weeks, I thought of sending her a note, saying that she was right, common miracle though it is, conception to birth is a pretty miraculous process. Then, without warning, I lost the baby. Now I keep thinking of that statement. Of course she was right--to bring a child into the world is nothing short of miraculous.  Pregnancy is a beautiful crap-shoot.
      My response to my aunt caused me to wonder why I had been so hesitant to celebrate, openly, my joy about this pregnancy. Why, when people congratulated me, did I feel resistant to accepting the warm sentiment? When asked if I was excited I said, instead, that I was happy.
      I was shy to say to anyone that suddenly, in spite of years of saying I would never have children, that I wanted this child.  I imagined that I could protect my desire if I didn't speak too loudly about it. Privately, I was pulled, drawn, as if following a strong current of longing toward the possibility of motherhood.
      Losing the baby was something I knew was possible, I just doubted the likelihood of miscarriage given my steady and growing certainty that this child had chosen me--planted itself firmly inside of me. I imagined she knew me already.
     On a Thursday, two days shy of week 17, I went in for an ultrasound and saw for myself, once again, that she was perfect, her little heart thumped along steadily; she seemed gifted at living. Before dawn on Friday, I woke to a sudden flood. My sheets were soaked. My water had broken. The baby, though still alive, could not live.
     I was given an ugly choice.  I could wait for her to die and be expelled from my body. I could induce labor and birth this child with her soft, filmy, unformed lungs, and watch her die, or I could have her body scraped out of me by way of dilation and extraction.
    As the nurse outlined the bleak options for my growing child, the bright white of the room pulsed. The air was sucked out of the space, fluid continued to soak the waxy paper beneath me.  Recognizing my lack of comprehension the nurse said, "I'm sorry, there are no good options here. This is only tragic. I am so sorry."    
     It happened quickly--a future born and eclipsed.  Two weeks pass; each day shedding the skin of the previous until my body begins returning to its pre-pregnancy state.  I prepare to go back to work. I am left with the the new knowledge that miscarriage is common--as common as 1 in 4 pregnancies. The stories of these losses are spoken softly among women and nearly everyone has a story, a sister or a mother, a grandmother, or a friend.
      To be among the living requires a kamikaze spirit, a do or die willingness to muck through the thick stew of beauty and agony.  I haven't always been sure that it was the thing for me.  Like so much phenomena, the white heat of stars, the synchronized flight of starlings, pregnancy is common as well as miraculous--cells joining, hemispheres separating, fingers flexing, the first movement, the growth of fine hairs, the opening of eyes. And perhaps miscarriage then, is part of life's natural revisioning process, possibility arisen and quelled, reminding us of the constant expansion and contraction of everything of which we are a part, every day, on and on defining for us, on some level, the notion of the Miraculous.

Love's Simple Hierarchy

Two years ago, summer :

Micheal and I are outside drawing an illustrative story. He is seven years old.  He likes to narrate the story and suggest things for me to draw.  I am stretched out in the sun, laying in the grass with a piece of smooth plywood beneath the scroll of paper. There are colored pens scattered in the grass.  Micheal has climbed on top of me, like a cat or a cub, and is stretched out the length of my body, his feet just past my knees and his head over my shoulder watching as I work away at fulfilling his directions, elbows on the plywood, squinting in the bright June light. We are just two months from the date of my wedding to his dad.
        "How old are you?" he asks me.  "Thirty-two," I tell him. "No you're not," he insists, knowing full well my age and that my answer is truthful. "You're older than my mom." Still drawing, I tell him that his mom is thirty-six. "Nope," he insists. His toes curl into the backs of my knees, flex and stretch out again. "No," he says again, firmly, head hooked over my right shoulder, our shadows making us a two-headed monster. "You are older because I want you to die first, then Ryan (his mother's boyfriend), then my dad and THEN my mom."
         It strikes me as funny, because I can't remember anyone ever telling me they want me to die. I smile but squint even harder at the bright spots the sun is making on the paper in order not to laugh.  So this is step-parenting, I think, death wishes as a pronouncement of inclusion into the tribe.
          "That makes sense," I pause, "to want your parents around you for the longest and no matter what."
          Satisfied, he sighs, having told me something of the terms of  his love.

What the Japanese Know

Someone told me that in Japan there are gardens, little sanctuaries dedicated to lost babies. I want to find one. I like the idea of a place where Magnolias bloom in late winter casting shadows over magnificently raked gravel, where water pools and moss softens the edges of white stone. I like to picture delicate plum blossoms, a symbol for courage to the Japanese, fondly testing the morning air, bravely offering their petals year after year to the new season.

For women like me, there are no such gardens that I know of.  No place to visit the memory of an almost-person, a baby that is more cloud-shape than human, to whisper to a never-born child, sing to it, look for it.

Portland winters are sometimes grey as a tarpauline, the city covered over by cloud; we live in a house of mist for months. This is hard for me, and harder still this year. After Christmas, when my family left for their homes in southern Oregon, Der and I left too. Someone had suggested we go to Hawaii to escape sadness of losing a baby, many even offered to help us "get away." But there were financial matters to think of; there was work to be done. So we took our memory of the baby into the field of gray. We drove through the still, ashen-colored buildings of Portland, the rain-sodden trees, out past St. John's bridge, the Linton Feed store, Sauvie Island, farther and farther until the landscape was unknown to me, until the damp world slid by in a monochrome wash.

Our destination was Astoria, and the Cannery Hotel. We spent three days looking at the bridges, watching the tide shudder and swell, the birds become indistinct from the waves and then burst forth flying. On the last day we drove over a bridge spanning the wide Columbia. The sky was rubbed charcoal, with flirtations of blue streaking through. We drove out to Cape Disappointment, the false end to the journey of the Lewis and Clarke expedition, and did not even discuss the irony of the name.

We reached the terrifying mouth of the river and the dark stones that protect the slim shore from its massive force.  We climbed out of our car and over the cold basalt slabs, stood on the slick boulders that compose the levy and were made mute by the pounding waves and the raking wind. Our jackets flapped and billowed; my eyes teared. Bits of rain needled my face. My hair tore around my head reckless and electric.  The water sucked and roiled with such great, thundering force that I could feel the raging pulse of it rising up in the dark slots of my bones.  I could hear the rocks as if they were moving or echoing or rolling.  It was a sound the color of basalt, an impassive gray, a simple mineral cry.

We stood there for no more than five minutes looking at the wild, thrashing water. Our instinct to retreat was too strong. Without a word, we climbed, slipping, back over the dark, hulking boulders, crossed the dun-colored sand threaded with sedges, back to the safety of our car. It was no Japanese garden, but it was something--the shuddering pulse of the harsh, cold mouth of the Columbia, the battered landscape twisting and shoveling unthinkable tons of water, not thoughtful, just massive heaving and thundering with a terrifying, awful momentum. It gripped me, that force, challenged my specialness, delivered me to myself.

In the car, blood started to return to my face and hands, to my ears. The blueing sky dilated and showed through briefly.  The trees stood still, unmoved, cantankerous and grey, protected from the wind and waves by the height of the levy. Der kissed my hand with his cold lips and we left without ceremony.

The Memory of a Peach

Think of peaches
Think of nectarines.
Winter's bare branches are a stiff denial, but fruit--
think of that dream color,
a happy detour
into the possible, how now
the summer seems improbable
and geese
are always heading North.
Buildings in the city ruminate
and decay while
the memory
of summer haunts and tempts,
toys with the imagination
like a dream.

Boats in Water

The longer I live, the more alive I feel, partly because of what is gained, but mostly because of what is lost. Every time I lose something, a new layer of the human experience is revealed to me, a new layer if myself. I've learned that nothing is tidy and I've come to think of life as a sweet and awful mess, a gorgeous, horrifying mess, in which survival means, at the very least, endurance, at most, epiphany, maybe revelation, perhaps even beauty.

I don't know whether children are born with joy, pure and unbroken, then are set to sea, and if life is a series of storms that batter each human boat until it forgets its native shore, loses all sense of direction and must set course for some entirely new destination, or if we are lost to begin with and encounter myriad opportunities to restore our commitment, to refine our internal compass, to see ourselves made and remade by events that my either capsize us or bring us, in the end, safely home.

At 35-years-old I find, to my shock and amusement, that I am fine. It's strange to accept the simple fact that a single, unalterable loss does not capsize me.

Pen Pals

"My pen pal asked me how far along you are."

Micheal scribbles on a sheet of paper at the dining room table. His thick hair obscures his eyes but I can see his lips pressed into a thin line, concentrating.
"Was that hard?" I ask him.
He shrugs and shakes his head, no.
"Her mom is 14 weeks."
The space between us elongates. I look at him as if down a corridor as it stretches into a tunnel and warps.
I don't say anything for a moment.
"I think we'll try again," I say to him, to myself, to the space between us.
"Like when? You'd better do it soon. Don't ladies stop being able to have babies when they're like 50?"
"Maybe tomorrow. Maybe we'll start trying tomorrow."
He looks at me then, rests his pen, smiles finally.
"That'd be good. Almost everyone I know has a brother or a sister."