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.