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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
After nine months of pregnancy, it took only seconds for my world to collapse, a few seconds for the doctor to say, "I'm sorry. There doesn't seem to be a heartbeat."
Mar 20, 2002 | The sneaker salesman asks me about my exercise preferences -- aerobics? running? -- and I'm halfway through a detailed history of step classes and speed walking before I realize how ridiculous the regimen must sound considering the heft I'm carrying around. I want to explain that my excess flab is the product of recent childbirth, but stop myself midsentence.
I can't tell the sneaker salesman that I'm shaping up postpartum because, unlike most new mothers, I don't have a baby. One day after my son was due, his umbilical cord became entangled around his neck. He died, still snug in my womb, before he could be born.
It's just not a thing you toss into casual conversation. Yet, this self-imposed, socially correct silence is painful to maintain. I attend showers and cocktail parties, where women I've never met are talking about their pregnancies and their kids. I don't want to impose the burden of my personal tragedy on strangers, but I also don't want to have to stand in these circles denying who I am.
I craved oranges and had burning pelvic pain, too. My epidural also didn't take on the first try. But, of course, the natural progression of such remarks -- Congratulations! Did you have a boy or girl? What's his name? How old is he? -- makes such contributions impossible. So I stay quiet. And with each incident of forced, unnatural muteness, of pretending I did not have a baby, I lose my son all over again.
You don't realize how many strangers you chatter with each day until you must guard each word to avoid mentioning the most significant event of your life. You do not appreciate how many acquaintances you can go a year or more without contacting until the specter of a chance encounter turns routine functions like grocery shopping or visiting the local pub into perilous exercises of anxiety and avoidance. You cannot know how important your physical appearance is to you until you cannot provide every person you meet with the excuse of pregnancy for your fat.
My husband refuses to be robbed of the heartbreaking pride he still takes in having sired a child. I watch him tell old friends and associates. I watch his face contort with the effort of reconciling stubborn traces of joy with the awkwardness and discomfort that comes from sharing this information. But my husband keeps himself in a pretty tight orbit of friends, family and colleagues. If my world is to extend beyond the safe cocoon of people who know what happened -- and for me, it must -- I have to be prepared to suppress the most distinct part of who I am.
A full-term stillbirth is not the worst-case scenario in pregnancy; it is the unfathomable. You skip that chapter in the pregnancy book, not so much because the idea is too awful to consider but because it is too improbable, too horrible -- you think -- to actually happen. When it does happen, you learn that the unimaginable does indeed happen, that there is no reason to really believe that it can't or won't. The basic human inclination to hope for the best -- in times of eager promise or fearful anxiousness -- is not only exposed as a sham, it is also no longer available to you. You become proof of the foolishness and naiveté of such faith.
