My son did not look dead. He was pink and round and perfectly formed and appeared only to be deep in a peaceful baby slumber. His eyes were closed, but there was an expression on his face, a thoughtful one, as if he had spent some time pondering his future, planning his entry into the world. The secret of who he would have been was permanently trapped inside him, but its presence was unmistakable. Personality, humor, intelligence, talent -- potential my son would never have the chance to realize, potential from which the world would never benefit.

I see his face every minute of every day, and when I see it -- when he was born, and now, in my memory -- I think of what happened as some sort of payback, a restitution for past sins or transgressions. Yet I have no sense of any cosmic debt being paid, of karmic accounts being settled. Instead, my little baby hovers above me like an angel of foreboding, a warning to heed the message of his death. I cannot figure out what that message is, what lesson I was supposed to learn, and the fear that these lessons will keep coming until I decipher the meaning of my son's death is paralyzing.

I had been very proud, almost cocky, about the speed with which I had conceived and the ease with which I carried this baby. For so many of my closest friends and relatives, procreation had become an exhausting medical process resulting from infertility and miscarriage. My pregnancy was romantic, natural. My son was going to squeeze into the world two months before my 34th birthday, six weeks before my first wedding anniversary. I had beat my biological clock and breezed through 40 weeks of tests and examinations without a complication or concern.

Pregnancy, for me, was a process in which I cast off my old self, with its mundane inadequacies and failings, and regenerated a spectacular new me in its place, a me empowered with awesome, preternatural capabilities. By the end of my pregnancy, I could not remember or imagine the reliable efficiency and functionality of my pre-pregnancy body. I could not recall an intellect that could be engaged by any subject other than the baby I was carrying. I spent the last six weeks of my pregnancy in severe, immobilizing discomfort, but that only seemed to reinforce the importance and seriousness -- the privilege -- of the condition. I could not imagine a life that was not defined by this experience.

Instead I am distinguished by a grotesque mutation of the experience. What was to be my ultimate triumph is now my most abject failure. The onset of labor did not send me to the hospital; the eerie stillness of my child, the absence of his familiar squirms and kicks, did. A team of nurses and doctors frowned at the screen of a sonogram scanner with mounting dread and alarm, and some essence of myself, something innocent and optimistic, drained away. Whatever my pregnancy had been or meant, whatever memories or expectations it had brought into our lives, collapsed into a mangled pile of useless rubble in the few seconds it took for an obstetrical resident to look up from the sonogram screen and say, "I'm sorry. There doesn't seem to be a heartbeat."

Whether a woman believes motherhood to be her most significant experience, or mothering to be her most important role, she is redefined, her identity permanently altered, once she gives birth. I am stranded in a lonely purgatory between the worlds of motherhood and childlessness. I carried my baby inside me for nine months and pushed him into the world. I know the surge of all-consuming love and pride that rushes into every cell of a person's body the instant her child is placed in her arms. But I never fed my son or changed his diaper. I never heard him cry or saw him smile. I have not had to adjust to the stress and exhaustion of this awesome new responsibility.

Everyone I know is having babies and I imagine I can hear the cliquish scorn of the other mothers I thought I'd be joining: "You're not really one of us. What ever made you think you could be?" I had been the dutiful and faithful pledge of this elite sorority, but ultimately I was only permitted to push my nose against the glass. I've had a child but I don't have my child. I fit in nowhere.

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