writing: empty

I've been doing some writing in my spare time, just for fun, so I thought I'd start posting some of what I've written occasionally.

Here is piece #1: Empty

Empty

Few events in a girl’s life are as devastating as having a miscarriage. I earned this scout’s badge at the age of 24, after having been in my first marriage for less than two years.

The death of a friend in our circle, who was only 26 when he passed away, had left several of us feeling as though time was short. My then-husband and I, along with our closest couple friends, decided that since we’d been married for over a year, and clearly the years were passing without our control over what was to come, we should start a family sooner rather than later. Strangely, the other girl and I found out that we were pregnant on the same day, and rejoiced in the news, driving from family house to family house to share the announcement.

A long and annoying and immature series of events would lead to the demise of our friendship, that other girl’s and mine, and my marriage, which had been on some sharp rocks before the pregnancy was discovered, continued on gossamer threads… We were happy about the idea of a baby, as expected. I was living in denial about the state of affairs. Only about two weeks before the test came back positive, I had asked my husband for a separation, and he had begged for me to stay, with our final decision being that we would “keep trying” to make things better. While I lived in defiance of what I was feeling in regards to our relationship, my husband seemed to agonize over everything, trying to convince himself (as I tried to convince him) that perhaps my ambivalence toward our marriage was the result of early pregnancy hormones or mood swings. I don’t think either of us bought into it, but what could we do… a baby was on the way, regardless of our situation.

We quickly got caught up in the excitement of it, despite my immediate and hardcore 24/7 nausea. We talked about names, I spent lots of time on baby-centered shopping websites choosing nursery themes, and I lamented not having gotten my teaching license when I finished my English degree, since then I could have had more time off with the baby later.

One Friday morning in May, the morning of a regularly scheduled obstetrician appointment, the phone woke me before my alarm clock went off. My mom was on the other line, letting me know that my godmother had died. This had been expected, so it wasn’t a great surprise. I called the office and left a message on the voicemail for my coworkers at the real estate appraisal firm where I worked: I had taken off the morning for my doctor’s appointment, but now I would be out for the entire day to be with family after this news.

My husband and I got dressed with muted excitement. This was the “heartbeat” appointment, when the doctor would use the tiny microphone for us to hear the baby’s heart for the first time. We would drive separately, as he would return to work after the appointment, and I would head to be with my mother.

We arrived to the doctor’s office in Baton Rouge early and didn’t have to wait long before we were called in. The standard checks were made—blood pressure, temperature—before the obstetrician came in with his magical heartbeat machine.

I lay back on the table and pulled up my shirt, revealing my still basically flat stomach. The doctor pressed the small microphone against my abdomen, and we heard a faint heartbeat. We were excited, but he let us know that that was just my heartbeat, that the baby’s would be louder and quicker. He moved the microphone from place to place, but nothing distinct could be heard. We started becoming a little nervous, but the doctor assured us that there was nothing to worry about if he couldn’t find the heartbeat; perhaps they’d simply made a mistake on estimating the due date of the baby. He let us into a separate room, where the sonographer would give us an ultrasound to determine the actual due date.

The sonographer came in, friendly and subdued. As she started the easy procedure, she talked to us about what she was seeing—the ovary on the left, the one on the right, the uterus. As she marked and stopped film on spot after spot, she stopped talking slowly, making notes in her chart.

The longer time passed without comment, the more nervous I became. My body began to shake. Surely nothing was wrong, right? Both of my sisters had gotten pregnant as teenagers by accident, and had delivered without major problem. My mother had had four children with little planning. I had waited until I finished college and was married, so clearly this was my turn, and it would be perfect, right? The sonographer’s requests for me to calm down were futile; I couldn’t exactly stop my body from quaking at this point.

After what seemed like an unnecessarily long period of time, the sonographer began to explain. “Here’s what I see,” she said. She identified the uterus, the amniotic sac, and a mass of “tissue”. Apparently, I had been pregnant, but the baby was already beginning to “break up,” a term that I don’t think can be reframed in any way to be more easily received.

As we waited, wordless, after the news, the sonographer left the room to retrieve my obstetrician. He came in shortly to tell us, in certain terms, what was happening and what our options were. We could wait until my body “spontaneously aborted” the baby, which could be any time between that moment and weeks from then. Or we could schedule a D&C, where they remove the “tissue” as early as possible. I opted immediately for the D&C, just wanting the entire nightmare to be over.

We left the doctor’s office, and I tried to hold it together as I drove my car alone back toward my house. On the way, my best friend Jenny called my cell phone to hear the “good news” after my appointment. I pulled the car over to tell her, my voice collapsing only a few words into the news. Why was this happening? Was this my fault? I had taken some prescription medicine for the unendurable nausea; had that caused this? Had the stress I’d been through with the fight with my former friend, also pregnant, caused this? There were no answers. The doctor could tell us nothing.

That afternoon, as I sat at home chain-smoking now that my reason not to smoke was gone, I started a cruel fence-straddling time, moving between, sometimes simultaneously experiencing, anger and emotional wreckage. My mother-in-law came over, clearly not knowing what to say any more than I would know what to say in a similar situation. I’ve never been good at dealing with friends in sadness, and I have a great tolerance for others who have the same affliction. I couldn’t eat. I could talk about it, but it just wouldn’t sink in. And I was in disbelief. Was I ever pregnant at all, despite what the doctor said? And was this a punishment from God? I had just completed RCIA, converting to Catholicism officially in order to attempt to fit in better with my in-laws, with whom I always felt at odds… perhaps this was my punishment for doing that in the same time frame as trying to split from my husband?

In retrospect, it sounds cruel, but I guess at the time I understood why my husband decided we should keep our plans for that night. We had casino hotel reservations at a town not too far away and tickets to go to a concert at the casino that night with his family for a band that he liked. His reasoning was that he didn’t want to be at home with the phone ringing off the hook, our having to explain every ten minutes what had happened, having to talk about it. I was just moving in a daze, not really thinking about anything, caught up in the air above my head.

We rode silently toward the hotel, arriving as planned and checking into our room quietly. When it was time to leave the room for dinner and the concert, though, I couldn’t face it. I talked my way out of the social events, which at the time made me feel a little guilty but now makes me angry at the idea that I’d be expected to do otherwise. I sat in the dark, without the benefit of the television, sat in a chair in front of the window, the heavy hotel windows open, chain-smoking and unable to think at all. Odd that, when my life has consisted of almost non-stop mind-racing, at the time when I am experiencing possibly the most meaningful and horrible moment, I am unable to think of anything other than the lit cigarette in my hand, and the coldness of the air conditioner clicking on and off, and the lights of the Louisiana city flickering below me. I don’t remember sleeping that night, but I know I did, as I awoke early, eager to get moving and drive to my parents’ house, to be among my family.

My mother was the only one who seemed to feel the loss as I was feeling it. I knew this without seeing her, without hearing it, wanting to lie in her bed with her and just sob until I couldn’t release anything else. She did what she could, what she always does, spent time in the kitchen, making my favorite dish of crawfish etouffee. She’d even bought me a pet fish, a poor but thoughtful substitute for the loss I was in the process of feeling.

Because of my doctor’s apparent ineptitude when it came to dealing with women in my situation, I had to wait the entire weekend before the D&C would be performed. I spent my days and nights lying around, completely numb, on the edge of a break, feeling as though I was lying with a dead baby. My arms, which had never held the baby, suddenly felt inexplicably empty. How could that be? And why were the pregnant girls around me so lucky, and why was I so unlucky? How could I ever be around them again?

On Monday morning, I was prohibited from eating or drinking anything, as my procedure was scheduled for 6 pm. I attended my godmother’s funeral, feeling numb and distraught at the same time, if that makes sense. I went to the post-funeral visitation period at my aunt’s house, answering the questions as they were asked, counting down the hours, worrying about the surgery, my first time going under anesthesia.

We arrived at the hospital. I was admitted and hooked up to the IV and told to wait until they were ready. My mother-in-law stood at my feet, my mother and other family members around, as I cried quietly, lying on my back. When they came to roll me out, I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop the crying. I lay on the bed in the operating room, silent, as the nurses went about their business, making their daily jokes and comments, their job being just regular routine, as I was dying on the table. The tears rolled down my cheeks as they put the mask on my face, and I counted down all the way to one before I blacked out.

When I came to, I was in the recovery room, and surprised the nurse. Apparently, they were under the impression I’d be knocked out for a while, as they’d just gone into the waiting room to tell my family that it would be a few more hours. The rest of the night is fairly vague. I know I wore a pair of my father’s old pajamas, which I still own, and that I was sore and had to be helped into my husband’s truck. I slept well that night, for the first time since I’d heard the absence of the heartbeat.

Looking back on it, I am fairly certain that I had an emotional breakdown. I went for more than a week with an inability to be alone, to drive alone for more than a few minutes. I went longer hallucinating baby cries and feeling rage when I saw a woman with a baby, when my arms were empty. I was unable to attend baby showers for my sister or my cousin, who were expecting babies that same summer. I quit my job and returned to school, determined that, were I to become a mother one day, I would not regret not having the time off, as I had when I was pregnant with Casey, the name I’d chosen for my first baby, when I was told there was no way to ascertain gender at that point in the pregnancy.

As time went on, I got on with my life. It was a life-changing experience, and I was never the same. It changes who you are to feel a loss so internal yet so dramatic and excruciating. A loss that feels sort of stupid, since there wasn’t anything there to lose, really, but one I felt more of than when my grandmother or aunt died. I was able to come to terms with the idea of having a baby again later. I was able to talk about it without crying, to appreciate my sister’s baby that much more.

But still, on August 16, the due date for Casey, I remember the baby. I remember the feeling more than anything, the feeling of alienation and emptiness. I remember crying as though I’d just lost the baby again when the fish my mom had bought me died. I remember my second miscarriage, how it was easier than the first, but brought back all the misery of the first. I remember when my marriage finally ended, and hearing everyone say that the miscarriages were really “blessings”, and agreeing but also feeling guilty because of it. And I look at the faces of my two sons sometimes and feel sad for them, knowing that their half-sibling isn’t here, that they weren’t the first, and they’ll never really know what that means.