On The Ordinary Instant

trigger warning: miscarriage

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What I can tell you is that I am doing alright, now. That a week can feel like a lifetime. That it is possible and easier than I imagined to crawl hand over fist out of it. That if you get granular and look at the way your son’s hair curls at the ends, and pack peanut butter sandwiches, and walk down to the lake at 4, and sleep in, and play the tambourine, and make pasta, that eventually the hurt quickly becomes a fact, and just another seam in your life. Perhaps I am rushing myself to feel alright, but I don’t know another way. My nature is to dwell dramatically on pieces of my life, but when it comes to the truly traumatic or life-altering ones, I rush through them and try not to remember what was hanging on the walls. I cope by going forward. Is there a better way to do this? I am sure. But I don’t know how.

What I can tell you is that I feel like I should have known the baby was dead for two weeks before I actually found out. Should is a slippery word in this space. How many ways we can think of what we should or could have done. I try not to play that game. But I do know there were moments, signs, a small knowing that I told myself was morbid, floating in the back of my head as I laid out in the Italian sun for weeks. I felt, too good. I felt, thin. I felt, wonderful. Oddly wonderful for being ten weeks pregnant. Then, the spots of blood. Then they stopped. Everything was normal. Too normal. Then there was that one time I looked up at those two stars, and my mind thought for me, a thought I didn’t make but just had that said, if you have to go, then go, but please come back.

I read something on Instagram that said you were pregnant even when your baby was dead. And I thought, I don’t know if I feel like that. For ten weeks I believed one thing, but that doesn’t mean it was true. What do you do with something like this? Chalk it up to the things that suck in life for no reason other than life is hard, and sometimes it’s not at all what you imagine or plan for. Set it on the shelf next to the ten pounds I gained for no reason. Or the maternity bike shorts I bought. Or the little dress from Mexico. What do you do with all the things that are not? This is just my experience. This is not meant to help anyone else this time. Sometimes, recording things helps me make sense of them, or at the very least, another way to move forward.

When the doctor told me. I had to have her repeat it several times. Part of my brain had been preoccupied with business taxes and whether they’d been filed correctly. I’d just gotten a haircut. I was making enchiladas for dinner. Didion said it, “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” First, I called my mother. Then I called my husband. Telling him was possibly the worst part, to hear that break in his voice. And although I knew logically and emotionally and truly that it was not my fault, I also couldn’t help but feel that I had brought this hurt to him. And if I could have kept it all to myself, I would have. He’s too good; I didn’t want to share this one. But that’s not how this story goes. And thank god that is not how it goes. Because for the next part, he had to, once again, carry our whole family through while I fell apart. Maybe it’s not something we say enough; thank you.

I get pragmatic. What is the quickest route from this shit-hole situation to the other side? I go in the next day for a procedure. I like the idea of it better than my other shit-hole options. They put me under a drugged, dreamless sleep, and on the other side, it’s done. The choice in this, I think, says a lot about me. Some women, other women, would probably let their body naturally do what it does. Give themselves an entire runway of grief. I am not that kind of woman. The hospital is strange as they always are and sterile and impersonal, and I cry in front of two orderlies as they guide me around for blood work and pre-op details. One of them puts my tank top and underwear and sweatpants in a plastic bag for later like I’m being released from prison. In the waiting room, there is a woman on TV making grilled cheese sandwiches in an air fryer, and I hang desperately to these details; the glow orange of the melted cheese, the crunch of the bread as she cuts it in two, the simplistic nature of the whole thing, the regularness of it is so out of place that I need to live inside this grilled cheese tutorial because it is so other than what I am having. I take off my jewlery. The anesthesiologist tells me a joke I cannot remember about Sweeden and then everything blurs together into a warm druglike dream.

The next few days are a blur of numb necessity, and it is only now, one week later, that I can string words together into sentences; my mind finally cleared from the drugs. We packed our things and headed to our cabin in the woods to spend the summer in the kind of rhythm only this place can give you, and I have never been so grateful for this little slice of earth as I am right now. The lake is clear and so cold it hurts the bones in my feet. My son paints and watches Frozen, and I struggle to complete simple tasks, but that’s ok because I keep things very simple. I get granular. I buy a lot of white peaches and leave them to ripen on the orange countertop. I remember when we bought this house, and we were young, and it was just us, and the idea of having a family and everything that would come with it was just that, an idea.

I don’t know what happens next.