Once

The Musical Education of Squiggle

By the end of next week, the Squiggle—at only 12 weeks old—will have officially been to more concerts than I did in my entire first 18 years of life. When Stryper, Huey Lewis, Cyndi Lauper, and the Bangles (the last two my crowning concert-going achievements;  who could resist the famous “Everybody Bops” tour?) are some of the only bands to venture out into the heartland in your formative teen years, you don’t have much choice. 

But now that I’m living in civilization, we’ve recently heard, together, the Golden Smog, then Wilco, and next are headed to see Madeleine Peyroux later this week.

When I tell my brother about the concert tally, he smiles and says, “Well, that’s because Squiggle is already cooler than you are.”

He’s right. I know it. I can live with that.

And so I think Squiggle would want me to share the wealth (and coolness, no real thanks to mom here)—listen to a recording of Wilco, live, here.

Superstitions, Good Luck Charms, and the Can Can

After two pregnancy losses there are several things I will not do. I will not eat eggs on the morning of an ultrasound. When I cracked an egg one morning and the yolk spilled out already broken, and then within a few hours the doctor told me that my own, human egg hadn’t developed properly, that the sac was empty—well, that was quite enough of a bad metaphor to match my bad luck for one day.

I avoid any food mixed with acia berries, for though they are supposedly rich in antioxidants and are packaged as benefiting the rainforest they are picked from, they are also the food I ate minutes before my bleeding started on my first loss. Concerned afterwards about the red raspberry leaf—either a uterine tonic or uterine stimulus, depending on which study you read—that’s a main ingredient, I threw away the pregnancy tea deep into my garbage can. And then there are, of course, the pedestrian bits of nervousness—black cats, ladders, opening umbrellas inside. Silly, yes. Stupid, absolutely. But how could I not try to do everything and anything I could to court the good luck of whatever spirits I’d apparently maligned in the past? What do you do when you’ve been shoved into a place to live where there are no successful explanations but to find yourself, despite your own usual reasonableness, dabbling in the realm of signs, omens, and invented protections?

 I just can’t help the superstition. After all, the official diagnosis from my specialist doctor for my miscarriages? “Likely, bad luck.” Twice. Even now I worry that the mere fact of writing this down will get the fates going with their tricky knitting needles to screw things up all over again.

 Most of all, I won’t listen to NPR, which in the height of my sadness or worry about my body always seems to have a blaring feature about infertility, miscarriage, or stillbirth in America. Add in there the high chances for reports on problems with medical care for women in this country (something I’m hair-trigger angry about on a good day), obstetrician malpractice, and the general, decrepit state of world health and access to health care at all, and I’d just rather listen to some terrible 70s replay station, churning out a harmless dose of Bob Seeger, Led Zeppelin, and maybe even a bad ZZ Top tune or two. And nothing beats the creeping doubts like a little “Crazy on You” from the Heart girls.

But the morning of my scan, the music stations—70s, 80s, 90s, mixed, jazz, country, alternative, whatever—were filled with loud banter and wisecracking DJs. And so I hit at the buttons of the radio until I found the classical station and took solace there. What did I find as we tooled down the road to the doctor’s office?

Offenbach’s Orpheus’ Descent Into the Underworld—more famously, and popularly, known as music for the can can. 

How can you not smile when battling city traffic and irate drivers when the “Infernal Gallop” section jumps into your ears and ricochets through your body? How could little Squiggle not do its own dance in my belly, delighting to that music? (Listen to cheesy midi version here.)

How could I not dare to believe that by catching that tune unexpectedly, so full of abandon and joy and wildness, there was the least little bit of good luck involved?

And that’s the music I carried in my head, determinedly, fervently trying to believe in luck over and above past superstition: out of the parking garage, up the elevator, into the waiting room, up on the table with the crinkly paper, and sitting there, half naked, legs in the stirrups, and shaking from fear yet again, until there was a new song to hear. 

From here on out, I will always be thankful to dear and vibrant Jacques—king of light operetta—for providing a small soundtrack to my day and to the good news that followed. Sweetness and light. Legs up in the stirrups as if legs kicked in dance. And two little leg buds, deep inside me, doing their own rudimentary version. Here are the lyrics I am still singing: Everything is fine. The baby is growing and from all appearances happy and lively and undeniably real. An identifiable, defined spine. A twitching heart at a just-right tempo. A developing brain. And, true heir to this mother and her husband, the father, a skull that proves a big, hard head.

High kicks, a yell out to the audience (wheeeeee!), grand finale splits. And then, applause, all around, all smiles.

Oui!

Telling Tales

If I am a fiction writer, don’t I have a right to create stories? Even if they are not hard and critical and full of life’s trouble, like the stories I’ve been good at in the past. What if they are more like the oldest stories—like myth, like fairy tale, that acknowledge the ogres and the dangerous paths, that know that lightning and volcanoes and floods are all possible (if not inevitable), but also that offer deliberate actions that can be taken to avoid disaster and doom? Take a different path from  where you know the hungry monster lies in wait. Have the quick answer ready to outsmart the troll. Give the proper oblations to appease a surly god. And there, there is the way to such a thing as happily ever after, if only just through momentary triumph and human cleverness.

Here is the story I want to make, about a quiet room with the gentle humming of a machine. A scope in, that then lightens up to reveal a full ring of life. The music cues in: a deep and central song of continued heartbeat. The smallest fingers stretch out into themselves to learn their grasp at the world. This is a story, then, about everything being okay, that avoiding alcohol and eating well and letting myself sleep and walking in the crisp autumn air and appreciating each late bloom and saying thanks to the sky and earth and sun and moon and everything around me for each individual day forward—that it all has to matter in some way, a magi’s gift to my own body, an offering up with the prayer of keep and stay and grow. Once upon a time, there was a baby inside. And then, miraculously, wonderfully, there was still a baby, staying and growing, kept safe and warm. Until finally, there was, out in the real world, too, a baby, ready for his or her own story, beginning its own myth of monsters and truths and sky and moon and the round, round world I have to believe is holding me in its arms as its own child, listening patiently to the story I so want and need to tell.  

The Act of Honoring: Remembrance Days and Forecasted Days

Today is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, as recognized by House Resolution #222, passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. At 7 PM, no matter your time zone, you are encouraged to light a candle in honor of the approximately one million pregnancies in the United States that each year end in miscarriage, stillbirth, or the death of a newborn baby.

In a way, this piece is my own honoring of this day, and, like all memorials, it’s a complex one. Tonight I am caught between remembrance and current trepidation and future hope. I think I need to light three candles, one outside my house for the outer world to see that I’m honoring the losses—mine and so many others—and two inside, a kind of in-house secret, to honor my current pregnancy and how very much I want to keep it safe from loss.

These are weeks of new worry. Not that I’m not fully pregnant, without a fetus in the sac as I’ve seen before; not that the growth hasn’t started in earnest—the magnified sound of the heartbeat and those grainy black-and-white photos of the inside of my body prove to me there’s something live and growing there. In fact, this is the longest I’ve ever been pregnant and the most I’ve been able to believe it. At a little over ten weeks, my body is shifting weight into my low belly, even if in a way only I’d notice. My breasts show those stark veins filled with new and fervent blood. I suppose the one saving grace of symptoms is that they just about clobber you over the head with your own news. Get too afraid that this is all for nought, that it’s a product of your overfertile imagination, and whammo—just how many hours can one woman sleep and still be completely exhausted?

 The take-to-the-bed urge is all the worse today not just because of all the emotional and official weight of this day of remembrance, but also because I have an ultrasound scheduled for tomorrow. Just a peeking-in window scheduled to see that everything is okay, given that I couldn’t get in to see a new OB until late next week. I have no doubt that my body thinks I’m still pregnant. Even now it’s trying with all its might to drag me back to the big bed and go for the world record of sleeping (oddly enough, while there seem to be set records for sleep deprivation and longest run of activities that require no sleep—DJing, radio broadcasting, continuous movie watching—the category of longest sleep seems left wide open. Maybe I have an important skill to share with the world after all).

But I also know that as smart and hallowed as our bodies can be, they can also be awfully slow to catch on. They manufacture pregnancy hormone after there’s nothing left in the body that’s pregnant. (It took my body weeks and weeks to get my beta HCG down to less than five after each of my miscarriages.) They continue to ache and wallow in symptoms even when the doctor has confirmed it’s officially over.

The real and present fear, then, is that it all will stop, suddenly. That the chromosomes, which met well enough to get me this far, will have crossed in irreconcilable difference with the fact of life. 

The word of this reality is everywhere—in two close friends who’ve lost their babies right about this stage. Of fellow bloggers just diagnosed who are going through this loss at just at this very moment. The fact of the matter is that I’m 37 years old—at which current medical software will calculate my risk of trisomy 21 from 1 in 215 to 1 in 273—and have already had two miscarriages, and at least one chemical pregnancy, what the medical science establishment has told me, in their mellifluous way, are “products of conception” themselves likely “representing chromosomal anomalies.”

I am not afraid of raising a special needs child. I am aunt to a boy with Down syndrome and had a cousin with cerebral palsy, among other physical challenges. I cannot even remember how far back it was when I worried that the risk of getting pregnant came in carrying and birthing a child with what, back then, I would have stupidly called a birth defect.  

It’s losing the chance at all to raise any child, that life might just not be possible, where the deepest fear arises. And it's a kind of voodoo I want to do here, to honor that fear if only to work against it and take away some its power.

It doesn’t help to think this through too much and try to be logical. To think about the chances, the percentages, to read those numbers off the computer screen and capture them in my head along with those shared stories, so that they return, a kind of illogical and crazed haunting, in my dreams. 

Last night I dreamt about my father, now seven months dead, reappearing and needing care for his wounds. He died of tongue cancer that had spread to his jaw and throat, the tumors pressing out from his throat and inward, on his aorta. There was a very real chance of his bleeding to death, and so in those last weeks we watched scrupulously anytime there was any loss of blood from the tumors that had pushed to the outside of his skin. And there was always blood. It was a matter of controlling it. We had small white, anticoagulant pills we crushed into powder and dabbed on the bleeding spots, that worked, in that moment, like magic, but only if we caught it at the exact right time.

Because I knew far too much about bleeding from my own losses, I could tell him in the dream how to stop up the wound, what pads we needed to buy from the drugstore to soak up what his body was giving away, and I woke, saddened by my own expertise. I lost my second pregnancy the same week I lost my father; it’s impossible that the two can’t entangle together. And the fear of blood is no product of a squeamish girl, but of someone who knows firsthand just what that bleeding means and how it can never be good news. 

I am terrified to dream at all about blood, even if it’s not my own, even if it’s about tending to someone else’s losing. Because in two prior pregnancies I’ve had stark dreams of miscarriage, and have seen that night image come to fact within days. As bone-tired as I am, there’s also little solace in sleep when your dreams are as filled with worry as your days.

But I want to answer against that sorrow. To have the candle burn not just in loss but in reconciliation and hope. That when light and air meet, there is alchemy. That there is the magic of stoppage, because I’ve prepared against loss and caught the child within me at just the right time. 

There are other bursts of red, of light that I can, and need to, recognize here. I knew the Chrysanthemums in my front garden were coming, could see the red petals start to inch out of the green buds. And then, suddenly, in a certain spray, they were there in full flower. Over the past four years, they’ve grown to a deeper, richer burgundy each time they’ve come back, as if they themselves carry a certain wisdom in the hue they’ve earned themselves in time and return. I love these flowers, called hardy for a reason. They are far from delicate and luxurious; they are determined and proud and even stubborn. They sprawl wide, taking up more room each year, and every year they present themselves with an anticipated, but still unexpected delight. When I go to find more information on my treasured flowers, I find that the Chrysanthemum Society of Victoria gets it just right, noting that their power lies in how they “make beautiful displays of blooms when all others have ended.”

It’s nightfall here, and when I go outside to light my first candle, I walk over to the garden and see, even in the darkening, even in October’s chill night air, those red blooms reaching up and stretching out in growth. I want to fill my head up with those instead of the bad stories—to stock the inside of my brain with light, with the small fire ignited, with the stories they tell me about hardiness and stubborn, beautiful increase despite the odds. If I dream tonight, I want it to be of fields of these simple flowers, of lying and growing among them, of gaining strength from what seems difficult but that which, in fact, is necessary for the kind of growth I am meant to know. That’s a kind of honoring, I think. Not just necessary regret and sorrow, but also a determined and unexpected growth in the least likely of places, but also in the most common and ordinary way that says that, indeed, this is the way the world can and does work. A bright, simple, red comes to bloom. The most basic of flames takes its charge and spark and burns sweetly and rightly. The meeting of light and air in possibility, the sway of small heads of flowers in the night breeze. This is honoring, to past, present, and future, to say for all of these places, for each of these moments of growth and want and will and hope that in this moment, in this hour of light, all is well.          

Now About those Happy Hormones I Was Promised…

Bloating, yes. Any manner of strange digestive processes, yep. Sheer exhaustion, moodiness, queasiness, panic, dismay, those strange pulls out of nowhere of the ligaments stretching? Yes siree bob: all of the above.

But what about my rosy glow of pregnancy? What about those happy, pg hormones that are supposed to be soaring through my body and making me a blithe little spirit fostering new life in my belly? What about those minutes that are supposed to be filled chock-full with the wonder and glories of being pregnant and with child?

Of this, at least, I'm surely due. (Check, please.) 

Don’t get me wrong. Every single day without bleeding is a grand success. Every time I roll over in bed and feel the soreness of my breasts is a sweet surprise that I still might be pregnant. And when I wake up in the morning and see the dark blue lines strong and sure as road maps, a sign of the veins bringing in more blood, across my chest, I know—or want to believe—that things are changing and growing and becoming, just as is supposed to happen in these months. 

But there are never any guarantees in pregnancy after you’ve experienced loss. And while I’ve found the most solace of my life among women who know this grief, I’ve also been introduced to a whole new panoply of ways things can go wrong. It’s really astounding, in the end, anyone ever has a baby ever.

Yesterday I told a good friend I was pregnant. But I couldn’t stop amending the news, throwing in how tentative it still was, making sure to mention the prior losses. Sure, we saw a heartbeat at the last scan, and for a normal person that would be a great source of comfort; the science is supposedly on my side, and the numbers look all pretty and right in a row. But science (especially medical science) and I have had blow-outs in the past; we’ve gone months without speaking to one another, and I still hold a serious and ugly grudge.  

I keep qualifying this pregnancy. If I get that far. If I don't experience another loss. If everything goes well. If we have the baby. If if if if. When will I get to When? Being able to say, When we get to term. When we have the baby. When I can believe. When it all comes true. But even now, there’s that ‘if’ hovering in the air, making itself known and demanding to be heard: more insistent and audible, each day, than any occassional heartbeat a machine can let me sneak a listen in on. I know enough by now to suspect that any happy, natural chemicals in my blood and the glow of pregnancy are just two more inventions of this condition that other people may indeed experience, but that seem silly and foreign and not in the cards for me. But I don’t need that—any of that. Just give me, each day, one small bit of assurance that this is at all possible. Because that’s all I dare ask, but it’s, unfortunately, more than I dare hope for, too.

A New Fierce Human Desire: Sleep

I am jealous of horses and cows, who can sleep standing up. Oh! And bats, too. Upside down. Because the ability to sleep in any position seems the most desirable skill a girl could have in the first trimester.

I’ve never had this happen before—this desire for sleep strong as the strongest bodily urge. That way all of me suddenly trips and says, “Sleep now or else.” Never mind that I’ve just woken up, that I’m stumbling from the metro to the university, that I’m standing in front of college students who’ve come to demand a solid dose of entertainment along with their education. Never mind that I’m mid-neighborhood walk with the dog or out at a blasting concert or on the phone with a most beloved friend. It comes at me like an unstoppable spell: Sleep. Now.

In moments like this I realize how little the body is my own as it works at its job of manufacture. If I were a different woman, I would revel in the efficiency and wonder of production, how the body speeds on each day to add a new feature, a new working, a new part of that tiny body. But the woman that I am quakes a little at all this activity regardless of my brain and intention, because I am all too aware of what it means to be out of control, when what the body decides for itself and what the brain so desperately wants have no commerce or even common language.

Now is the time I’m supposed to relax into the pregnancy, trust in that heartbeat and the good measurements that everything is moving along just fine. That there is no stoppage or trouble or malfunction. But this body? It’s a shyster and has played me for a fool more than once. As much as I’ve done to try to clean up its act, I’m beholden to it, and it has a will and a mean streak all its own. I’ve sent it to rehab, paid for intense treatment, made it start the 12 steps with admitting, out loud, that it has a problem.

Has my body come clean? Will it straighten up and fly right? Can I trust this sinning backslider with the care of my one and only child? 

But you see, I have no choice. It’s working its tricky hex on me all over again. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Think not. Want not. In any position, in any way necessary. Just sleep.

Longer Secrets and Shorter Stories

The story seems simple when I type it out here. Three easy posts that go from fear to hope, the brink of failure, onto some version of success, as if it were that easy. Never mind the three whole years of embarrassed silence. The incomprehensible cycles (long or nonexistent) and the deep cramping pain that would double me over in the middle of the day, for which my general doctor so helpfully prescribed me medicine for stomach upset. The months of trying that turned to years. And then, finally, with my cycles somewhat on track, the first pregnancy, followed by abominable loss. The months of trying and failing that followed. Then pregnant again, but loss again. And more months and months of trying and failing. The quiet in the place of story--all those friends to whom I could not say the word miscarriage, because I was somehow ashamed.

Who among those of us steeped in loss can ever say that pregnancy is success until a child is held, breathing? I know that only when that infant body leans against my adult body, only in that moment do I think I can take on the name of mother. Only then can I believe it.

There are harder stories, longer stories, for sure, many of which belong to people I know and hurt for. We’ve all, the miscarriage women, certainly had to endure the seemingly quick, cheery stories of women who have trouble-free fertility and pregnancies. And so I don’t know how to shape this—to bring in its history but also lead towards a happy ending, something I don’t know how to compose and something that seems foolhardy to even contemplate. If I imagine a small mouth rooting. eyes that come blinking up in the light of the outside world and doing the earliest work to focus, what does that do to the secrets—the lost ones and the ones whom I could not make, alike? How do I honor them without falling into someone else’s stories that would turn them into winged angels when one of them was, ostensibly, not ever a potential body at all?

How could I trust in a happy ending when I know better than to believe in the simple story, opening with pregnancy and closing with birth? How, when I know about all the secret terrors that can happen each day after that extra line glares up from the white stick, can I turn this to tale that moves swiftly across the pages in brief plot, that ends gloriously in springtime and flowers and all good news? Because I don’t want to close away my own true story. I don’t want to write here that all of that past hurt is now worth it, as if pregnancy could take away pain, displace it and heal the scars back to perfect skin. It doesn’t. I know that I am raw and chafed rather than smoothed. I can’t help but count sadness on my rough hands every day, and it’s an arithmetic that makes it hard to be celebratory, to sing out some story about possibility and all good, happy things, and shiny babies coming out healthy and round and exactly-right toed in the end.

Because I've been writing a new secret story: that I want it desperately, this ending, keeping instead of losing. That I want to live and be in the middle of my own story before it’s too late, to welcome myself fully into my pregnancy, to trust that the midnight twinges are the ligaments stretching just as they should, the joints loosening in the sweet juice of relaxin. That the little beat I heard mere days ago has kept up its rhythm and will continue to pump life within me. That this story doesn’t end like the others, that in glorious May, there will be a child born, and that that will not be the end of one story, but part of how I am always beginning--the longer, more complex story. The honest one that's much harder to tell.