Back to Normal

I go to class. I stand in front of my students. I open the book I’ve assigned, read aloud, “I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, a stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” I teach them; I try hard to be bright and cheery every day.  They don’t know.

I go to the grocery store. I buy everything on my list. I add an extra bottle of wine and a box of chocolate chip cookies, in need of comfort anywhere I can get it. The cashier asks how I’m doing today. I smile and say, “Good. And you?” She doesn’t know.

The writer I knew years ago, who’s gotten back in touch, and to whom I just can’t seem to finish the letter to tell him about our summer, finds me on Twitter. If he reads back on those pages, he’ll see the mention of tears and milk and blood and, before that, of an angry day in my pregnancy, back in those brief, stupid moments I thought it was safe to break down the lines between my real life and my loss life and my life in possibility. If he only reads forward, for the time being, he doesn’t know.

Back a month ago, I go out to lunch with my dear friend H. She knows. But I’m trying to be brave and show that I’m handling everything just fine. Five minutes within being seated, the people next to us start up the small talk: “She had to go into labor and then had to have a C-section. It was just the worst.” I sit and I sit, holding it together, staring hard at the menu, telling myself the conversation will pass onto other things. It doesn’t. It just doesn’t. They’re just making what they think is harmless lunchtime conversation on a subject they’ve stumbled onto that keeps them talking in common; it’s not their fault, I tell myself, that they don’t know.

They ramp up stories of everyone each of them knows who’s ever had something unexpected happen at birth, but all of their stories end up perfectly fine. I am up out of my chair and in the restaurant bathroom, doubled over and sobbing. H. finds me, asks whether I’m okay. I tell her about the table; she asks whether we should leave. I say I just need a moment to catch my breath (because that’s exactly how it feels--like all the air within has been knocked clean out, with me gone caved in and empty). She tells me to take my time and come when I’m ready. When I rejoin her, the waiter has moved us to another table. I imagine H. has handled this with grace and minimal fuss. The waiter must think I’m just persnickety or one of those women doomed to complain through the whole meal. He is overly solicitous in that way that he thinks nothing real is wrong. How very much he doesn’t know.

This past Saturday, I’ve said yes, I’ll come to a party, My husband is out of town. I shower, wash and dry my hair. I get dressed and put on lipstick. I think it might actually be fun to meet a new person or two. I remember back years ago about how a party would mean a quick chance to flirt with impunity. But then I realize I can hardly remember that girl. I look at myself in the mirror, know I need to do something about my shaggy hair, see the wrinkles that have suddenly appeared stronger at the corners of my eyes since E’s birth and death. I look down at my jeans, tighter than usual because I can’t shed the pregnancy weight (see wine and cookies mentioned above). I know, suddenly, I have nothing interesting to say and that I can’t possibly have the energy to go. I pre-imagine all the conversations that have the power to blindside me from the slightest mention. I can’t imagine why anyone new would want to talk to me. I consider staying home. With great relief but a dose of sadness, too, I don’t go, knowing it would mean being caught in a house full of people who do not know.

I screw up my courage on Sunday, because my daughter has dragged out the yoga mat and pointed to it, pleadingly, and take her back to toddler yoga class, where I haven’t been since I was pregnant. The woman who’s due on Halloween, just a week from my former due date, laughs when we’re asked to crawl on the floor like snakes, along with our children, and points to her belly. She doesn’t know.

The yoga teacher asks all the children for the news in their lives. “Do you have a new brother or sister?” she asks one. She knew, back in June, that I was pregnant, but she’s clearly forgotten. The horribleness of this moment for me, watching as this other girl just about the same age as my daughter, sweetly  nodding about her new sister, she doesn’t know. When it comes our turn, the teacher asks, “And what’s your news?” I do not say to the room, for obvious reasons, “Squiggle was going to have a new sibling, too. But then things went so wrong. And then he died. So she both has and doesn't have a brother.” No one in the room knows but me.

When class is over, the other studio spills out, too--the prenatal class, it turns out. The teacher chats with one of her students in the hallway, and they commiserate about how awfully your feet can swell in the later months. My daughter takes forever to put on her shoes, her tiny, precise feet, long enough for me to bite hard enough into my lip, long enough that biting stops working and I can’t keep the tears from coming, long enough for the hallway conversation to end and for the teacher to turn and tell me my daughter reminds me of hers, and for her to take a second look at my messy, wet face and, from her expression, start to ask why, but then stop and hurry away. She doesn’t know.

We drive by the farmer’s market on my way home. My eye catches sight of a former coworker, whom I know to have had a terrible row with fertility, and whom I last saw at that very market months ago, when she told me of her pregnancy. Back then, I hugged her hard, so happy for her, wished her well on that test, told her I was certain it would all go well for her. I didn’t tell her I was pregnant at that same time, due for that same test that week. It felt wrong, to step on her happiness like that, with so much trouble getting pregnant in the first place (something I well understood). And there she was, poised at the edge of the market, so pregnant, exactly as I would have been--what are the odds of her, in that exact spot at that exact time, so visible, just as I was driving past? So clear she is, positioned there--her hands on her back to support that big belly, her still very pregnant. Me, driving, so empty. I can’t begrudge her that fullness. But still, it’s awful for me to see in a flash where my body would otherwise be. How I’d be holding up my body, supporting it in these last months, expectant. She doesn’t know. Not that my test, like hers, went perfectly well, not that at the next stage, she would continue to be lucky and I would not.   

It’s hard enough to navigate the people who know and are careful around me, to whom I feel some duty to show I’m coping and doing fine. But for some reason it’s the utter strangers and those people who just don’t know, those who have no idea how awful it is in my head and body, still, who bring up for me a real feeling of going utterly crazy. I wish I could feel some measure of pride for the days and times I’m feeling brave and do all the things that normal people do in a normal day. Instead, I feel the dark burden of everything I’m carrying. I hear the yelling that’s going on in the back of my head that wants to come right out in anger to say Do you know how unbelievably hard this is? Picking out peaches? Do you know how hard one stupid decision like that can be?

But I don’t. I behave and I pretend and I muddle through. And I accept the fact that the better job I do at performing normalcy, the worse I feel. Because what’s the option? Because, in the end, how this feels, how it is to try to live day to day, week to week, in so uncertain and wronged a world, no one should have to know.

Comments

[Michele]

How I understand those feelings. You give words so eloquently to how so many of us feel. The rest of the world doesnt know... And, because of our own heartbreak, we hope they never know first hand.

[Kate @ wifemotherexpletiving.blogspot.com]

thank you so much for writing about this all.

[annacyclopedia]

I don't know, and I hope I never do. But I am listening and wishing you moments of peace in spite of the knowing.

[Catherine W]

This is so beautifully written.
I think I know that feeling of going utterly crazy, all that awfulness contained inside surrounded by the obliviousness of others who simply don't know.
You are right, no one should have to know.

[Kymberli]

This is achingly beautiful in all the ways that no one should ever have to know about.

[Not On Fire]

Your writing is so beautiful. You are able to so clearly express the grief and pain of your loss. I am so sorry for your loss. I wish you peace.