Two months to the day that my mother died, I woke with a terrible headache and the faintest drop of blood. Calling what I saw a drop seems like an exaggeration. Really, it was so small, so faint, that I thought it must be a shadow, an imperfection in the toilet paper, something, anything other than blood. So I turned on the light. It was blood—pink and faint, but blood all the same.
I went back to bed. It is really unlike me to yield; to go quietly. It was 6 a.m. and no one was open, and how could my heart already be broken? And Bug had to get ready for summer camp, and really this couldn’t be happening to me. My mother was dead, this couldn’t be happening to me. My mother was dead. THIS COULDN’T BE HAPPENING TO ME!!
At 7 a.m. there was more blood. The husband, awake finally, thought it was nothing. Women bleed right? I had a month’s worth of implantation bleeding, so this seemed like more of the same. My husband’s ignorance of the human body and biology never fails to astonish or delight. His overwhelming sense that everything is nothing, that everything is ok is a perfect counterbalance to my general suspicion, to my sense that bad things lurk in the shadows and that sinister motives shade every word spoken or line written. (Thank you graduate school; for encouraging my pessimistic worldview with endless discussion of the investment of authors and the political and economic payoffs of seemingly disinterested ideas.) He rushes headlong into the security of the morning routine.
Bug needed to get up. She’s terrible about sleep. She hates to do it, but once she’s down don’t mess with her. She always wakes drunken, bleary eyed, and spoiling for a fight. Getting her up gently is a must as is sticking to her routines. Before camp, we kissed and giggled, and she actually sat still to have her long hair brushed and braided. As she left, I told her that one of her Aunties (fictive kin) would pick her up. She has a limited comfort zone (I chalk this up to her prematurity and bad genetic inheritance from her father’s side). Up until this point no one else had ever picked her up from school but the husband or me, and she had never spent the night at someone else’s house. This day changes all of that. She seemed puzzled but eager to go to camp. Then the husband drove our sheltered daughter, the sleepy-eyed tyrant to camp, and I raced to the doctor’s office.
I was in the midst of giving the axe to my obgyn, Dr. Can’t Be Bothered as I didn’t like her blasé attitude or her office staff. The doctor I wanted, Dr. Southern Comfort was out of town, or I would have gone to him. So instead I go to the doctor I can’t stand.
The husband arrived just as I was called in. There was more blood, lots more, and cervical mucus as well. Dr. Can’t Be Bothered was alarmed, and sent me to the hospital. Up until this very moment, I believed that my baby, our unborn son would be fine. I thought that I was about to enter the living hell of bed rest boredom. I thought that bad things, shots, stitches, injections, hospital food, etc. were about to happen to me, but that my little Monkey would be fine and safe.
Walking out of the examine room on our way to the attached hospital, the nurse says “Next time, you’ll get a cerclage.” And then it hits, and hits hard. Everything I have believed about cosmic balance (I mean surely, my son can’t die two months after my mother has died!) about the rewards for suffering bravely, about how you get to have an adulthood that is far better than your shitty childhood, goes out the window. “Next time” means this time is over, that this time was a false start, and this child, this desperately wanted, dearly loved, so close to viability, yet too far to have meaningful survival baby is effectively dead.
That was 12 weeks ago today.
