And Then Some

When things fall apart….

The visit with Dr. Southern Comfort went well. We spent almost two hours giving the twice over to topics already covered. My uterus is fine. My cervix is incompetent. I’ll need a c-section and a cerclage—maybe an abdominal cerclage at that. The good Dr. feels certain that all will be well with careful planning. He has 25 years of experience and is a leading authority on incompetent cervixes—whatever that means—and feels certain that with careful monitoring we will go home with a healthy baby. It was all good news and we were glad to hear it once again. But here’s the fly in the ointment; the husband has freaked out and has stepped off the bandwagon.

After the slight bit of blood, the husband came undone. When I first noticed the blood, I casually mentioned it to him, and he insisted that I lay down. Glad to get out of doing the dishes, I assented. Mistake. Mistake. That moment allowed doubt and fear to creep in for the husband. We did not work on the plan that night. We did the next day. But something funny—well not really funny per se, strange and sad is more like it—began to happen or not to happen. Turns out fear can make you go limp. Yes, limp. He’s been a wreck since last week.

I was a wreck last week about all of this. I really felt betrayed that he wasn’t with the plan. There was a lot of shouting, even more crying, and an ultimatium: Either I am pregnant now, or we won’t ever be. (Ok all of the shouting, crying, and bossing around was done by me.) Yep, I threatened to close up the hatchery and become a woman devoted to career and not to baby making.

Now I could possibly be pregnant now, we were busy actualizing the plan during my window of opportunity. He insists that he’ll be thrilled if we are pregs again, worried but happy. But I wonder. If he went limp when he had the opportunity to impregnate me out of fear that I will die, how thrilled will he be if we are indeed pregnant?

Updates

Department Front

The department meeting was fine. Actually better than fine. The old folks were as grumpy as ever--bickering with one another about past grievances real and imagined. Somewhere in the middle of it all I got the giggles. I don't mean the I can't stop smiling shit eating grin that hides the giggles. I mean the outright laughing giggles. I laughed through the whole meeting as the old men bitched at one another. Funny thing, is that they started laughing at one another and the meeting lost some of its tension.

Baby Business

Light bleeding gone. I have a doctor's appointment in a few hours and will have a better clue about the world this evening. I'll be glad when I can relax a bit and get back to work. I am so behind on my articles, the book, and getting prepped for next semester.

Worry

Ok. We have been working on our plan. And today I had some unexpected bleeding. Nothing major. Just light, faint red blood. Maybe too much actualizing of the plan? But I am absolutely freaked out.

With Monkey I had a month's worth of implantation bleeding that started something like this. We were first told by Wholly Worthless Catholic Hospital that it was in God's hands. My doctor's later said it wasn't a big deal. But then we lost him. And now I am freaked out what if this is implantation bleeding and.... I am glad that we have a doctor's visit on Thursday.

100,001 plans for happiness

We have started the dance of conception again. Thursday we go back to our wonderful doctor—Dr. Southern Comfort. We have already spent nearly six hours with him in the last six weeks, mostly talking about our fears and worries. He assures us that a cerclage will cure what ails us, that the placental abruption was caused by the negligence of our other doctor, and that we will have a healthy baby born a few weeks early. Every other doctor we have consulted has concurred and has green lighted us to try again.

We are thinking that this month or next will be perfect—conceive, heave through my easy spring semester course load, get a cerclage, maybe teach a maymester class—a film course at that!, and then spend the rest of the summer off my feet, reading, and playing queen. [My breezy summary hides my horror and unbelievable fear of having CVS, two amnios, a cerclage, and a c-section at 36.5 weeks in order to have another child. I regularly throw up in the shower from the fear.] Most days I am thrilled to think about having another baby. But in-between bouts of terror and joy—really it’s a roller coaster of emotions—I feel guilty about wanting to conceive again

CNN reported today that nearly 100,000 children are awaiting adoption in the US. The article stated that many of these children are older, have siblings, have suffered severe abuse, and/or are African American. Many of these children will languish in social services as they are shuffled from one foster home to the next, and as they await the termination of parental rights. For years, we thought about opening our home to a child from a similar background. And now that we have the chance, we find ourselves turning away from the possibility.

After we lost the baby, we looked into adoption. We would be happy to take in a toddler somewhere between 1-4 of either sex and of any racial background whose parent/s can no longer take of them. But we found that finding a child who hasn’t suffered some form of sexual or physical abuse to be nearly impossible. Hours spent scrolling through on-line adoption books have left us sad and horrified.

“Johnny should be the youngest child as he does not get along with younger children.”

“Sam is a kind a hearted child. But he can not be left alone with young female children.”

“Sarah needs to be an only child in a two-parent household. She has trust issues after suffering years of sexual abuse.”

The stories go on and on. These children not only deserve but desperately need good homes and loving parents. We should be one of those families. But we are not. We can’t expose Bug to abuse and sadly we find that as a family we fall short of what is needed to care for one of these children—a large and warm extended family. After our little Monkey died, we realized that our family was the three of us—the husband, myself, and the Bug. I simply don’t have any extended family and my husband’s brothers and parents were awful to us after Monkey died. What they did and said is my husband’s story to tell, but let it suffice that they are hateful people.

So we will go on, and hopefully our little scheme of happiness will work out, and late next summer we will have another Rooster in the house. But what of those 100,000 children waiting for their little plan of happiness to work out?

So is that all there is?

I nearly drowned the summer I was 13. We lived 20 miles inland, and I would sneak away on the bus to the Pacific Ocean. I took the 37 bus down Euclid and would end up on the shore in less than two hours. The bus moved slowly through the Orange County traffic. Stopping to pick up maids and janitors, along with the disabled, the poor, and kids like myself who were too young or too poor to drive, the bus filled with an assortment of the poor, the immigrant, and the young. Most of the working people and the disabled stopped off well before we hit the ocean.

That summer no one noticed whether I was around or not. My mom was struggling to get sober and to recover from heart surgery. The house was focused on her recovery. She would need another year or two before she dried out; she never got sober, just dry. No one noticed my long absences.

The misnamed Pacific Ocean can be treacherous with its placid surfaces and churning undercurrents. Every year teenagers and adults drown, caught up in riptides that refuse to release them. Riptides appear suddenly as waves moving in opposite directions collide and pull you in all directions. The sand slips from beneath your feet and suddenly waist high waters are several feet over your head. Your instincts tell you to swim to shore—to swim hard. But the water holds you back. It is as if you are running hard into hurricane winds. You drown from your exhaustion.

I was a strong swimmer and unafraid of what lurked beneath. When the riptide snatched me, I panicked and headed to shore, though I knew better. The people three feet from me didn’t notice as I started to drown. A yard away their water was calm and shallow, and their feet rested firmly beneath them. The last breath before I blacked out, I remember thinking “so is that all there is?” (My mom loved Peggy Lee, and that song was her favorite. It was the sound track for her alcohol induced bouts of melancholy and thus the muzak of my childhood.) I was fished out by a lifeguard, given CPR, and transported to a nearby hospital. The family took a cab to pick me up. My brother came to get us later that night. I vaguely remember them arguing on the ride home and later that night. No one ever said anything to me about it. For the next eight years, I hung out, got high, skipped school (but I still managed to graduate in the top five of my class, go figure), and lived recklessly.

Then a car hit me while I was on a motor scooter. The car was doing 45 and I didn’t have a helmet on. I should have died. It broke my body, and at 21 I was wheelchair bound for months, and dependent on my family and friends for the smallest of things. That incident upended my life. It was humbling and liberating. When I let go of my pride and my sense of self, I found strength and grace in others. For ten plus years, I lived in gratitude to that accident. It made me stronger. I became a better person—kinder, more patient, and less shallow.

And now the summer of my 35th birthday, I should have died once again. My son did die. I would live recklessly, but my promises to my daughter Bug preclude black out drinking.

Several weeks ago the husband and I saw a therapist. We requested a woman and were given a man, we wanted to have non-Christian based therapy, and of course were given a Christian therapist. He fell all over himself to tell us how impressed he was with our grief process. (It was as if I was caught in a riptide again. I wanted to shout “I am drowning, can’t you see it?!”) Towards the end of the visit, he gently asked us if we thought God was trying to tell us something or me something, since our son died two months after my mother died. We never went back.

We are slowly moving away from what happened this summer. We are making plans for next year to travel, to write, and to maybe try once again for another child. Bug grows by leaps and bounds and becomes smarter and more beautiful by the day. The husband is so overwhelmingly grateful that I lived that it tempers his grief for the loss of our son. He looks forward to the future, our future. But I find myself hovering like a ghost at that moment when I was bleeding to death and my son was suffocating, and wondering “so is that all there is?”

When heartbreak sneaks up on you, part one.

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.

Miss Melanie

Forget the destruction of local economies, oppressive work environments, poor land use policies, the systematic inequalities in promotion for women and minorities, the real reason not to shop big box stores is that you always seem to see the one person you don’t want to see.

After today’s pumpkin patch visit with my four year old daughter, Bug’s pre-k class, I headed to the local Costco to develop pictures for her teacher and the class. (Thank you, University, for the expensive digital camera for my err…research.) Instead of unloading the pictures and leaving, I hung around to look at all of the things I don’t need but might want and in bulk at that. I scored a couple of new books including Cornel West’s Democracy Matters and had a bad but very cheap lunch. Then my mindless afternoon hour of waiting went bad.

As I was strolling over to the photo section, I saw Miss Melanie (think Gone with the Wind), the mommy of one of Bug’s friends. Her face dropped as she looked at my belly. While my belly is far from flat, it is not the shape that she expected to see. I last saw her fourteen weeks ago, at the summer party I threw for Bug and her preschool friends.

Bug’s childhood is far different from mine. My childhood was spent lonely and scared that social services would snatch me away. Bug in contrast is our joyful center. We struggle to give her meaningful experiences and to fill in where the extended family should be. Thus the summer party—replete with elaborate decorations, a meal for parents and children alike, and a huge mess for later. Miss Melanie worried through the whole affair. She was worried that I was doing too much; that there was too much to clean up; that I was too exhausted, etc. Three weeks later my cervix opened and our world fell apart.

Miss Melanie saw me before I saw her. I felt the pressure of her stare and turned to look to see who was mad dogging me. Her face turned to a mask of sorrow that quickly gave way to tears—all of this in the middle of Costco. I stood there comforting her, thinking that next time I am going to the local mom and pop photobooth.

Bit by bit

My unborn son died two months after my mother died. He was twenty weeks and my mother was 76 years old. My cervix opened without warning. My mom smoked two packs a day chased with a pint of Early Times for thirty years. He was the shape of my future—our long awaited second child, a second chance at a long and uneventful pregnancy, the testosterone balance to our estrogen filled house, the completion of our little picture of happiness. She was the shape of my past—circumscribed, lonely, and incomprehensibly sad and complex. But she was my mother and with her went the last of my connections to my family of origin.

I am learning to crawl again after being knocked off my feet. I think of the two of them together—ethereal and beautiful, happy and laughing, and wondering why I mourn them so. I am off for the semester under a medical leave. I am trying to write or research. The medical leave hasn’t been without its headaches but I am glad to have time to think and to pull myself together.