Mother's Day

I was at a bachelorette this weekend with my college roommates and a bigger group that included other friends of the bride’s I’ve known tangentially for years. The kind of people you don’t keep in touch with individually but are always happy to see when your mutual person brings you together.

Just before the much-anticipated weekend of celebration, the bride found out one of her friends was going to have to end her pregnancy. She and her husband had gone through a lot to conceive, and all seemed well this time until they went in for their 20-week anatomy scan and found out their baby girl’s bones had stopped developing at around 12 weeks.

The idea that this woman had been walking around for two months, doing all the things you do to prepare your body and your life during pregnancy, without knowing that something was wrong, seemed so astonishingly cruel it took me a while to catch my breath after I heard the news. Their inner circle, of which I am not a member, rallied around them for support during and after an emergency surgery. Everyone was surprised when she said she still wanted to come to the bachelorette. But I understood.

We were told she didn’t want to talk about it over the weekend, just have something to look forward to and see if she could manage to enjoy herself even a little bit, drink the drinks she hadn’t planned on. Maybe she could get through a meal without thinking about the future that had suddenly evaporated like smoke through grasping fingers.

When she walked in on the first night we all carried on with “great to see you’s” and too-tight hugs. Poured her glasses of wine, grabbed her hands for a dance. It was a festive weekend but I wondered how many of us had that specter of grief looming just out of sight, thinking of her sorrow, thinking of our own.

The last morning just so happened to be Mother’s Day and we found ourselves alone in the kitchen making coffee while the rest of the house slept off hangovers. We leaned against the cutlery drawers, holding paper cups of Nespresso, and her eyes met mine. “You know, we just lost a baby,” she said softly. She hadn’t broken eye contact and mine immediately welled with tears. “I know,” I confessed. “I heard you wanted to be distracted and didn’t want to talk about it this weekend, but my heart has been breaking for you.” She buried her head in my shoulder. I told her I knew what it was like to lose a pregnancy and she looked back up at me. “I will never be the same,” she said. “I don’t know who I’ll be, but the me of three weeks ago will never exist again.”

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The first time I got a positive pregnancy test after years of trying, I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe. Great gobs of snot hung from my nose as my shaking hands held that stick and my sobs turned into hiccups. I was still sitting on the toilet. I was so unprepared for the results to be positive that I hadn’t taken the test with any sense of ceremony. I would have waited for my husband if any part of me had believed two lines were in the cards that morning.

In the movies, a positive pregnancy test results in a baby. I now know that isn’t how it works in real life, for more women than I ever realized. The pee stick is just the first step in a long list of things that still have to go right, and may well not. The pure serotonin that shot through my veins when I found out I could, and had, gotten pregnant is a feeling I will never forget, and I’m so grateful I got to experience it once unabashedly. The next time, that unbridled joy was tempered with caution, a wall around my heart, fear whispering around the edges.

I was anxious about writing about all this, but after I pressed publish on my last essay I got some astonishingly vulnerable and kind messages from women I didn’t know were in this sad sisterhood. It was like the floodgates were open and once people knew that I was talking about it, they wanted to, too. One wrote to me about “the frustration, blame/guilt, torment of not knowing why our perfectly healthy bodies couldn’t do something they are designed to do (and feared would happen before we were ready!)” Another talked about her experience with “women’s health topics that are so often pushed down or minimized… we need to be sharing these stories because other women are facing similar things and it can feel so isolating.” “Felt like you were in my head,” said another.

I’d worried it was too corny, in that post, to explicitly say “you’re not alone,” but a lot of people said that to me afterwards, and it felt really nice. So I’m back, trying to repay the favor, trying to say thank you.

PS

Quotes shared with permission, stories that aren’t my own slightly altered to protect anonymity

PPS

I love you mom! (not anonymous)