To wrongly carry

This miscarriage business is complex.

We buried our “miscarriage” last night. Picking the right spot was tormenting… the first spot was too exposed; the second place was too far from the house and I cried about not being able to see it or protect it; the third spot, in the garden, was at least visible from the kitchen sink and dining room table so I could keep my eye on it. I like that it was within the fence and not just out in the wild. We named it “felt”.. the in utero nickname I’d been using for the past several weeks.

I remember one 15 year old client I was working with who miscarried at 8 weeks. She and her adolescent boyfriend and some cousins and pals crafted a small coffin out of a shoebox and lined it with velvet. They had a funeral and buried it. She was devastated. I was supportive and appropriate in my social worker way but I secretly thought it was very strange and way over the top.

As I buried my own little one yesterday, I thought about her. I don’t think she was strange or over the top anymore. She was authentic and heroic and brilliant for grieving so thoughtfully and doing what she felt she needed to do to deal with that loss. I am a mess. My condition makes her look stoic.

The etymology of the word “miscarriage” dates back to the 1300’s with “mis” meaning wrongly.. so to miscarry is to “wrongly carry”.. by 1527 the word came to mean “to deliver an unviable fetus”. It all sounds so active and implies some failure of the deliverer/woman.

It also seems a pale euphemism for what the “delivery of an unviable fetus” really looks like and feels like. A rougher word with more hard consonants or something might feel more appropriate….. maybe it’s not the word that is the problem. Maybe it is the relative silence around the experience that affects 1/3 of all pregnancies (that’s a lot of women, partners and families). For me, it is a bloody, painful, gut wrenching, mournful, dissonant, guilty, jarring, and isolating collision. I just keep thinking in disbelief, women go through this all the time.

I sent Blase to rent the dumbest romantic comedy he could find at our little store. He brought home a box that seemed to fit the bill with some nice looking couple on the front, smiling and stuff. The kids finally fell asleep and we turned it on. The opening scene looked to be set in the 50’s or 60’s and was of a woman, crying as she was wheeled into a hospital – having a miscarriage. The next scene was that same woman, again being wheeled into a hospital, screaming – for her second miscarriage. This repeated through her subsequent miscarriage – totally 7 in a row.

We were amazed. Neither of us could think of any movie in recent memory that even vaguely or lightly depicted miscarriage. On this day when we wanted only distraction from our loss and miscarriage pain, we’d somehow gotten this film. What were the chances???? ( It was a great film – check out “The Music Within” if you haven’t already.)

Anyway, the woman suffering the miscarriages was totally broken by her experiences; no doubt compounded by the historically insensitive (abusive) treatment of women by the medical establishment in decades past. Every year, she made a cake and decorated and had a birthday party for each lost baby. Every party ended with her unconscious on the table after overdosing on sleeping pills. This happened 7 times each year. The movie is based on a true story.

11 weeks and bleeding

My unplanned but celebrated third pregnancy is now an unexpected miscarriage in process.  All of the excitement, anticipation, imagining, and nurturing around this impending baby is now just incessant blood on a pad.  It is simultaneously surreal and inescapably graphic.  We were so curious about this new being and eager to meet him or her.

After 5 days of bleeding, crying, and hibernating, today, I showered, changed my aged clothes and broke the news to my 3.5 year old daughter.  We anguished over how and what to tell her… finally, the moment and way arose.  I was reading to her and somehow the story segued into a discussion of eggs and chickens.  She was asking about how eggs get in and out of chickens and how eggs become chickens.  After we’d momentarily exhausted her line of questioning, I explained that I learned something when I went to the doctor… that the egg in my tummy was a special egg and isn’t the kind that turns into a baby.

“Well, where will the egg go?”, she asked.

“It will come out eventually”, I answered.

“I want to see the egg,”  she stated.

“That would be neat but with this kind of egg, it is SO small that we won’t be able to see it.  Not this egg, not this time,” I ventured.

Seemingly satisfied, she insisted I resume reading.

At bedtime, she pulled up my shirt and placed her hand below my belly button to “feel the baby.”  Breathing deeply, I reminded her that because of the special egg, we won’t be able to feel this baby.

Political insomnia

I cannot sleep. For a change, this sleeplessness is NOT due to my beloved unplanned pregnancy but to the turbulent world’s suspense of all that hangs in the balance of today’s already unfolding events. I cannot think into the possibility of Obama NOT winning without feeling the hint of emerging hives. The spectre of another stolen election leaving us with the deadly wonder twins and their certain path of peril is so deeply depressing and ominous that I skip lightly over the thought in my mind when it arises.

I have had numerous conversations that remind me of the pervasive misconceptions and prejudices that will frighteningly play themselves out on a loaded national and international stage this election day. I remember an 18 year old who said he won’t vote for Obama because he’s an “iraqi”. Blase called an “undecided” voter who lambasted the democrats for their stupidity in choosing a “foreigner” for their candidate. NPR interviewed voters a couple of weeks ago who repeatedly said they wouldn’t vote for Obama because they “don’t trust him”. When pressed for reasons behind their stated mistrust, many said, “he’s Muslim”. After the interviewer’s correction, reminding the voters that he was actually Christian, more went onto say that they would rather vote for an “American who was born here”. Again, the interviewer clarified that Obama was actually born in Kansas. “Oh”, some replied, “well, I just don’t trust him…….he’s black,” they concluded.

Lately, when I drive to town to town to do errands, I torture myself briefly by listening to conservative (aka mainstream) radio stations for as long as my stomach can take it. This is usually a matter of 3-4 minutes but long enough to hear the repeated discussions of Obama as “barack HUSSEIN Obama”. You can really only hear the HUSSEIN part followed by a faint Obama. Listeners calling in repeat this again and again… “HUSSEIN Obama…” This manipulation and hate/fear mongering propaganda, though not suprising, is painful to hear.

Today is monumental. Let it be a day of massive change in a hopeful, sane direction. VOTE VOTE VOTE!!!