If all goes well, in a few weeks I’ll start feeling this new baby’s movement—“the quickening,” they call it, which always sounds like the title of a really spooky horror movie to me. And I’m not a fan of horror movies. In fact, I don’t like them at all.
I don’t like where I am emotionally at this stage of my pregnancy at all, either. It feels like a horror movie. I’ve been in this weird ditch, a psychic limbo, in the few weeks after the non-stop miscarriage anxiety of the first trimester, the constant nausea, the novelty, but before really starting to show, to feel pregnant—before the quickening. I know, from my two previous pregnancies, how much feeling that baby move inside me—redoubtable, independent life churning inside of my own—drives home the truth, the concrete evidence, of a baby to come.
I want to start feeling that with this baby. I want it, I anticipate it, I invite it in. But I know it will also haunt and torment me.
Because, of course, ceasing to feel movement is what signaled my last baby’s death: after fifteen solid weeks of kick kick kicking, no more kicks. It wasn’t that dramatic when it happened; in fact, it took me a few days to really figure it out. No trauma had occurred. There was no horror movie blow: no bloody scene, no ominous phone call. I just, over the course of a few days, stopped feeling pregnant, stopped feeling movement. Where’s my baby?, I wondered. And then I knew he was gone.
God damn it, I don’t want to go through that again. Not ever again.
* * *
I did something unusual when my son Day died in utero at thirty-one weeks: I waited to go into labor naturally and I made a plan to birth him at home. Birthing at home had actually been my plan all along, my family’s plan, as it had been with my older child, but the fact that I stuck to that plan after my son died is pretty unusual, since few women in this country choose homebirth, and even fewer choose to carry a dead baby inside them and wait for the birth to come when it comes.
But let me tell you: that birth was not a horror movie.
It could have been: we waited three weeks for my body to go into labor, three emotionally scary weeks, and during that time my midwives prepared me for the idea that when I did get to meet my son, he might not look so good. In fact, he might be a little monstrous: decayed, sour-smelling. A person who had been dead for a long time. A corpse.
I also had premonitions that the birth itself would be awful, grief-stricken,and that once my son was born I would lie prostrate on the floor and scream obscenities at the heavens, tearing my hair out, weeping over his lifeless body.
None of that happened. Instead, as I had hoped might come of choosing homebirth for my stillborn child, we had the most peaceful, sacred birth—almost serene—surrounded by loving caregivers. Yes, there was weeping, but there was also joy and pride and beauty. Yes, my son’s skin was scarlet and fragile, but he was a gorgeous, whole boy, a real baby, and everyone held him and exclaimed over him like he was any other precious newborn. It was gentle and sad and sweet and awful and perfect and right. There was really nothing horrific about that birth, nothing that feltdangerous or gory, and nothing haunts me about it. I’m so glad we made the choice we did. I’m so glad we met Day that way, said goodbye to him that way.
But God damn it, I don’t want to go through that again. Not ever again.
* * *
As I write this, it’s my fourteenth week, and as I said, I started feeling movement with Day at fifteen weeks, so next week is looming really large for me. I can hardly wait for it, and if it doesn’t come like clockwork on Week Fifteen, Day 1, I don’t know how I’ll handle it. Oh, and did I mention that Week Fifteen, Day 1 corresponds almost exactly to the day on which I stopped feeling movement last year? One year ago today, her life changed forever with the death of her son. Now, it’s the anniversary of that death, and The Quickening is about to begin..or will it?!. Horror movie plot, anyone?
But once the quickening does come, assuming it comes (please, whoever is out there, I beg of you, let it come), I don’t know how I’ll handle that, either. Am I going to be one of those paranoid pregnant women walking around with her little kick count notebook, timing every roll and poke, refusing to lift a box or hurry down the street for fear of hurting the baby? Am I going to spend every day of the next twenty-plus weeks wringing my hands over feeling or not feeling a kick, waiting, powerless, like some horror movie victim for terror to inevitably strike?
I was a pretty nonchalant pregnant woman the first two times around, and I prided myself on that. I truly believe that being pregnant is a natural thing, as is giving birth, that millions of women have done it before and are doing it right now, it’s no big deal, la dee da.
I’m not so nonchalant this time out. Not after my stillbirth. We’re planning another low-key, low-tech pregnancy and homebirth, because one thing I know is that no amount of technology or fancy testing could have stopped Day from dying. This time around, though, I didn’t tell anyone until I crossed the twelve week line, heard a heartbeat on the Dopplex. This time around, I held off on making baby-related plans as long as I possibly could. This time around, most everything is edged with some fear. Already I’ve been waging an all-out propaganda campaign on my unborn child: Oh my gosh, our family is so awesome, I whisper to my fetus while stopped at a traffic light in the car. You have the best dad, and your sister can’t wait to meet you. You’re going to be so loved. And just wait until you taste breastmilk—yum! Stay with me, kiddo. Just stay with me. You can do it.
When it comes, if it comes, what will the quickening tell me, do to me? It will no doubt bond me even closer to this baby. And it will bring more fear as well: the fear that something can and might go wrong. And this is not an idle fear, not the generalized anxiety like many pregnant women have, but the kind of real fear born out of real experience. And with thatfear comes the knowledge (and the additional layers of associated fear) that the deeper I get into this pregnancy, the harder it will be if that horrible something occurs.
I really don’t want to spend the rest of my pregnancy in a horror movie. And I don’t think it will be like that, not really, not minute to minute. But there’s something truly inescapable about the innate terror of trying again after loss.
The Quickening: Beware. Coming Soon to a Theater Near You.
[Author’s note: Due to this magazine’s production schedule and my own writing deadlines, these columns appear quite a bit after the moment in which I wrote them. For clarification, I got pregnant in late August, and am due in mid-May. This was written in late November 2008, when I was about fourteen weeks pregnant.]