Today I sorted through the baby clothes we’ve saved. Hand-me-downs from our daughter, from friends, the few special things I bought in anticipation of our son before he died and never got to use, the few things I’ve bought, hoping against hope, for this baby to come.
“We’ve got some great baby things,” I call to my husband in the other room.
“Yup,” he says.
“We’ve got some great baby things, and I really, really want our baby to be alive and wear them. I really, really don’t want our baby to die and not to get to dress our baby in these clothes. I feel pretty strongly about that,” I say.
“Yup,” he says.
* * *
A friend who is a couple weeks ahead of me, pregnancy-wise, with her first child, checks in by email.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
“Fine,” I write, “except for those hours when I start panicking because I don’t feel the baby move and am convinced it’s dead.”
“Oh, I know!” she writes back. “When that happens to me, I just drink some orange juice!”
My midwives told me to drink orange juice the morning when I was sure my son had died. I drank the orange juice; nothing happened. My baby was dead.
I think to myself, You don’t know anything, friend who has never had a baby die. You don’t know what it feels like to have your baby stop moving for real. I don’t write back at all.
* * *
My husband’s father passes away, and we talk about Grandpa Joe’s death with our three year old.
“I don’t like it when people die,” she says.
“Me, neither,” I say.
“I don’t want our baby to die. I want our baby to stay alive the whole year long. I want our baby to stay alive the whole time, so I can teach it to crawl.”
“Me, too,” I say.
She leans over and shouts at my stomach, “Stay alive, baby!”
I say, “I tell the baby that every day.” Which is true. Every day I whisper to this baby, Stay with me. Just stay alive. When it moves I whisper, Good baby. Keep moving.
* * *
Strangers notice my belly and my daughter and smile. “So this is your second?”
“My third, actually,” I say. “I had a stillborn son last year.”
“Oh,” they say. “Well, don’t worry. I’m sure this one will be fine. Don’t worry.”
I stare at them blankly. Whatever could they mean? What could they be thinking?
* * *
One of my fellow Exhale columnists calls our attention to the blog of a family whose son got stuck with a shoulder dystocia during birth and died days later. I click over to his picture—a gorgeous, perfect newborn—and burst into tears.
* * *
You know the friend I wrote about last month? The wonderful friend/doula whose first baby died at the beginning of labor and who brought me to the candlelit vigil and who was the ideal person, in so many ways, to be at the birth of our stillborn son?
She was pregnant again, about five weeks behind me. We had her over for breakfast one morning before her prenatal exam at 22 weeks, and we had a lovely time, and then she went off to her prenatal and sat around chatting with the midwives for awhile and then they did the exam part and the midwives couldn’t find a heartbeat.
No heartbeat. Another stillbirth. Her second stillbirth. No live children yet. Another planned homebirth for a stillborn baby.
She’s doing amazingly well.
I have been semi-wrecked by the news—by this horrible confirmation that, indeed, this worst kind of lightning can strike the same person twice. And this friend is a better person than I am—a kinder, more compassionate person than I am. She doesn’t deserve this, and even though I am not as good a person as she is, you know what? I don’t deserve it to happen to me again, either. It’s very scary to not just think, but know, in this form of evidence, that it could.
But I’m doing okay, too.
* * *
The dread comes and goes. A gnawing worry that maybe it will happen again, maybe I’m not feeling enough movement, maybe something will go wrong. First it was coming about every ten days, then about once a week, then every three or four days, and now, as I reach thirty-one weeks, when I lost Day, it’s even more frequent.
I’m hoping that as I pass over the 31 week-mark, it will start to ebb away again, and leave me some peace. That once I reach, say, 36 weeks, I will start to focus on ordering an infant car seat and some nursing bras, getting my homebirth kit ready, finding a place to set up the tub, all that lovely stuff, and not be in constant reach of the dread.
There’s not much I can do it keep it at bay. I’m wearing two amulets now: a Jewish chamsa, a hand-shaped charm on a string of red beads that is supposed to ward off the evil eye; and a safety pin full of turquoise and carnelian beads that my midwives passed on from a Mexican border town midwife and which I faithfully pin to my underwear everyday. These things help, a little.
* * *
Still, nothing is a safety zone. Pregnancy is not a safety zone. The second trimester is not a safety zone. The third trimester is not a safety zone. Birth is not a safety zone. The days after birth are not a safety zone. There is no safety zone. So how can I stand to go forward with this love, this immense love I already have, for our baby-to-be? How can any of us go forward with all this hapless, hopeful love?
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