Heartbeats

           Mother’s Day 2009. It wasn’t my first Mother’s Day.  As a matter of fact, I had been a mother for well over two years, but this Mother’s Day in particular was a turning point for me.  When I had given birth to my daughter, Tess, in 2006 I was 33.  You might expect that her birth would have clued me in to the fact that yes, indeed, I was an adult, but it did not.  In fact, I used to think (and this is the stuff of fantasies . . .) that people seeing me with Tess would assume that I was her babysitter.  Right.  If I happened to be out with both my daughter and my mother, I was absolutely certain that people believed I was the older sister and my mother was just one of those “older” mothers.  After all, I looked far too young to be a mother.  At 33.  At 33 with a small child, which equals very little sleep.  Delusional?  Maybe just a little.  Did I mention the lack of sleep?  Regardless, I was thrilled to be a mother (even if I couldn’t fully believe I was a mother – I mean really, they trust me to raise this amazing, perfect little person?  Are they crazy?)and fully convinced that when we decided to have a second child it would be easy and I’d continue to amaze people with my youthful vitality.

All of this started to change when my husband and I began trying to expand our family.  We assumed that since getting pregnant with Tess had been so easy (within a month of trying, I was knocked up.  John was torn between pride in his masculinity and grief for all of the “practice” he no longer needed to be having) having number two would be a breeze.  At first, it seemed that it would be so simple the second time.  Again, I was pregnant almost immediately.  After the miscarriage, I told myself that it was a random fluke and I focused on getting pregnant again as quickly as safely possible.  Again, fertility was not an issue.  After the second miscarriage, I had all the tests done and was told that there was no medical reason why we couldn’t have another healthy child.  Bad luck, I told myself.  A second random fluke.  And yet I suddenly realized that not only did I feel every one of my (then) 35 years, I looked them too.  Sometimes more.  I was a mother of a toddler, after all.  But was I really an adult?

Mother’s Day 2009.  Pregnant for the third time in ten months, bleeding regularly, living in hope and fear for the little life inside me.  This time we had seen the heartbeat, evidence that this baby was strong and might outlive the unexplained uterine bleeding I was experiencing.  We had been in and out of the doctor’s office so many times in the past ten days, always hearing the same: “We have to wait and see; this could go either way.  Don’t lift anything heavy, and come in if things change dramatically.”  I was feeling regular morning sickness, a good sign (who would have thought that I would ever welcome nausea, but I did!) and the bleeding seemed to be letting up, all of which made me think that the past weeks of being unable to pick up my daughter were going to pay off.  Then, as I read bed time stories to my beloved girl (who had been hastily moved into her big girl bed in her big girl room due to my condition), I felt it happen.  I was losing the baby.

With the first two miscarriages, even though the babies were never viable, my body held on and I needed a D & C.  With this little one, the only one that had ever had a heartbeat, the only one that had ever really had any chance, my body was betraying me and rejecting the baby I so desperately wanted.  I left my daughter’s room mid-story to run to the bathroom, where I passed her baby brother or sister into the cup from her potty chair.  I was devastated.  My baby had such perfect, such tiny little hands.  I cried as I passed more clots, but realized that I was still a mother and I had a job to finish.  So, I pulled myself together, washed my face and hands, stilled my tears, and went back to my daughter to finish putting her to bed.  In that moment, a moment of profound loss and grief, I put aside my needs to care for my daughter.  Since then, I find my heart breaking regularly for women everywhere who have to deal with the loss of a child.  My heart especially breaks for those women who suffer these losses without the consolation of a healthy, living child.  My heart breaks for my own three losses, my three stars in the night sky.  It was in that moment of loss and pain that I truly became an adult.  Being a mother was not enough to make me feel like an adult, but putting my motherhood above my own devastating grief made me an adult in a heartbeat.

I wrote this essay for a magazine contest. It was the first time I put on paper any of what I went through during those devastating 10 months, and it was raw. It still is raw. I really felt like this essay was something that other women needed to read, so when the winner turned out to be something about bowling (or riding a bike, something along those lines. Yes, it was a metaphor for something bigger like no longer worrying about mommy and daddy’s approval or something like that, but still. It was about a sport. And not a particularly challenging one at that) I felt betrayed. Silly? Maybe. But grief and pain isn’t rational. So I bottled up my emotions all over again and tried to still the voice in my head that kept whispering that I needed to be trying to reach others with my story.  But that voice won’t be silenced. Will anyone ever read my words? Will they be the lifeline I want them to be? I have no control over that. But I truly, deeply feel like I need to be putting them out into the universe.  And maybe someday, someone who needs to hear them will. And will for just a moment feel a little less alone.