You've probably had this maudlin e-mail forwarded to you sometime in the past decade. "To be a mother is like having a wound that never heals," it goes. Maudlin, yes, but there's some truth, there. I remember this every time I see a "IGTNT" headline. Or when I see a murderer's mug shot. I remember this every time I look at an old friend from high school, who lost her son somehow, and whose silent grief prevents me from asking her about it.
For me, it happened Christmas 1999.
This time ten years ago, my husband was driving me through a snowstorm to the hospital and I was, bleeding, and having contractions every 3 minutes apart. The baby, whom I could already feel kicking, was the result of months of studying, sleuthing, trying to keep a pregnancy going.
This story is personal. One might be able to eke a political message out of the need to cover infertility treatments (not ALL of us are Sarah Palins), I suppose, but then again, we're trying to eke the bare minimum coverage for everyone at this point. Perhaps I can take "community organizing" as my theme, as vague and glorious as that sounds. But, it's personal. So you can stop reading right here. Or you can come along with me, and remember. I have a wound that never stops trying to heal.
After Christmas Eve dinner at my sister's in 1999, and a bunch of gifts for the baby-to-be, I had some cramping that gnawed and grew. A quick sweep of the cervix revealed a glassy-feeling bulge that I at first refused to admit could be the fetal membranes. "Just a swollen cervix" I thought.
I asked everyone I knew in the ER if I would lose my baby.
"I'm allergic to OB cases" the nurse told me, rushing out of the room. She did find his heartbeat with the Doppler--it was the first time my husband had heard it. Hearing the heartbeat had never been a big emotional event for me, but it was for him. His face was so stricken.
Finally a doctor did a pelvic exam and said it was hopeless. I'm agnostic, and so is my husband, but I said to him in Spanish (because it seemed like such a private thing to say, and so many people were in the room) "Let's pray for this little soul who is about to die."
I had a boring job at the time, fraught with office politics, and I would sit at my desk and daydream about the baby, whom I believed to be a boy. I was so in love with that baby. Besotted.
What do you do when your love is about to die? Me, I started thinking, right there in the stirrups, about conceiving the next one, because anything else would have felt hopeless. And . . . I asked them to give me something strong, so that the baby, if he could feel anything,would suffer less when the end came.
All night the contractions woke me, making me grip the siderail, but they spread out, and by Christmas morning they were gone. The obstetrician ruptured the membranes, then, hoping to start something up. Labor. That was the oddest thing, trying to fight an urge to protect my baby to allow him use that little hook.
"Hold her down," the OB said to the assisting nurse, who leaned hard on my legs. And then the gush. That was when he died, cord prolapsed.
More waiting, and rerouting our dinner guests with some phone calls--I had had a big Christmas dinner planned. Cervadil finally did the trick and I had him, a half-pound boy, at supper. I thought he was gorgeous. Green fruit, to be sure, but gorgeous. A wonderful nurse treated his body with dignity and spoke matter-of-factly about him to us. She took photos and hand and foot prints, and found a sturdy white envelope box that would serve as his coffin.
It felt so queer to be leaving that hospital with him tucked under my arm rather than in my belly. I remember bringing him to the Christmas tree, opening the box, and wrapping him in a receiving blanket that someone had given him for Christmas the day before. My husband stood behind me and just sobbed. Later he told me he'd thought I would be "one of those women" who had a disconnect with reality and would treat the dead infant as live. I tucked a few toys in there, and some locks of our hair, and then set the box on our dresser, and slept like a dead woman.
On Boxing Day, we buried him. Not an ideal day for interment--my husband could barely break the frozen ground with a post hole digger, and would not let me try. My brother-in-law, who is built like an ox, finished the job, and I knelt in the snow pushing the box down as far as my arm would reach.
And there he is today, in our back yard under some lofty fir trees, along with a sibling lost a few years later in a much earlier miscarriage. Sometimes it almost seems as if someone else lost him, since so much good has happened since then and the depression is long gone, but not an hour goes by that I do not think of him. Not a single hour.
My custom has been to take a flower, a cookie, or some other goodie out to him on Christmas Eve and have a talk. The gist of it is always, "Thank you for being my first born son. I love you so much, wherever you are." Last night, I conjured his face and form in my mind's eye--a dark-haired boy with dimples, much like his younger brother, my son who lived.
I know that everyone handles the loss of an unborn child differently. My way was to search unrelentingly for answers. What went wrong? How to prevent it again?
What went wrong was that my uterus was deformed. "Bicornuate," came the diagnosis and not capable of stretching out and holding a baby past 20 weeks or so. What's more, my obstetrician had no good answer for me. "The uterus stretches more and each pregnancy will go later and later," he said, seemingly suggesting that I produce a couple of practice children in hope of taking a preemie home, eventually.
Nor did the net yield much in the way of information or support. Nothing organized or consistent, anyhow. Some sources echoed my OB-GYN. Fairly obsolete sources, I'm sad to say. Still others insisted that "bicornuate" was a diagnosis applied to way too many women, and that a "septate" uterus was more common and operable. The operation was fairly simple and the results approached that of a normal woman!
Hoping to establish a support group where women had help figuring this out, I started a little Yahoo Group about these uterine deformities ("mullerian anomalies") and did my best to organize women in the same boat. I dedicated it in my dead son's memory; his name is on the front page in block letters.
Another of my motives was just finding a story, a photograph, any evidence that operating on a septate uterus really was easy and effective. And it took a while, but evidence began to accumulate, as voice after voice answered back. A pregnant woman in Georgia. The husband of an expectant mother in Finland. A Mexican mother to a newborn girl. Even a mother of twins 12 miles from my house.
From a few dozen, the rolls swelled to 100, then 500, and so on. Now we number over 3,000. Physicians use it a resource of sorts (I collect data for one and perhaps someday two studies), and a physician donates his time answering some pretty important but arcane questions for the group. The group has had real-space meet ups, spin offs and celebrated all kinds of milestones. It has a FAQ of sorts, its own glossary and in-jokes. When I became pregnant again, the ladies of the community cheered for me, and when I miscarried again, they mourned with me. When finally I delivered a term baby, they sent me a tree to plant for him! And that particular triumph of mine has been eclipsed by similar triumphs a couple of hundred times over. Books cite us as a resource. The group is a collective labor of love and it is gold.
And it started with the opening of a deep wound, Christmas 1999.
Thank you, my darling son.