On Saturday -- yesterday -- I was 10 weeks pregnant. I’d happily discovered my condition at just under 6 weeks and my felicity was joined by Troy, my partner of seven years and father of our four year-old son, Henry. When the discovery was made I was a week away from debuting a one-woman show I’ve written about my sex life. I begin the show naked, and put on my clothes, beginning with a beautiful bra and panties, while singing songs about everyone I’ve had sex with. So before making an appointment with an OB I had more pressing obligations: I had to exchange my C-Cup Le Petit Trou Danielle Bralette from La Journelle for a D.
I had fun secretly pulling off the show with an embryo the size of a sweet pea in my uterus, imagining it was backing me up with some little harmonies. I also mapped out that our second performance would be when I was ten weeks and tried to foretell if my costumes would still fit. I began to re-write the show for later performances with a full belly and thought it would be a a great conceit. I’d been fantasizing about writing a musical meant just as a vehicle for pregnant women to perform. Then I realized that with a few changes I’d already written it.
On Tuesday I met with a new OB and after hearing that my uterus was growing tall and full we told Henry that there was a teeny baby in there and he sparkled with the news. On Thursday night, the last thing he said before he went to sleep was, “Mommy, I love the baby.”
But just before I had put him to bed I saw that I was spotting. And it was red. Soon after he’d fallen asleep I began cramping. At 2am I texted my mother and asked her to drive down from upstate to watch Henry while we went to the hospital. At 4 am we went to the emergency room in Brooklyn. Vitals and labs were taken and we sat in a dark room while an almost retired technician did a 30 minute ultrasound on my belly and then a 30 minute transvaginal ultrasound, staring at a screen facing away from us, nodding and clicking, and unable to tell us anything she knew. Her captures were sent wirelessly to Manhattan where they were reviewed by an OB who then relayed the news to the attending in Brooklyn who then relayed the news quietly and reverently to us, the only words of which I can now only remember cinematically as “blah blah blah fetal demise blah blah blah.” Then there was a shift change and the new attending spoke to me quietly and reverently, while Troy was moving the car for street cleaning, and explained that though the heart I’d just made -- I really enjoyed talking that way, “What are you up to today?” “Oh you know, just making a new brain.” -- though the heart had stopped beating and my pregnancy was no longer viable, my uterus was still closed. They gave me papers with the diagnosis “incomplete miscarriage” and sent me home to let nature be my MD.
As we came out into a normal Brooklyn Friday morning, not humorless enough to not appreciate the irony of what I for a minute thought said "Failed Miscarriage," and drove to Court Street for smoothies, my insides still felt strong and taut and I had the image of my uterus as a mama elephant who refused to leave her dead calf.
We recently bought a pile of Victorian lumber in upstate New York that I am pretty in love with and so we packed up groceries and toys and crappy sweatpants and drove through rush hour traffic to land in our new king-sized bed, really the only piece of furniture we’ve purchased for the empty and echoing house. Because a pregnant lady doesn't want to sleep on the floor and soon we'd have two children wanting to share the space.
The doctor, and the paperwork with which he sent me home, had both said for me to expect my uterus to “expel some fetal tissue.” I pressed the doctor about this because it sounded potentially hypo-bolic (which apparently is not actually a word). “When you say this, you mean that the embryo comes out and I will see it.” I said. “No,” he maintained, “ you will not see the embryo, you will see a sac the size of a grape.”
We arrived at the house and sometime before bed and really without pain or ceremony, the embryo came out into the toilet. The doctor was not was not right. It looked a lot like the Baby Center pictures I was emailed every Saturday showing me how the burgeoning fetus was developing. I stood over it wondering what I was meant to do, fish it out and bury it or flush it like a dead goldfish? That sounds like a joke but it is really only meant as a genuine question. I mourn without religion. What am I meant to think about this piece of my flesh now that its heartbeat has stopped and doesn’t my philosophy feel better treating as such? Isn’t it weird for me to try and imbue it with qualities that are meant to be respected as anything other than what it is, tissue that is meant to disappear back to the earth and the water, just like all the other will.
Within the hour I began a strange labor where contractions came in the form of convulsant cramps -- I had been warned by the doctors that the cramps would be like bad period cramps and they were right about the level of pain but not about the activity. These cramps were paroxysms, intense contractions of my uterus which had so much work to do once it had discharged its concern, to expel all that had been required to try to make the embryo grow. My uterus felt like it was vomiting. For the next 10 hours I labored the contents of my uterus. There was defecation and vomiting and we filled a contractor bag of bath towels soaked in blood and tissue. At this point, I was passing out and the bleeding was not subsiding and I could no longer process thought or sit up and I asked Troy to call an ambulance.
The paramedics hooked up an IV while bouncing down our country road and I became lucid enough to be horrified that I was out of the house without a bra and dirty with feces, blood, vomit, and sweat.
Soon a bag of fluids and two sublingual Zofran tabs pulled me out of the primal story of the Victorian farmhouse and pushed me into fluorescence and stability. 6 hours later a much more expedient belly and vaginal sonogram showed the empty spoils of my uterus’ hard work and I was released with more wishes for a brighter weekend, this time with a prescription for Zofran just in case.
I would have written this down today no matter what day it was but it does happen to be Mother’s Day. Like most reasonable humans I find the holiday to be a pile of bullshit but also like most, I love spring flowers, children’s drawings, and expressions of respect and love.
And when I think about it, just the words fetus and conception seem to me to have been co-opted by religion and stolen from biology. We are of course sad to have so sunnily faced the prospect of having another child and then lost the opportunity. But we are also atheists and humanists and devoted to biology and astronomy and geology. We have no regrets that this was a deep felt introduction to the circle of life for our son, especially as I think Troy and I agree that the society we live in prefers for things like this to be other than to be us.
Getting pregnant before I was meant to perform my show and becoming un-pregnant before I am meant to perform it again are logistically tricky. I think of stories I hear of producers of Broadway shows blaming their star for becoming pregnant during its success. I think of the primitive screams and ooze that took over my body over the last 48 hours, my body that needs to belt to a C and be naked in public without bleeding and sell 37 more tickets by Wednesday.
And then I love Mother’s Day. I was born with a body that has the potential to make life. I was born with a body that can deny me that potential. I was born with the right to decide if I want to try to make life with it. I can be so empowered by my reproductive system and one-hundred-percent at its mercy at the same time. And what am I if not a breathing paradox? And isn't that the majesty that I think should free everyone from religion?
Happy Mother’s Day. To women. Those parts down there are beautiful and merciless and no matter what you do with them or what they do to you, you deserve respect and lilacs.