Eight Years
On the anniversary of the deaths of my mother and my daughter
Today is the anniversary of my baby daughter’s death, and of my mother’s death a year later. This is a piece I wrote when my youngest-and-now-toddler daughter was an infant, about the eight years during which we had miscarriages, dealt with infertility, buried my daughter and my mother, and had two daughters who lived. It’s behind a paywall because it’s so personal, and I’m not keen to have internet trolls pasting it everywhere. It needs a content warning for basically everything imaginable: child death, miscarriage, infertility, pregnancy, medical abuse, the death of a parent. It’s all there.
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” —Mary Oliver
My husband and I began trying for a baby the weekend of my best friend’s wedding. It was 2013. Back in those days, health insurance didn’t have to cover pregnancy unless you bought a rider and paid for it for a full year. We’d had our rider for a year, and it was time. I knew we’d get pregnant right away.
I sat on the floor, reading a book and blow drying my hair, fantasizing about the maternity clothes I’d wear when I quickly became pregnant. My mom called. She said she had lost the ability to read. She was having trouble with her words, too.
I told her it was probably just normal aging.
I worried it was a stroke.
We went to the wedding.
It took us four months to conceive the first baby. I told my mom on her 64th birthday. The baby was due on my birthday. It was beautiful symmetry. I met my mom at the mall to shop for maternity bras the next day. Petite people with large breasts know that they’re bound to misbehave early. “They need a proper cage so they don’t eat me,” I told my mom. She laughed. She forgot how to say bra and kept calling it a boob restrainer.
I bought books on homebirth. I started making my baby registry. I drew a comic of the baby talking to my husband. And then I started bleeding.
It was a miscarriage. One of those supposedly small tragedies no one is supposed to talk about. It’s not small when it’s you.