I Had a Miscarriage by Jessica Zucker (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

to become a parent. No matter how much you love your child. Because as humans, we are vulnerable. We are not impenetrable. We are affected by what came before. We are shaped by our experiences. And life has a way of throwing us off course sometimes—which can include pregnancy loss but also might show itself within the parenting landscape afterward. Whether you look in the mirror in those early days of motherhood and are all ear-to-ear grins or can barely even recognize yourself—barraged by disquieting, unexpected feelings—you are a mother. Don’t discount your feelings. Don’t minimize them. If you don’t feel you can do it for yourself, do it for them. Do it because you now have their eyes looking to you, and because what we model in the way we take care of ourselves (or don’t) matters.

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Once my own anxiety softened—and then at long last, evaporated—I found myself back in a sturdy place from which to parent. Free from darting thoughts of worry, I embraced Noa’s place in our family and was all the more present in my interactions with Liev too. This took time. It took effort. It still does.

Even something so pure and simple as my daughter’s unconditional love was not immune to the far-reaching reins of my trauma. This is a situation many rainbow babies may not even know they’ve found themselves in—or that they’ve survived. But oh, how grateful I was to have transcended it. I often think about a phase she went through as a toddler—when she was firmly in a period of wanting to be glued to me, as if she wished we could literally merge. She wanted me by her side at all times. It was as if she remembered where she originated. This rainbow baby of mine truly makes me yearn for a pause button; a way to stop, or at the very least slow, the passage of time. Sometimes she stares at me with a knowing look, takes my face in her hands, and says, “Mommy, I grew in your body!” as if to express gratitude that everything went smoothly. As if she’s proud to have formed inside me. We made it. This girl, this love, this peace. We made it. And although life brings countless opportunities for distractions from emotional intimacy, I still want nothing more than to cozy up with this sweet one—to giggle, explore, gnaw on her edible feet, and live off of her soul-healing cuddles. I want to have forever with her, endless opportunities for us to learn together. She, no doubt, is a teacher. My teacher.

In anticipation of Noa’s first birthday, I wrote a mini ode to her. An illustration of what led to her and what has ensued since. I don’t know when, or if, I’ll ever show it to her. But I reread it often, reflecting on the rainbow that glowed over the hills of Hollywood as I labored, the one that held such significance, that yielded a sense of corporeal calm. I wrote of pushing her into the world, moaning with hope and fortitude. I transcribed the feeling of deep connection to her as I exhaled the fear that accompanied my pregnancy. I want her to know, in no uncertain terms, that I treasure the emotional roller coaster that led to her. I did not want it, but now that I have it I wouldn’t trade it away if I could.

I believe that, on some level, my darling girl somehow just knows. One morning she pranced out of her room, excitedly snuggled into bed with the rest of my brood, and said with unwavering pride, “I’m grateful for my family!” My son promptly kissed her all over and exclaimed that her feet smelled like cupcakes; my husband giggled and took her into his arms; I simultaneously welled up and grew a huge smile on my face. This is the unique place that rainbow babies occupy in families: in a way, they carry the complexity of grief we felt as well as the relief we might now feel. That is the bittersweet beauty of rainbows.

13

“Things. Things to have, and to hold, and to see, and to treasure.”

After the dreaded unmedicated D&C procedure was finally over, anchored to a reality I could barely comprehend by unruly smelling salts and salted crackers, I watched as my body slowly but surely stopped shaking. I’d lost a lot that day: a baby, a great deal of blood, an imagined future, not to mention any remaining shred of innocence I was privileged enough to still have had at forty years of age. My body reeled. My psyche too. I was taken from my doctor’s office and out of the building to our car in a wheelchair. Concerned about the possibility of me fainting from the significant blood loss, the doctors wanted to play it safe. And before I could fully embrace what had been taken from me, we were headed home—prescriptions in hand and a sip of juice to help stabilize me. Her remains stayed behind, to be sent off to the lab and analyzed. All we had were snapshots. Of her brief existence—of this liminal space we found ourselves in. Nothing more.

We took heart in knowing the fetal remains would be tested, to help determine why this unwonted experience happened at all. But that was all we thought to do. We didn’t think to ask about cremation, a ceremony, a memory box. Miscarriage doesn’t precipitate these conversations in the medical setting—about handprints, ashes, or funerals—whereas stillbirths often do. If I had experienced a stillbirth—the differentiation between these traumatic losses delineated by just four weeks, as the stillbirth term is applied to pregnancies at or past twenty weeks gestation—these options would have been presented to me. But due to what, at the time, felt like an arbitrary timeline, I was left without any tangible courses of action. No way to memorialize the life lost, save what occurred in my mind. My husband and I knew we’d