The Sun Still Shines on the Worst Day of Your Life

The Dentist’s Office, the Window Full of Great Boulders by Rebecca Pyle

I am going to tell you something that you won’t believe. It is too much, too horrible, too perfect a metaphor. As a writer, I would never use it, because it would be like moving paper dolls through an elaborate diorama, some Regency ladies’ game. But because it happened, it is true and all of those other things, too. Because it is true, it is all I have.
          The sun was shining the day I found out that I carried a headless baby.
          Can I call it a baby? Does that make you uncomfortable? Is it a manipulation? Here is another true thing: it makes me uncomfortable. For all these years that have passed—I will date myself soon—I have referred to the fetus. Fetus seems impersonal, medical, inhuman, which is bad storytelling. It is also entirely the point.
           I went to a movie theater, because I did not want to go home. I did not want to think or feel, and I said to my fiancé, “Let’s go to a movie.” We went to the closest theater and stood at the ticket counter. My only question, “What’s playing now?” Midday, we were the only people there. Everything was too bright, the orange-patterned carpet, the glass-fronted concessions counter, the movie posters and red “velvet” ropes. I chose the one movie about to start, so we would not have to miss the beginning and would not have to spend another moment in that glaring lobby. We bought tickets to Scream and walked numbly into the theater.
          Within minutes, Drew Barrymore had been strung up and eviscerated. The dark quiet backyard. The old, massive, leafless tree—or was it summer, full green? Maybe both, maybe an old, dead tree in a lush landscape, for the juxtaposition? I have never revisited the movie. I know I could have an answer in minutes and tell you definitively, but I won’t. What is so horrible and perfect a metaphor is the evisceration. A young woman’s belly is sliced open and her guts spill forth to hang down and lie on the ground beneath her, under the arms of the massive tree, under the quiet expanse of the night sky.
          I told you so.
          I don’t remember the rest of the movie—the mask, teenagers, running, hiding, screaming, gore. All the stuff of horror that I don’t like, don’t give any time or attention to. But that one image, even if it has grown fuzzy around the edges and I don’t know if the tree is leafless or green, stunned me. Zap! I went into the theater to disappear and that image was like being hit with a cattle prod.
                                                                

When I was in junior high school, I had a biology teacher who encouraged my passion for the natural sciences by giving me a biological supply company catalog or two. I used my own money from babysitting to order a dissection tray and pins, dissection kit with scalpels, tweezers, probes, etc., and, of course, specimens. I dissected a large white rat (Rattus norvegicus), a pregnant dogfish shark (Squalus acanthias), among other things, on the deck in our suburban neighborhood. I kept a notebook, detailing my observations and attempting to sketch what I saw. My parents’ support was passive. My hobby was, no doubt, unusual for a girl of thirteen or fourteen. Also, repulsive and possibly confusing, so while my parents never put down my pursuit, neither did they praise it. They simply let me be weird in my own way. I suppose I had to give my mom cash to write checks for my mail order purchases, and that is the clearest indication of support in my memory. A remark made later, during my college years, shows how she accepted my pastime: “I figured with biology you’d at least get a good job.” Right. Sorry, Mom. I switched majors from biology to theatre. Art ultimately won over science. But it was a long match, very long.
          Some ten years later, my dissection kit tucked in the back of my childhood closet, I worked in a university office as an administrative associate. The office happened to be one floor of a library building. My work phone rang and I answered, “University of Blank, Retention Services, this is Alida. How can I help you?” It was for me, my obstetrician’s office. A woman told me, with the calm, matter-of-fact tone of a professional, that my mAFP, maternal alpha fetal protein, level came back very high and they had scheduled an emergency ultrasound for me the next morning.
          Other women would probably latch on to the word “emergency,” alarm bells tripping in their inner ears. I remained calm, even as my core constricted. Clench. Ignore. Gather information. Get answers. I focused on “mAFP.” “What does that mean?” I asked. The woman hesitated, calculating how to answer. She did not know me, could not have imagined my long blonde hair in a braid as I bent over my dissection tray, engrossed by the possibilities of life. She had only one name for me: patient; maybe two: expectant mother. “It could be nothing, a false test result, which is why we’re doing the ultrasound.” She didn’t know who she was dealing with. Science Girl pressed on, “And if it is something?” She finally admitted it could indicate spina bifida.
          Science Girl got busy.
          Sitting at my work computer, I looked up spina bifida online. I read. I looked hard at pictures of people in wheelchairs. When my lunch break came, I went upstairs and tunneled into the stacks. I opened book after musty book, seeking knowledge, because knowledge is power.
          Old medical texts contain not only information, but also images, the kind we disapprove of, of jars filled with bodies and formaldehyde or nude children with black bars across their eyes, displaying their deformities with helpless grace, from an era we hope is bygone. Maybe it’s just sanitized. I went back to my desk to finish the work day. Nothing was certain. The pictures I had seen in the stacks did not apply to me. There was only one thing to do: get the emergency ultrasound in the morning.
          I spared my fiancé the report from my lunch hour. I instead mimicked the woman on the phone. “It could be nothing.” It could be spina bifida, but it could be nothing.
                                                                

My fiancé and I sat in a waiting room, surrounded by pregnant women flipping idly through magazines, some expectant fathers, too. I do not recall if we held hands in hope or isolated ourselves in fear, but we were some shade of anxious. The other women, they all had their babies in common and shared those knowing glances and friendly half smiles that said, “So exciting, isn’t it?” I felt like an intruder with my secret, but until I had my answer, I could still be one of them. Right?
          Only a few months into this relationship, I had become pregnant. Foolishly, naïvely, carelessly pregnant. I believed myself smart and cautious, but apparently not enough of either. When the test showed positive, I thought, So, this is what’s next in my life. There was no panic, just dull acceptance and curiosity. I was twenty-five. It was fall. The sun was shining that day, too.
          I took my boyfriend home to meet my parents. I told them I was going to have the baby and then I would think about marriage. On Christmas Eve, I introduced my boyfriend to my uncle. “This is my boyfriend, Blank.” Before my uncle could reply nice to meet you, my mother interjected, “You mean fiancé.” She said it lightly, with a smile, but the subtext was far from lost on me. It was unacceptable, my state, and needed to be corrected, sanctioned. By marriage. We went back and shopped for a ring.
          We left the women in the waiting room with their babies and their magazines and were led back to a room cramped with an examination table and large console, a chair, and a rolling stool for the doctor. It had no windows, and I don’t remember any pictures on the walls, no new babies or landscapes or abstracts, just flat, soft gray. Maybe beige. It was a room with one purpose, and it was not to comfort the patient.
          A technician sat at the machine and wheeled her stool between my belly and the console, making small paddling movements with her feet. She pressed the wand into my jellied abdomen, slid it one direction then another, eyes on the monitor—always the monitor, never me. My belly was small. I’d only just begun to show, had only just told my boss and coworkers. Jumped that gun. Somber, solemn, quiet, gray; I asked what she was doing, what she saw. “I’m just getting some images and taking measurements for the doctor,” she non-answered. When she left us, she did not meet our eyes.
          The doctor came in and sat on the stool, paddled herself to my side. She spoke, and tears shot out of my eyes, tears I did not know were in me. She said words that made my head swim. I couldn’t see her for all the tears. Science Girl sat in the corner, dunce hat perched on crown—knowledge is not power. The doctor showed me to a bathroom across the hall, a kindness and a relief. I had to drink and hold it before the appointment, so my full bladder could buoy up my womb. I cried in there, too. We were led by someone down a hallway through the back of the clinic and out a secret door into the building’s wide hallway. We were being spared. They were being spared.
          It was a mercy not to go the way we came. I had no desire to pass through the expectant mothers with their bellies and eagerness, to feel their stares as their half smiles fell off their faces and broke on the floor. And they were spared the sight of us, our faces crushed by sudden loss, streaming wetness. Was the mercy for me or for them?
          We were led (we could have done nothing on our own) into an elevator and up, down another hallway, and delivered to the office of a counselor. We were invited to sit with her.
          The fluidity of it all impressed me. I had received a call at work no more than twenty-four hours before, and here I was being passed from player to player, specialist to specialist, with an efficiency that seemed a marvel. All things medical necessitate long stretches of idle time, after all. It is for this we have the ubiquitous waiting room. This was a well-practiced play. They did it gently, the latex gloves of their profession suddenly kid. My only conclusion, drawn over time, they had known all along.
          The genetics counselor explained and answered questions in the quiet voice people reserve for hospitals and funeral homes, a voice that respectfully, kindly, makes room for another’s collapse.
          I began to hear words again. I let Science Girl face forward so she could be useful. Neural tube defect. The counselor picked up a sheet of paper and rolled it into a tube. The spinal cord is the first thing to form in the body. The cells make a tube, but in a neural tube defect they don’t seal properly. Anencephaly. With anencephaly, the tube doesn’t seal at the top. She held her paper tube so the top of it flared open, the edges cutting a deep vertical V where there should be a solid wall.
          Doctors and their dead languages! Every profession loves its jargon, causing the layperson a certain amount of translation and mental gymnastics.
          Cephalus: a Greek hero figure, who must have had a big head.
          encephal: the root word, of or pertaining to the brain
          –y: suffix, condition or process
          a–/an–: prefix, not, without
          All of this is a fancy way of saying in ancient Greek “no brain.” I could understand that without Science Girl’s help. And as soon as I did, something happened. In that instant, I did not carry a baby, but a parasitic mass of cells. A no-brained-thing resided in my body.
          The counselor asked if we knew what we wanted to do. Zap! Again. “What do you mean?” I asked. Surely there was only one thing to do, one sound, medical, safe path to take. She explained that some people feel the time in utero is their baby’s natural lifespan—she stopped short of saying God-given—and they carry to term and deliver. This was, in the truest sense of the word, inconceivable to me.
          I have images locked in my memory of babies born with anencephaly. Their faces are topped by cute little stocking caps stretched flat over an empty and partially formed skull cavity. Their eyes are closed. They look alive but wrong, tragic, and deeply, deeply sad. Anencephalic babies might, but don’t always, have a brainstem. Outside the womb, they may live a few days or not at all.
          My fiancé and I spoke very little about what was happening, but he claimed later that from where he sat he could see the monitor during the ultrasound. He said there were no eyes. The head had not formed enough for eyes. He also said it was a girl. I have never believed him. How could an untrained eye make out anything for certain? But then again, they had me positioned where I could see nothing, and I tried. We were sent for an “emergency” ultrasound at a special clinic, so maybe the image was clearer than I think. Maybe a layperson could make it out. Whether he’s right or wrong, it’s another image I do not need to carry through life, but do. I do know that my chart reads “severe anencephaly.” Severe. Severe, I thought. There either is or is not a brain. How can you have severe anencephaly?
          I pushed the word, the thought, the image back into a deep pocket of my mind. Even Science Girl let it go.
          Another appointment was made for me, and the patient was passed to another set of professional hands at another specialty clinic. Or if not specialty clinics per se, clinics with special equipment for special procedures that my regular obstetrician did not handle. But first I had to get through a week between appointments.
                                                                

We left the counselor. The sun was shining. We went to a movie theater.
                                                                

The phone rang in the kitchen at the back of our apartment, a two-bedroom near the university. We hadn’t lived there long and hadn’t done anything with the second bedroom yet. Other than the mattress we bought new, everything was secondhand and mismatched. That’s how young we were. How young I was. My fiancé was gone, but I don’t know where, to pick up some food maybe, so I was alone in the apartment. I answered, because that’s what you did back then. “Hello?”
          My mom spoke my name.
          That’s all it took to topple the dam. I bawled, “I lost the baby.”
          That may be the last time I used that word, baby, at least for many years to come. I did not speak of it, and if I did—on an extremely rare occasion with a very trusted friend—I choked on words like fetus and pregnancy loss. Because what did I lose? Really? Can you answer that question for me? When is the dividing collection of cells inside a uterus a baby? Science Girl can tell you that sperm plus egg equals zygote, which begins the work of cellular division, becoming a mass of cells called a blastocyst, which implants in the uterine wall. The blastocyst becomes an embryo only fifteen days after conception. The embryo forms three layers of cells that begin to fold in on itself to form an oblong body—and here it goes wrong. Still, it keeps differentiating itself into parts, including the non-baby, disposable parts, like the amniotic sac, placenta, and umbilical cord. Nine weeks in, the embryo graduates, having attained the status fetus. The head is the same length as its body. It no longer looks like the Elephant Man, but is still alien. The minute toes are the first structures to possibly elicit maternal coos, at least giving one a focal point other than the bulbous head and misplaced face, like a Mr. Potato Head wearing Junior’s features. Science Girl eats that shit up. Fascinating.
          But that day in my apartment kitchen, I had been stunned and numbed and have no idea what I was doing before the phone rang—stood there not moving, thinking, feeling, processing anything. I heard my name spoken a thousand miles away, and I broke.
          “I lost the baby.”
          My mom told me she had a feeling she needed to call me. She offered to come down, plane-ticket-cross-country down. I said no. I said there was nothing she could do, so there was no reason to bother. I would be fine.
          I get that from her. Stoically bearing your burdens, moving forward, not complaining, not troubling others, definitely not asking for help. I am also very practical. What would she have done? I was still able-bodied. I had my fiancé for help. Right? So I said no thank you. I have since learned things I didn’t know then, like how to accept help. I’m still not great at it, better at accepting it than asking for it. I wonder how the course of things might have changed if I had said yes. Yes, I need you. Yes, I am worth the airfare. Yes, I want you to sit with me and hold my hand. Yes, just yes.
          That day changed my life. It’s not that I wasn’t the same afterwards. Mostly I was and partly I wasn’t. But I made choices that I would not have otherwise made. I became a pretender. I lied to myself. I did not mean to fake my life, to fake me, but I couldn’t help it. It’s just how zombies are. If I had accepted my mom’s offer to come down, who knows what would be different.
          The Butterfly Effect.
                                                                

I went back to work. I dragged myself through long days of newly informed coworkers smiling at me. One coworker told me I was glowing. Yeah, right, I thought. It must’ve been her imagination, because I no longer carried the happy anticipation of motherhood, the expectation of baby, the question of boy or girl. I felt like a sandwich board had been pressed onto my shoulders, its message: Doom. Only they couldn’t see it for all my maternal radiance. Congratulations pelted my skin all week, and I kept standing, kept walking. Zap! Zap! On the appointed morning, my fiancé called in for me and said I had “lost the baby.” He drove me to the next doctor.
          On the way in, the radio informed me that it was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
          Just sit with that a moment.
          This surreal synchronicity pinched a nerve in my body. Coincidence? Irony? Whatever it was, it connected me to something big and ugly. Bodily autonomy in every sense possible has got to be the primary human right. If you are not sovereign in your own skin, what are you? But I never thought I would have more than a philosophical, ethical, political interest in the question. And I did; I had poured my youthful energy for causes into Amnesty International. From junior high through college, I wrote letters that went all over the world. I wrote and directed two plays about the death penalty. I cofounded my high school chapter and did a stint as president of my college chapter. Activism, peaceful, non-radical activism with lots of writing, that defined my involvement in the issues. Whether it means anything or not, it has always struck me that it was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
          Did you know feticide is a word?
          Of course it is.
          I had no foreknowledge of what was going to happen. I mean none. I was raised in polite society. This was post-Hollywood Code but pre-streaming. This sort of thing was done, but not portrayed. If someone went there, it was dirty, shameful, not seen but merely referenced. Okay, I wasn’t raised by Puritans, true. I did see Karen Finley, the performance artist, live once. Honestly, I appreciated Finley and her ilk in a philosophical, cultural, political way, but I did not actually enjoy the show. It made me uncomfortable. I did buy a signed copy of her book, so there. My point is that if what was happening to me had ever been portrayed, it had not been done honestly to the best of my very limited knowledge.
          Now, thanks to streaming and many more women shaping the stories we all consume, I’ve seen a number of depictions of the procedure. I still haven’t seen one that feels wholly honest or that matches my experience. A woman decides to get it done. She enters a clinic, fills out paperwork, affirms her choice, lies back and thinks of her better life, then walks out of the clinic, talking to her best friend who supports her choice fully. Yes. Right. The clinician tells our heroine no heavy machinery, hence the friend. But even if I could show all those versions of “it” to my young self, I still would’ve been clueless. And Science Girl? After the lunch hour in the stacks debacle, she was shut out, services no longer required.
          Here’s what happened to me.
          I saw an obstetrician, a man, with an ordinary doctor’s office. He examined me for himself. I respect that; not just taking the referring clinic’s word for it. He spoke aloud as he made notes on my chart, whether for his benefit or his nurse’s, I don’t know. Not for mine. I felt rather invisible in his office, but I didn’t care. It was a relief not to have to pretend or smile. I could shuffle in, sit, mumble, change into the paper gown, be worked on and over and my zombie self was just fine. But enough of me rattled around inside that I was still paying attention. This is where I heard “severe anencephaly.” And he did that thing obstetricians do when they measure you navel to pubic bone and with the ultrasound machine measure the fetus. I had no idea about the date of conception. This doctor did his measuring, looked at my chart, muttered something, hmmm’d to himself, and said as he wrote on the chart, “We’ll say twenty weeks.”
          I trust you know what that means. I sure as hell do, and I am still grateful to that man, though I have no idea what his name is.
          I was given pills to take before we came in. Three or five, I don’t remember, a muscle relaxer and Valium. By the time I was disrobed, I was a little loopy. Remember Sixteen Candles? Molly Ringwald’s character’s sister on her wedding day? Not that bad, but kind of like that. They say every time you retrieve a memory, you shift it a little further from the truth. This is a pretty old memory, but I’ve done my best to keep it on the high shelf. Is it factually true, every detail? Hell, besides the known fallibility of memory, I was a drugged zombie. This is what I remember.
          The procedure is a D&C, dilation and curettage. The cervix was dilated; don’t ask me how. Maybe one of those pills I took after I brushed my teeth that morning. Maybe the doctor did it mechanically. Curettage refers to cleaning out or away with a curette, a surgical instrument that has a ring, loop, or scoop at the tip. Of course the etymology is from the French, because curettage sounds so much better than scrape. Dilate and scrape, who wants one of those?
          I’m not suggesting everyone gets a handful of loopy pills before a D&C. For all I know, that treatment is unique to that doctor at that clinic at that time. Or maybe it happened because, as an employee of a university, I actually had, very briefly, good insurance. I’m only saying this is my experience.
          The doctor performed a vacuum curettage. The instrument he used worked just like you’d imagine, and the receptacle a large glass jar. I remember clearly, the nurse went to remove the jar. I lifted my head to watch, because the part of me who loves biology, who spent her babysitting money on dissection specimens, was curious. The nurse was on it. She saw me, slipped a towel over the jar to conceal it, and with the brisk efficiency that defines her profession, carried it away. I remain ever grateful to her as well. Not seeing another unforgettable image is the greatest service she did me that day. You understand, I did not want to see. I had an inclination to look because I was out of my head in multiple ways. And because I was out of my head, I lifted it to look where I did not want to see.
          My fiancé drove me home with aftercare instructions to do with pain and bleeding. We did not stroll out into the sunshine, speaking deeply of what might have been. He took me to our third story apartment where my cat waited for me. My mom did not, because I spoke the words “I’ll be fine.” Fine is the biggest lie of them all.
          Tampons are not allowed post D&C, so my fiancé deposited me on the futon couch and turned to go out. Did I want anything else? I said, “Could you bring me some bridal magazines?” He told me once, years later, that he thought I wasn’t upset, didn’t care about “the loss” because I seemed fine, almost happy, and because my shopping list consisted of maxi pads and bridal magazines. Shows how well he knew me, if he couldn’t tell that I’d been replaced by a drugged zombie, that inside I was scrambling to pull all my guts back inside of me and hold them in their proper places.
                                                                

We were referred to a support group. On another sunny day, we walked into another office building and found an interior, windowless room with fluorescent tubes behind clear ceiling panels, a sorry approximation of light. We sat in a circle on folding chairs, filling the small room, us and the other couples and our plus one, the counselor. We took turns saying why we were there and shedding tears, passing tissue boxes, Ring Around the Rosie. All of us, ten couples give or take, had chosen to terminate a pregnancy that was wanted. The medical community would call these therapeutic as opposed to elective procedures, although some would debate where that line falls. I would debate it. Couples, almost to a one, agonized over quality-of-life considerations. How would the child function? How would others treat the child? Would the child ever have a chance at an education? At love? At our society’s many markers of success? And what of the parents? Were they up to the task of caring for a child with certain unusual challenges in life? Emotionally? Financially? What about their lives, hopes, and dreams? All of them derailed in that singular moment.
          Don’t judge.
          Even if you’ve been there, don’t you judge. Sit with it. Imagine it. All the things you would sacrifice, all the things you’d never get to do, all the ways your life would be ruled by the needs of your child, needs that never go away—you can’t outgrow a disability the way you outgrow diapers. Just. Sit. With. It.
          We walked out into the sunny parking lot, the sluggish movements of people lost in themselves. Finally, I spoke. “I would have kept that baby. And that baby. And that baby. And that baby.” My fiancé said, “Me too.” There were couples there facing the prospect of raising a child with Down Syndrome. I know. Don’t judge. I honestly don’t remember if there was a diagnosis in the room, other than my own, that I wouldn’t have taken on with the ferocity of an archetypal Warrior-Mother. There may have been, and there were likely one or two that would have required some soul-searching. I have always been grateful that I did not have a quality-of-life decision to make, because I don’t actually know where my yes would have become my no. That day I looked up spina bifida online, I thought, Okay, okay. I was raised to keep on keepin’ on. I wasn’t afraid of spina bifida, not the worst of it, so I sure as hell would have kept those babies. But that’s just me, I keep going. (That’s not always a good thing.)
          We never went back to that support group or any other.
                                                                

One day a coworker said, “It’s nice to see you smile again. For the last six months you haven’t been yourself.” Six months as a zombie. I couldn’t have told you that, because I was the zombie, looking at the world through dead eyes. Sometimes someone shows you a mirror. I wasn’t all good at six months, far from it, but that smile, that remark, was probably the first sign of spring. What I’d been doing for six months was I was busy being fine and … Remember those bridal magazines?
          I planned a wedding. I planned it hard, so that forty weeks after the procedure, I was a married woman. I’ve never done the math before, but here is another weird true thing: the anniversary of Roe v. Wade is January 22nd, and I was married on October 25th. Forty weeks, which, if you’ve ever tracked a pregnancy you know, is the end of the gestational line. As the saying goes, “You can’t make that shit up.” If I wrote that into a fiction, the perfection of it would threaten to break the narrative.
          Only a writer would see it that way. We look out at the world and see story everywhere. It’s an occupational hazard, to live in a constantly reflective meta-headspace. Structure and meaning emerge as we process what’s happening to and around us. Some of it is plot, simple cause and effect, action and reaction. My mom said, “You mean fiancé,” and I told a man to put a ring on my finger. Some of it is deeper than that, especially when chronology doesn’t apply or events can’t be explained other than coincidence or—if you don’t believe in coincidence, and I no longer do—a cosmic shift. That deep shift is where we leave plot on the curb and enter the untamed territory of theme. It’s head and heart, Science Girl and Wedding-Planning-Zombie Girl.
          What does it mean that I walked into a movie theater and saw a horrible perfect metaphor for what I was going through? What does it mean that I had a D&C on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade? What does it mean that the project I threw myself into lasted forty weeks start to “I do?”
          Life is a facsimile of art.
          In art, we make the meaning as we go, building symmetry and chaos into our creations with the skilled hands of craftspeople. In life, we apply a constructed meaning to our experiences retroactively, finding symmetry in chaos, straightening the weave here, tugging a thread there. And that one? Can’t I just clip it, pull it out, throw it away?
          Ever since my divorce, I’ve had an amusing card that I framed hanging in my downstairs bath. It says, “Is willing to accept that she creates her own reality, except for some of the parts where she can’t help but wonder what the hell she was thinking.” What the hell was I thinking? No, really. What the hell was I thinking? Oh, yeah, I wasn’t. Not really. Zombified bride.
          Maybe if we’d stayed in the support group, I would have caught on, but I didn’t. I never told anyone at work what I’d been through. I left them to make of the euphemistic “lost the baby” what they would. I took off only as many days as I had leave for. In hindsight, I should have used unpaid leave and given myself more time. I should have told my mom to get on a plane. I should have shared my story. But it just wasn’t done. At least not by me or anyone I’d ever met. The story lodged somewhere deep and dark within me, a boulder too hard and heavy to shift. It went unsaid, and the unspoken stories within us will pin us to the ground.
          Part of the gag choking off my voice was a confusing sense of shame. I had done nothing wrong, but our culture is a condemning one full of words that sear into our skin, like the A word. I hate that word. I can think it and use it in contexts that don’t apply to me, but right now, my hand resists spelling it onto the page. Hester Prynne knows exactly what I mean.
          Whenever a nurse takes my history during an intake, she says something like, “Two pregnancies, one child?” and glances up from her clipboard or computer monitor for confirmation. And despite the lack of condemnation in her professional voice, despite the therapeutic nature of my procedure, the legality of it, my knee-jerk impulse is to blurt an explanation. I don’t know what my chart says, I’m just glad these nurses don’t use the A word. I’ve talked with close female friends; they get it, have similar impulses. Maybe we all carry a little of Hester’s red A. Some of us carry a lot. It’s easy to deny and defy the Scarlet Letter in a philosophical, ethical, and political way. Sound the rally cry! When it’s personal…. Damn, it’s another story.
          Besides a confusing sense of shame, there is a confusing ambiguity around everything. Does a fetus count as something to mourn? Did I lose a baby with all the hope and potential attached to that word, that being? Or did I lose the idea of a baby? Without a brain, was that a person, a being, at all? Or was it only a tiny mass of biological tissue, like a cyst or tumor? Nobody grieves a cyst. Gone? Good, let’s grab a beer. Part of not telling my story was not having words for what I’ve been through. I’ve used “pregnancy loss” over the years when I’ve referred to it at all, but that remains abstract and takes even the idea of the baby out of the experience.
          My mom told me, on the phone, that she had been struggling with my choice, which never seemed a choice to me. She’s a Catholic. She came to the conclusion that if there was no brain, it couldn’t have a soul, so it was okay.
          I understand. I really do. But I wish she’d kept it to herself. In the midst of everything, I did not need to hear that my mother was grappling with the prospect of my committing a mortal sin. Heat flares in my chest even now. I get it, but for anyone to suggest that what was happening to me, even in unspoken subtext, could result in eternal hell fire…well, that pisses me off.
          Years later, but before the proliferation of yoga all across America, I walked into an old house turned ashram for a yoga class. My teacher, Ma Devi, caught me in the entry and said, “I’m supposed to tell you, the soul enters the body at birth, not before.” She didn’t know why she had that message for me. I knew why, but I didn’t know why now. It hadn’t been on my mind. Maybe it was an anniversary, maybe the shame and confusion were swirling in my energy field. The unspoken.
                                                                

It’s been a long journey from there to here, to finally telling my story. I’m not sure how to end it, because as a writer, I know the sound structural choices available to me, and that the endnote will tie subtly and eloquently into the opening, bringing the whole thing full circle. One possible title is “The Other Scarlet Letter,” but this is not an abortion story or even a story about unwarranted shame, the tricky sticky collective version of it. It’s not a story to shock you awake to the tragic possibilities of reproduction. There are worse stories than mine, and I know some of the people carrying those millstones.
          Although…if you’ll permit another moment of reflection as I wrap up here: Three of those stories jump to mind, and in all three the parents-to-be were married, had close family support, and two of the three for sure had a funeral or remembrance ceremony. I got knocked up out of wedlock and was heading toward a shotgun wedding. I know, we don’t say those things anymore, not without our tongues firmly lodged in our cheeks, but the ideas connected to those words, like tangles of barbed wire, are still present in our cultural milieu, collective consciousness, or unconsciousness. Plus, when all this happened, if you were woke it meant something had rattled you from sleep.
          I admit some of my isolation was self-imposed, because I swallowed that gag whole. Part of it was geographical. I had moved cross country, leaving behind friends and family. Part of it was that our language does not have words up to the task. What claim did I have to my anguish if I could not actually name what I had lost? And part of it was fear. At my most vulnerable, I did not want people to know what had happened to me, lest they scream baby killer in my face and condemn me to hell. That shit still happens.
          My journey is about me at long last coughing up that gag. And my story is the whole messy tangle of guts lodged behind it.
          The sun is shining, and I can finally look at it, all horrible and fragile and tender.