In June, my husband and I found out we were pregnant. It would become the third baby we would lose in the last two years. I call her a baby although I know she was an embryo, her heartbeat stilled at six weeks and two days. I call her a baby because I can feel her weight on my chest and see her eyelashes in my mind. I call her a baby to honor the grief of those who have lost babies that existed only in our bodies and minds. Our babies that existed as dreams and then as memories.
At night, I closed my eyes and worried I would miscarry again. I fell asleep by imagining that I could make my baby comfortable enough to stay. I hung a string of firefly lights from hip bone to hip bone. Realizing I didn’t need to be limited by space in this first nursery, I added Paul standing at the grill, firing up chicken coated in cayenne and brown sugar.
Here is your dad, baby. Look at his eyelashes. Look at his kindness. Stay.
I struggle with the weight of my despair compared with their tiny gestational ages. Five weeks, six weeks, seven weeks. Due July 26, 2022. Due Nov. 21, 2022. A year of working nights and trying. Then due! March 17, 2024. Never, as it turns out, due at all.
As a midwife, I have found each of these gestational ages beneath an ultrasound probe, delighting with parents over the jump in development between six and nine weeks. The spine develops first, accounting for the shrimplike curve from head to tail. Then the arms and legs bud out like willow catkins and the spine begins to straighten. Nature repeats her designs — blood vessels reach toward their destinations like rivers toward oceans, like plants toward the sun. I reach from this experience toward meaning.
I don’t claim to know when other people’s embryos become babies or whether an unwanted pregnancy ever does. Story after sacred story from clients seeking abortion care helped me articulate one of my core beliefs as a provider. My responsibility is not to understand every person’s experience; my responsibility is to remember that I can never understand any person’s experience better than they do.
I was pregnant in my 20s with an embryo I didn’t keep. I imagined the child it could become. But the relationship I was in then wasn’t safe for me or him, much less for a baby. I imagined this child trying to get the love that I was trying to get. I imagined her chasing me, chasing him.
