Maud cries the most; she was more excited than anyone about me having another baby, even more than me. I can understand, because being a live-in aunt is such a wonderful experience—so much of the joy of having a little one with few of the responsibilities.
I tell the group, “I still feel him in my cells, in my heart, and I know I could never really lose him. He’s changed everything, so I see the world through a lens that he’s part of. But of course I do miss his body, the unfoldment of the babyhood and childhood we were anticipating. It’s complex, this loss, this gain. No words can sum it up.”
CHAPTER 26
February 5
I’m feeling surer about not having another baby. I still have moments of longing, but the trend is clear. It no longer hurts like hell to think we’re done, to remember our abortion. The boys are a lot, in positive and negative ways. Having Sam and Grace for two days and nights reminds me that as much as I love kids, taking care of them is hard, hard work. Fortunately, we have Cecily’s baby or babies to look forward to.
Lately, I’ve been settling on the idea that I’m not a natural enough mother to have any more kids. It’s not a judgment, just an observation which I’m surprisingly willing to accept. I loved having the chance to go through a healthy pregnancy and a not-healthy one, and mother Jasper and Kevin and Theo, plus Grace and Sam, all in very different ways. I love it and it’s plenty.
And I’m aware that this could all shift, and I could easily line up with a completely different path should one arise.
February 10
In bed with a fever I’ve had for three days—the first two accompanied by a killer headache. Sitting here for hours, I find myself thinking of Theo a lot. As I swab my own dried-out lips with ointment, I remember how I got to put ointment on Theo’s lips after he died to keep them from drying up. It was one of the only maternal acts I could do for him. I can picture his sweet lips still, the shape of his mouth, and how it felt to touch them. Now I’m crying and I’m afraid it will make my head throb again.
March 29
I wake early and drive to Grants Pass, where I speak to a group of nurses about infant loss. It is a stretch for me; I have always avoided public speaking, but I tell myself, You have gone deep into terror and made it through, this is nothing.
I start off my talk by sharing that I am nervous. My voice shakes and I can’t get any words to come out and think, Oh shit … then I ease into it, and by the end much of the audience is crying.
As we’re leaving, a nurse takes my hands and tells me, “Your story has moved me more than I can say. Thank you.”
May 20–22
I’m on a weekend retreat, and the theme is love. My therapist keeps using the actual physiology of the heart as a metaphor. She mentions that in utero, the hands and the heart begin entwined during early development. “So our hands naturally evolve as an expression of our hearts.”
All the analogies about the heart invoke Theo for me. He had an uncharacteristically strong heart for a trisomy case, one that always beat strongly and looked great on ultrasounds, fooling us all, including Oregon’s most respected prenatal geneticist, into thinking he was healthy. And his gift to me and to many others is about opening hearts. I am not surprised that he comes to me during the meditation Friday evening. He shows up as one of my guides the way I’ve seen him before, as a boy with a bow and arrow protecting me (from self-criticism as much as anything). When I describe my vision in the group sharing, my therapist says, “That boy archer must be Cupid, the piercer of hearts!”
I smile deeply. “Yes, that’s him.”
The words that come to mind strongly in the silence this weekend are patience, courage, and fierce compassion for myself. The patience to be with what comes up in me, for however long it’s there; the courage to trust myself to be gentle with whatever I’m experiencing. I have shifted a lot in how I talk to myself. At night without Dicken this weekend, when I can’t sleep, instead of giving in to the scary stories like, You’re going to be so tired tomorrow, what’s wrong with you, you’re so screwed up, how are you ever going to survive on your own? I treat myself like a sweet, scared child, and say, It’s okay, you’re fine, nothing bad is happening. You can just be with this awakeness and settle into it, and tomorrow you can take a nap if you need to … I give myself the love and security I have been relying on Dicken for. Lo and behold, I get back to sleep, and in the meantime enjoy this sweetness. I can rely on my inner resources, richer than I knew. The vast desert of solitude is blooming.
During the weekend, I am numb some of the time and can’t feel my heart. Instead of wishing I wasn’t so resistant, I practice patience and gentleness: You’re numb, that’s fine. It’ll pass, it’s really okay. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. I enter the numbness, and it morphs into vibrating energy, filling my whole body with joy and power. For the first time, I get that wherever I am is the way in, and I shouldn’t try to change where I am. In this place of energy, I can be with all my cynicism and see how flimsy it is compared to the vast beauty inside. I remember that several intuitives have told me that Theo and the Kundalini energy are calling me to “greatness,” which my skeptical self completely discounts; but from my expanded place, I can feel that greatness. I feel rich, like I am discovering a gold mine in myself, and that quiets the “get it from the outside before it’s too late!” impulse.
On Sunday afternoon, as the group is winding up, I’m asked to read a poem I told my therapist about, one I wrote.
“No,” I say, my face turning red. “I’d really rather not.”
“Lucinda, it’s time for you to read the poem.”
“I can’t.”
The whole group is looking at me, waiting. I feel my heart beating in my ears, a loud drumming. I want to disappear. The attention is unbearable. The pressure inside me threatens to explode. I want to scream, but instead I start to cry.
“Lucinda, we are waiting to hear your poem.”
“Why should I read it? It’s stupid, I just wish you’d move on.” The silence of the group and the feeling of their eyes on me are excruciating. I start to tremble. “I can’t read this poem,” I say. “My voice is shaking too much.”
“When I first started teaching,” my therapist says, “my voice shook through every lecture. There’s nothing wrong with the shaking. It’s a sign that there’s a lot of energy in what you’re doing. Please don’t let this keep you from sharing yourself with the group. We want to hear from you.”
Nodding all around.
I cry and tremble some more. I glance around the room and see that no one is going to rescue me from this. I am not going to get out of here without reading the poem.
Then the trembling begins to awaken memories in my cells: I’m four months pregnant and shivering in the bathroom in Ireland … I’m eight months pregnant and seeing brown stains on the toilet paper and beginning to shake … I’m on the table in the hospital having the first ultrasound and I’m shaking … I’m about to have the C-section and am trying to hold still so the anesthesiologist can get the needle in my spine … I’m in the recovery room shivering uncontrollably … I am back in the hardest moments, in the hour after, before we know the outcome and get to hold him, and there, in all that, is the strength. I have to journey far, far into the darkness within me and summon the strength to get through this experience, and in this place no one, not even Dicken or my mom, who are there with me physically, no one can get me through the darkest place but me. I have to support myself and be courageous. I do, and I know I am touching a strength I haven’t experienced before.
From this place, I say, “Fuck it, I’ll read the stupid poem.” I have reached way down deep to a part of me that no one else can touch, a place where I’m beyond caring about what my instincts are telling me, about how what I share is received; beyond anyone’s reach or rescue. From that place I can summon the courage to read my words, and I do.
Later, I won’t remember reading the poem or how people responded, but
I will remember what it was like to summon my deepest courage, and how I felt Theo’s grace, and nothing else, holding me.
June 6
I hear from my dad that a new friend of his, Sally, has a daughter whose baby just died. He had a heart condition they knew of before birth, but he didn’t survive the postpartum surgery. I send a condolence e-mail to Sally right away, initiating a lengthy correspondence.
About mentioning the baby’s name, for me, I wanted people to speak of Theo. It was a way to keep him real then, when I so feared he would be forgotten, his existence pointless. The thing about losing a baby is that you have the joy of meeting him and seeing him for the first time mixed in with the agony of his death. And I think all parents are bursting to share the joy in their hearts that a baby came along to bless them, even if they aren’t aware of the joy because the heartbreak overwhelms them at the moment. In a certain way I was like any new parent, wanting to spread the happy news of our baby’s birth, yet people for the most part only focused on the death.
So maybe look for cues in Frances and her husband, giving them an opening to share the happy parts and show off their beautiful boy without feeling that it’s odd or morbid. And at the same time acknowledging the very real pain, of course.
Dear Lucinda,
I have read and reread your e-mail countless times over the past few days. There are blessings—and you are one of them. We have made the wonderful discovery that we can speak of our beautiful baby boy Logan without being self-conscious … and there have been magical moments when Frances and her husband have been able to see so distinctly her mouth in Logan’s—and laugh.
I am so very grateful for your words, that you took the time to reach out to us. You have made an enormous difference in our ability and capacity to cope. Thank you.
With love,
Sally
I will have scores of e-mail, phone, and in-person exchanges with women who’ve lost babies or grandchildren. It becomes one of the most fulfilling aspects of my life.
CHAPTER 27
July 2007
Dicken and I decide to move to town. It’s something we’ve talked about for months, as we’ve struggled with the increasingly frequent hour-long drives back and forth for the boys’ hockey, soccer, dance lessons, and so on. And we’ve become convinced that Jasper would be better off in a structured school environment. It’s wrenching to think of not living with Maud, Tom, Grace, and Sam anymore, yet it’s hard to see continuing to live so far out when there is nothing we need to be there for, and so much in town that fits our changing needs as a family. Contemplating the move brings many intense conversations among the four of us adults, and agonized nights. It will mean more grief, more change. Are we doing the best thing for our boys? What about the dream of communal living? What is life asking of us, and what has to be let go?
It doesn’t take long for us to find a house in the neighborhood close to the school we’ve picked out for the boys. The weekend of the move, Dicken takes Jasper on a fishing trip they’ve had scheduled for months. Kevin is in Costa Rica, where he’s visiting family for part of the summer. I do the majority of the packing, with help from friends like Gabriella. I take as little as possible, especially from the communal areas of the house, not wanting to upset Maud any more than I already have. Sam wants to come with me to town, so he and I spend the first two nights in the new house together.
“Tia, let’s follow the big moving truck the whole way!”
I am grateful for his sweet innocence, and for the warmth of his sleeping body next to mine in bed as I reel from the disorientation of such a big change.
September 25
I’m visiting a neighbor who has a one-year-old. Running after her daughter, she looks tired but happy. She tells me about her dream of one day opening a yoga studio.
“It’s years away at this point,” she sighs, lifting her toddler into her arms. “But I hope it happens.”
“Little ones take all our energy for the first few years,” I say. “But we get our lives back eventually.”
“I feel like my life hasn’t started yet.”
Without thinking, I say, “I feel like mine is over.”
The conversation moves on, but later I think about what I said, about my life being over. Why did I say that? I guess because I’ve had my kids, and that mystery is ebbing. I’m aging. A patch of my hair is turning white. I’ve been married for fifteen years. I’ve traveled the world and feel like my personal allotment of airline fuel is waning. I’ve earned an advanced degree and worked in an intense psychiatric hospital not far from the one in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I’ve been through childbirth, adoption, having my baby die in my arms. I’ve had wild Kundalini experiences, a bad mushroom trip, unexplainable coincidences. I’ve seen numerous babies being born. I’ve seen meteor showers, the Northern Lights, white midnight and pale dawns. Euphoria, despair, night terrors, deep bliss, multiple orgasms, blistering rage.
But to think that at thirty-seven my life is finished? I guess I was always waiting for “real” life to begin, and when I met Dicken it seemed to. Romance, marriage, happy partnership, beautiful baby, needy child rescued, another beautiful baby who broke my heart and opened the sky. What else can happen now? Everything feels anticlimactic. Published writing, more travel? I can work hard to find the mystery through yoga, art, meditation, writing. But to create life with Dicken, to say yes to the mystery of a being entering my body and then our lives, how could anything touch that?
I’m sad it seems to be over. I can embrace other children, my nieces and nephews yet to be born, maybe grandchildren if I’m lucky; but my glory days are behind me. This feels massive to me because I equate it with the “real” part of life, what I wondered about all through childhood and adolescence: Who will I marry and what children will make up our family? I’m left with a sense that I’m less worthwhile as a woman with that access to the mystery closed off, the most powerful channel forever blocked.
Am I beginning to die? To accept my mortality, the speed with which life is passing? Am I becoming fatalistic? Or am I being ageist? Some people say life improves after middle age. But I don’t buy it. Again, I wonder: Will I go gracefully or with a struggle?
October 26
Christine, who runs WinterSpring, calls to tell me she wants me to take the program coordinator position that’s open.
“Oh, I don’t know, Christine. I’m not very organized. I don’t think I’d be that good.”
“Oh, sweetheart, you’d be perfect, believe me. We’re all hoping you’ll accept.”
“I’ll need a few days to get a résumé together.”
“You don’t need a résumé. Just tell me you’ll take the job, and it’s yours. The board has already approved you.”
“Wow, that’s easy,” I say. I’ve always dreaded job interviews.
“So you’ll take it?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I need to think about it. I just don’t know if I’m ready to be that busy. What about my writing, my boys?”
“Remember, it’s only half-time, and I think you could actually get everything done in a lot less than that.”
“So I can do all my hours while the boys are in school?”
“Yes. Why don’t you just try it for a month and see how it goes?”
*
When I tell Courtney about the new job, she says, “You’ve been called to this, Cinda. Everything in your life has led up to it, and it’s so connected with Theo.”
“I do feel lined up with this because it’s become my passion to help people who are grieving. It helps me and it’s also a way to give back. I feel so blessed with what I’ve been given, it just feels really right to spend twenty hours a week serving others.”
Dicken says, “You’ve been headhunted.”
“And you might have to live with a messier house.”
November 28–December 1
I get a call from Jasper’s school, saying he’s hurt his shoulder in games class.
&n
bsp; “Should I come and get him?”
“No, he’s had a little rest and says he feels okay enough to go back to the classroom. I just wanted to let you know.”
“Does he want to talk to me?”
I hear a muffled conversation.
“No, he’s heading back to class. He says he’ll walk home on his own.”
“Okay, thanks for letting me know.”
*
When Jasper gets home, he looks pale. I inspect his arm. It looks fine on the outside, but he can’t move it at all.
“Does it hurt?”
“No. I’m just mad I can’t use it. I want to play hockey tomorrow!”
Jasper has been playing hockey since Andrew and Gabriella insisted he start last year, thinking it was the perfect sport for him and would help him with his grief. They drove him to practices and games three times a week for a whole season.
“Sorry, Jasper, but you’ll have to miss the game.”
“I hate that kid who kicked me!”
“It was an accident, right?”
“Yeah, but I still hate him. He’s an idiot!”
When Dicken comes back from work, he checks out Jasper’s arm. “It’s not swollen, and he doesn’t seem to be in pain,” he says, puzzled. “Maybe it’s just sprained, or badly bruised.”
Over the weekend, Jasper takes it easy, watching more movies than usual. At night, he complains of his shoulder aching, so we give him arnica, a homeopathic remedy, and he’s able to sleep.
On Monday, Jasper goes to school but still can’t move his arm. He comes home with his friend Noa, complaining that he wasn’t able to play four square at recess. Something about this is beginning to scare me. I call Dicken, who is on his way to teach a seminar in Portland. When I tell him I’m worried, he suggests taking Jasper to see our chiropractor. I call the office and they say to come right over. Dr. Matt has a few minutes between appointments.
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