by Jackie Hance
I told myself that I was just trying to convince people that getting pregnant was what I wanted. I told myself that I already had three children and I didn’t want to betray them by thinking for one minute about having another child. But if I truly didn’t want it, why do all those things? Why pineapple and walnuts and bed rest? My mixture of guilt and pain and excitement and hope was a complex stew that I didn’t fully understand.
Still, I couldn’t help but secretly hope I was pregnant. The greatest joy I had felt in my life was my three girls, and a grain of optimism hidden deep inside me said that maybe I could find some hint of that joy again. I mourned the loss of the girls so deeply at least in part because life is a gift, and it was so unfair that it was taken away from them. With a new baby, maybe I could begin to appreciate the gift again.
Every night since the accident, I had prayed to the girls in heaven, asking that I be able to join them very soon. But the night before the implantation was the last night I said that prayer, asking not to wake up the next morning. Once the embryos were implanted, my nightly prayer to Emma, Alyson, and Katie changed.
Please make Mommy pregnant.
My girls listened. They always listened.
Dr. Rosenwaks had warned me not to take any store-bought pregnancy tests, because they could be unreliable with in vitro. I just had to sit tight (and eat pineapple) until my appointment for a blood test.
But a week before the appointment, Denine and Laura showed up at my house for our usual Monday TV night, and before The Bachelor even started, they pulled a home pregnancy test out of a bag.
“Come on, it can’t hurt,” Denine said, brandishing the box. “I just want to see what happens.”
I took it to the bathroom, peed on the stick, and then stared hard, watching for something to change. A minute or two passed. I could barely see a shadow. But maybe, just maybe.
I ran upstairs and woke up Warren, who had gone right upstairs after work to avoid the girls’ night in the living room.
“Is that a line?” I asked.
“I don’t see it,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“It’s here, look.”
“Yeah, maybe that’s a line,” he said. “But don’t get excited yet.”
Too late for that. I felt an unexpected thrill tingling through me.
The next day, I took another test, and the line seemed a little darker. I’m not very good at keeping things to myself, so the news eked out, and my friends reacted with bubbling enthusiasm. We might have been high school kids talking about sparkly prom dresses and fragrant corsages rather than grown-ups considering the possibility of a real baby. Every night that I had friends over, someone brought me a new pregnancy test.
“Try it for me! I want to see it, too!” Jeannine insisted when she popped in on Tuesday.
“Oooh, let us see!” said the women in the knitting group I had joined, a couple of nights later. Melissa and Isabelle each demanded their own proof. By the end of the week, I had taken twenty-seven pregnancy tests. I numbered them all and lined them up and took a picture. Sure enough, the lines got progressively darker.
But even with all that, I felt as nervous as any first-time mother-to-be when I went to Dr. Rosenwaks’s office for the blood test. I didn’t mention my previews, and he promised to call quickly with official results.
The next day, I decided not to go bowling—that seemed risky at this stage—but looking to be sociable, I joined the team for lunch afterward. We had just settled down at the table when my cell phone rang and I saw Dr. Rosenwaks’s number. I grabbed Isabelle and practically yanked her out of her chair. “It’s him!” I whispered loudly as we both ran out of the room.
“Jackie, everything looks good,” Dr. Rosenwaks said as Isabelle leaned close, trying to hear. “You’re pregnant. We’ll keep following it closely, and do more blood tests, but the numbers are strong.”
“Oh wow, really?” I looked at Isabelle, as stunned as if I had never seen any one of those twenty-seven sticks. Then, turning back to the phone, I asked the doctor, “Are you happy?”
He laughed. “Yes, I’m very happy. Are you happy?”
“Yes,” I said, surprised that I truly meant it. “Thank you so much for everything.”
I hung up and Isabelle and I began dancing around and giggling like teenagers. I felt like a great success.
We went back to the restaurant, and I knew I couldn’t possibly chitchat right now. “I’m so sorry,” I told them, “but I have to leave.”
“Are you okay?” one of the women asked.
“Yes, I’m pregnant,” I admitted. “Please don’t tell anyone. I mean it—don’t tell anybody at all. Even my husband doesn’t know yet.”
They cheered and offered congratulations and one woman got up and gave me a peck on the cheek. Some of these women I hadn’t known long and I certainly didn’t know them well. But circles of support are formed in the most unexpected ways, and since we rolled bowling balls together down shiny alleys, they ended up being among the first to know my secret.
I called Warren immediately, and by the time I got home, he had rushed home, too. He shouldn’t have been shocked—we’d been previewing the idea for days—but having Dr. Rosenwaks’s confirmation suddenly changed our well-spun fantasy into incontrovertible fact. I found him slumped on the sofa, an emotional mess.
A normal couple would have hugged and kissed in delight, but, gobsmacked by our new situation, Warren and I just stared at each other and hardly said a word. I sank down on the sofa next to him. The elation I had felt with the bowling group now wobbled as shakily as a gutter ball in the tenth string.
When Warren finally said something, it wasn’t what I’d expected.
“I’m exhausted,” he said, standing up. “I have to go to bed.”
Though it was still the middle of the afternoon, Warren had hit emotional overload. He wanted a baby and had supported me every inch of the way, but the reality was just too much to take in.
So there I was, sitting all alone with my news. I called my mom and her reaction was a noncommittal “Uh-huh.” Maybe she was trying to gauge my feelings before reacting too strongly, or she sensed immediately what a weird situation it might be.
“You’re pregnant,” she said slowly. “That’s good?”
“Mom, I don’t know.”
“How many babies?” she asked.
“I think just one,” I said. “I mean, it better be just one.”
Dr. Rosenwaks usually implanted three embryos in a woman my age, hoping one would survive. But I had argued for just one. I couldn’t cope with more than one baby. He insisted that he never implanted a single embryo—the odds were too low—so we settled on implanting two. In the next week or so, my hormonal levels were so high that we all began to suspect twins. But no—we quickly discovered that I had one healthy baby growing.
After the first shock passed, Warren and I began to talk again, almost unwilling to admit how we were feeling.
“Where will we put the baby?” I asked him one afternoon. “How will we work it out?”
“We have time to think about this,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’re going to be okay.”
“Do you think I can do this again?” I asked.
“Of course. It will be fine,” he said. He had become preternaturally calm and even-tempered.
We both felt a little hope. A lot of anxiety. A bit of excitement. And extraordinary gratitude for what Dr. Rosenwaks had done for us. “You are one of the reasons that Warren and I are still here on this earth,” I wrote to him a couple of weeks later. “The day we found out we were pregnant . . . Warren and I felt joy. It was strange. We had not had joy in our life for over a year and a half.”
Even as I wrote the words, I wondered if we had truly felt joy—or if that was just what I thought we should feel. But the elation I’d experienced during that call at the bowling alley had been real. Joy and uncertainty can coexist, I told myself.
“We actually peeked into the future,” I
continued. “We had not spoken about the future since the accident because we did not want a future without our beautiful girls. I think that was the best part of this—for the first time Warren and I had hope. Hope that maybe we could have a future. You gave us that hope.”
• • •
Telling friends and family the news turned out to be even more satisfying than hearing it ourselves. After nineteen long, sad months, I began to feel that the black cloud had shifted. Maybe not lifted—but shifted. Instead of seeing pain and sadness reflected in other people’s eyes, I suddenly got to see hope and happiness and perhaps relief. For all these months, people had naturally wanted to whisper words of optimism—but none came to mind. How could anyone promise hope when the future had been wiped out? Now the miraculous news took away some of the pain everyone had carried.
Emily Dickinson’s famous poem “Hope” begins:
Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
Our new hope perched precariously on my shoulder—or maybe in my belly. But I still sensed that, like Dickinson’s metaphoric bird, it could fly away at any moment.
Part Three
2011
Twenty-one
After the initial euphoria passed, unreality set in.
Pregnancy is always a long road, and since we’d frozen the embryos almost a year earlier, this one had already been longer than most.
Warren and I still had no idea how to feel about our new situation. Handling grief had been hard enough; trying to handle grief with this overlay of rejoicing seemed almost impossible. As usual, we took our emotional mayhem out on each other. Our fights intensified. Now the future wasn’t just an empty void, it was filled with haze and uncertainty. Could we really be parents again?
Dr. O’Brien tried every technique he knew to convince us that we had been good parents—and could be again. Warren seemed to accept that. While I theoretically understood the premise, I couldn’t accept the idea in my heart. I hadn’t protected Emma, Alyson, and Katie, so how could I dream of being responsible for another life?
Good mothers don’t let three children die.
My life and expectations had spun so completely out of control that I couldn’t really believe that I would have another child. I had been cautious during my first three pregnancies, making sure that everything proceeded as expected, but now I expected only disaster. Every time I went for a sonogram or check-up with my obstetrician, I anticipated bad news.
“A nice strong heartbeat and everything looks fine,” the doctor said at one visit early on, looking at the sonogram on the screen.
I turned in great surprise to the image. “Really? The baby is still alive?”
“Yes, of course,” she said with a smile.
Of course? I had assumed the opposite. Since the accident, I had come to believe that anything good I got in life would be snatched away. Surely the pregnancy was just another form of divine taunting.
Early in my second trimester, my anxiety and confusion seemed to deepen. Though on one level I wanted a baby, on another, I couldn’t bear the thought of being disloyal to my three girls by loving someone other than them. Warren no doubt had his own fears, but he refused to discuss them. And he didn’t want to hear the details of my jittery dread, which I insisted on sharing with him morning and night. He shut me out, not wanting to be made more miserable by my endless angst.
“You’re so mean!” I yelled at him one Friday night. “How can you sit there and watch TV when I’m in such pain?”
He had walked away from me in the middle of a sentence, unwilling to listen to me wonder whether we had the right to bring a new baby into our unhappy house. Emma, Alyson, and Katie had been so joyous, but now Warren and I were always so sad. A black cloud hung over us, and I shuddered to think of exposing an innocent baby to our misery.
“I can’t hear this anymore,” Warren called out, not moving from in front of the TV.
“You have to!” I shouted.
Our argument intensified that night and only got worse the next day. We spent all weekend in pitched battle. We screamed and cried, and our stress rose to levels that we knew couldn’t be good for any of us.
“We’re acting terribly,” Warren said disgustedly at the end of the weekend. “We don’t deserve this baby.”
The fighting had left me ragged. I didn’t eat or drink—all I could do was cry. I wasn’t trying to undermine the pregnancy, but I just couldn’t pay much attention to it, either.
“You have to take care of yourself,” Warren said angrily as he left for work on Monday. “We weren’t responsible for the accident or what happened to Emma, Aly, and Katie. But if this baby isn’t born, we are responsible.”
“I’m not doing anything bad,” I said halfheartedly.
“If something goes wrong, I won’t be able to live with myself,” Warren said as he slammed the door and left.
I tried to take a few sips of water, but nausea overwhelmed me. I’d never had morning sickness, so the nausea had a more emotional source. For nearly two years, I’d thought of the future only as a date for when my life would end. Now the future loomed large and real and frightening. Warren’s words resounded in my head.
If this baby isn’t born . . . we are responsible . . . won’t be able to live with myself . . .
I remembered all the care I’d taken in previous pregnancies and thought about how carelessly I was behaving now. I started to panic that after the weekend we’d just been through, something horrible must have happened to the baby.
I called Laura. “The baby is dead,” I told her tonelessly. “I know it. Can you take me to the ER?”
Laura didn’t ask a lot of questions. She raced over and bundled me into her car. We drove to North Shore Hospital, and the next thing I knew I was stumbling to the front desk and beginning to cry.
“I need a sonogram immediately because my baby is dead,” I said to the nurse in the emergency room.
Or at least that’s what I thought I said. I intended to sound polite and rational, but apparently, I began blathering and sobbing and making no sense at all.
“I’ve been crying all weekend and not eating or drinking and now I killed another baby and I’m completely devastated. Someone please help me, I need a sonogram.”
The triage nurse looked at Laura, who filled her in on who I was in quick whispered sentences.
Soon I was sitting alone in a completely bare room. A nurse had taken away my jacket, purse, and cell phone, and I had nothing to do but sit and stare. Through a glass panel in the front, I could see that a man was stationed outside the room, keeping watch. It slowly dawned on me that this probably wasn’t the place to get a sonogram.
Laura must have made some calls for help, because Isabelle, Jeannine, and Melissa showed up very quickly.
“We have to get you out of here,” Melissa said, all business.
“Why? What’s going on?” I asked.
“They’re doing a psychiatric evaluation,” Jeannine explained. “They’re worried about suicide. They want to admit you to a psych ward.”
I closed my eyes. This hospital didn’t seem so bad. After the weekend I’d been through, maybe it would be fine to stay here for a while and rest.
“I just want some quiet,” I said. “It’s okay. I’ll stay.”
But my friends had other ideas.
“We’ll get you out of here and take care of you,” Jeannine said firmly. “Tell them you’re fine and need to go home. You were worried about the baby and just wanted to check the heartbeat.”
Two psychiatric residents appeared and asked to speak to me alone. Jeannine and Melissa looked worried as they left, and Isabelle squeezed my hand. But the medical residents were both nice women, and I was happy to talk to them. I didn’t care if they made me stay. I didn’t really want to go home.
But when they stepped out of the room, my friends called
Dr. O’Brien. As soon as they could, they came back in and handed the phone to me.
“Snap out of it, Jackie,” Dr. O’Brien said, without too many preliminaries. “Do whatever you need to get out of there.”
“Why can’t I stay?” I asked.
“They’re going to put you in a psychiatric facility where you don’t want to be. If you need an in-patient residence, we’ll find one. But I repeat: Do whatever it takes to get yourself out. Now.”
I hung up the phone and sighed. A temporary escape from home would be nice, but he sounded urgent and it seemed out of my hands. Melissa and Jeannine and Isabelle were bustling around, talking to the psychiatric residents and giving assurances that I wouldn’t be left alone. They had me out the door and back in Floral Park before I knew what had happened.
By the next day, I was feeling a little better. But thinking about what Dr. O’Brien had mentioned, I started researching private retreats. The problem was that with their mountain backdrops, infinity pools, and “holistic rehabilitation,” they were wildly expensive—more for Hollywood celebrities than for me.
“If you really need to go, I’ll get the money together somehow,” Warren said.
“The places sound so nice,” I said dreamily. “Do you think I should?”
“Not really,” he admitted.
In general, Warren worried that if I went away, I would never come home again.
A few days later, I confronted Warren with a new idea.
“Let’s move,” I suggested. “Get a new house and a fresh start for the baby.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea right now,” he said flatly. “Let’s have the baby first. There’s been enough change. You might want to stay here.”
“Is it fair to bring a baby into a house with all these memories?” I asked anxiously.