@jenniferweiner
“There is no doubt that it will be him and I at the end of this.” Ben and his ladies are trying to kill me with their grammar. #TheBachelor
@jenniferweiner
Eesh. Two vocabulary and emotionally-challenged people trying to have a conversation about feelings. It burns. #TheBachelor
@jenniferweiner
We’re at Jef’s ranch. Where, in my imagination, the cattle are all branded with Jef’s missing F. #bachelorette
@jenniferweiner
“We’re always kissing, because I feel that that’s how he can really express himself to me.” Also, he doesn’t know many words. #bachelornation
@jenniferweiner
We’re off! “Although I see Catherine as my wife, I equally see Lindsay as my wife as well.” And the English language wept. #bachelornation
And Don’t Forget the Supporting Cast
@jenniferweiner
An elephant lumbers onscreen. It’s enormous and wrinkly and eating while it walks. It’s now my second-favorite character. #bachelornation
@jenniferweiner
“Emily didn’t pick you,” taunts Sean’s nephew. Who has now become my all-time favorite person on this show, ever. #bachelornation
@jenniferweiner
The crew member checking his Blackberry as Tierra weeps is officially my favorite #bachelor shot, ever. EVER.
Miss
Over the course of her reproductive life, one out of two women will lose a pregnancy—through either miscarriage or abortion. American women are only just beginning to talk about abortion out loud, to have a conversation about the choices we make and how it feels—if we’re sorry or relieved, or if we don’t feel much of anything at all.
There’s still very little talk about miscarriages, in spite of how many women have had them. So here, with regret, is my contribution to the literature.
This is what happened to me.
• • •
Adam and I have been separated since 2010, peacefully divorced since 2013. We get along, for the sake of our daughters, and also because, in spite of the demise of our marriage, we still genuinely like each other. Adam’s career has taken off. He’s one of the country’s go-to guys for campaign finance and election law. He lives in an apartment right around the corner from the house where I still live and does an excellent job of parenting our girls. The girls are with me every day after school, and they get to see their dad almost every day, too. Bill’s been living with me for the last year, and he’s a calm, gentle partner, another male presence in Lucy and Phoebe’s life, another man who loves them. No girl can ever have enough of those.
It’s Friday right before Christmas, a normal, busy day. I ride my bike fifteen miles to my therapist’s office (the bike ride’s almost as helpful as the actual therapy). Then I take the train back home, drop off my bike, meet Phoebe at the bus stop, and take her to the little bookstore around the corner to buy a gift for the birthday party she’s attending.
The plan is, get Phoebe in the car, take her to her friend’s house in Center City, then get on the highway and drive an hour to Berwyn to pick up Lucy, who’s hanging out with a friend, and drop her off at the movie theater near our house, where she’s seeing Star Wars with her dad. A typical, if slightly harried, early evening with children . . . except at some point around five, I start losing my mind. Maybe I’m tired from the bike ride, or chilled, because I didn’t have time for a shower, but, after we’ve bought our goodies, I hear myself snapping at Phoebe to hurry and get in the car. When we’re halfway to the party, she notices that she’s forgotten the present, and I sigh and whip the car into an illegal U-turn.
“Mommy, are you mad?” Phoebe asks in a tiny voice.
“I’m not thrilled,” I tell her. “I wish you’d remembered to bring it. I wish I’d remembered to check.” I look at the clock and realize that I’m not going to make it to Berwyn to get Lucy back in time for the movie, so I call Adam to ask if he’s home from work. I get lucky, he picks up, and as soon as he agrees to take Phoebe to the party, I drop her off and start the hour-long ride to pick up my eldest daughter.
On the ride home, things do not improve. When Lucy starts giving me her usual twelve-year-old sass, I’m snarky instead of jokey or patient or even just quiet, and after a five-minute recitation of her preteen woes, I tell her, “I think we’re done on this topic,” and I turn up the Hamilton soundtrack.
I know that I’m not behaving like myself. I need to calm down, put things in perspective, realize that being late to a party or a movie, or even showing up gift-free is no big deal. The next day I resolve to do better, and when the girls go to Adam’s, I go to the gym. After ninety minutes of Restorative Yoga with my favorite instructor, holding poses for long intervals, ending flat on my back with my legs up against the wall, I go to my favorite bakery, reasoning that sfogliatelle will make everything better, and that, after ninety minutes of sun salutations and listening to a long talk about intention, I deserve something sweet. I’m standing in line when a horde—there is no other word—of drunken Mummers shove their way into the store and start bellowing off-key Christmas carols, to the delight of the other patrons and the ladies behind the counters. Mummers are a unique-to-Philadelphia phenomenon, one of the few things about my city that I genuinely cannot stand. Mummers are men who, on New Year’s Day, get gussied up in elaborate, sequined costumes, some of which are basically women’s dresses, and twirl parasols and parade down Broad Street in troupes or string bands. Some Mummers are accomplished musicians with dazzling choreography. Others are drunken thugs. They march in brigades trailed by slow-moving vans packed floor to ceiling with cans of Coors Light. These princes among men start drinking first thing in the morning, then stagger up to, and back from, the parade route in their polyester frocks, peeing into convenient gutters and against the walls of row houses (including—every year—mine), and snarling, “What’s your problem, bitch? You’ve never seen one of these before?” when you ask them to do their business elsewhere.
Today’s Mummers are from Category Two, and they appear to have been warming up for the New Year’s festivities. Once they’ve shouldered their way into the bakery, they bellow off-key versions of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman” and “Silent Night.” “And none of this ‘Happy Holidays’ crap!” hollers their ringleader, a gentleman in a top hat and a stained Eagles sweatshirt, who jingles a cluster of bells to emphasize his point. “It’s ‘Merry Christmas,’ not ‘Happy Holidays,’ am I right?”
I roll my eyes at the woman in line behind me, who’s wearing a hijab and holding a little boy’s hand. Then I notice that she doesn’t look annoyed or amused. She looks scared.
Her instincts aren’t off. It’s been less than a month since a radicalized American and his bride from Tehran shot up an office holiday party in San Bernardino, less than two since the terrorist bombings in Paris. Donald Trump is giving daily speeches telling voters that we need to keep Muslim immigrants out of America—“until we know what’s going on”—chewing over the phrase “radical Islamic terror,” which he says whenever he can, and repeating claims that he saw Muslims cheering on 9/11 after the Twin Towers went down. It is not a good time to be in a hijab and out in public; not a good time, really, to be any kind of American, except a God-fearing Christian one. And a man, of course. Always better to be one of them. Because it’s Merry Christmas, not Happy Holidays, am I right?
I stand in front of the woman, my body angled so the drunken Christmas-insisters can’t see her. I listen as she quietly interrupts the cashiers, who are clapping and singing along, and asks if there’s another way out of the bakery besides the front door. I leave without buying anything, pushing my way through the fog of beer and rum surrounding the Mummers, knowing that I’ll never be back; that this place is done for me. When I get home, I am crying. What’s going on in the world? I ask Bill, trying to catch my breath. Why are people so awful? What if the Mummers spotted this woman an
d tried to do something to her? How did she explain to her little boy why they had to sneak out the back?
By the end of this recitation, I am crying so hard I can barely breathe, and Bill is looking at me with considerable alarm. I go upstairs, run a bath, take deep breaths. I realize that my reaction isn’t in proportion to what I’ve seen, which was sad and scary, but which did not end in violence. In my head, I run through a checklist: Am I taking my medication? Getting enough exercise, enough sleep? Did I eat breakfast? Is there anything else going on?
At some point, I realize that I should have gotten my period the week before. Well, that’s it, I think. Menopause. I’m forty-five, so this is probably about when I hop on the hormonal roller coaster for the next five years or so. At some point, just to rule out the obvious, I rummage through my bathroom cabinets and locate an ancient pregnancy test. I pee on the stick. Less than ten seconds later, there are two emphatically blue, make-no-mistake lines.
Positive.
• • •
After I get over being freaked out, I’m excited. I’m actually pretty thrilled. Yes, my kids are older, but at eight and twelve it’s not as if they’re so old that a sibling would seem ridiculous. Except I’m forty-five! I know women who’ve had babies at forty, forty-one, forty-two, forty-three . . . but forty-five? This is crazy, right?
Also, there’s history. A few years ago, I got pregnant with what the medical establishment, in its not-at-all gendered or judgmental language, called a “blighted ovum.” Basically, it was a bad egg, and my body realized it was no good and shut down the proceedings almost before the pregnancy began. My doctor gave me misoprostol, a drug designed to soften the cervical opening and start the process of the uterus emptying, and sent me home with minimal instructions—if I was bleeding so much that it scared me, go to the ER. Basically, it sounded like I’d take the pill and get my period. “You might have some cramping,” my doctor said, and I shrugged. Cramps I could handle. No big deal.
As it turns out, the process was a little more involved than that. I was bleeding a frightening amount, except I wasn’t sure it was enough to justify a trip to the hospital . . . and it hurt, a lot more than I’d thought (“bad cramps” made it sound like the miscarriage would be like the first day of my period, not the worst day of my reproductive life).
I do not want to go through that again. I’m afraid to get my hopes up, certain that, at my age, this will just be the same nightmare. I’ll go in, there won’t be a heartbeat, I’ll hear all kinds of fun language about blighted eggs and incompetent cervixes and “advanced maternal age” thrown around, and the whole thing will end in blood and sorrow.
Not only that, but the timing is rotten. Given the way the holidays fell, not to mention my beloved ob/gyn decamping for the suburbs the year before, the earliest I could get to see a doctor is three days after the New Year. I spend ten days holding my breath, taking daily pregnancy tests to confirm that I’m still expecting, swinging between delight and terror, avoiding alcohol and saunas, wanting to tell my friends, not being able to tell anyone, because, at forty-five, you wait until basically the baby’s crowning before you announce the joyous news.
Finally, we make it to the doctor’s office. Bill sits in the corner, and I lie on my back, babbling, as the technician slathers gel on a wand. “So, I was pregnant before, but I had a miscarriage, and it was a blighted ovum . . .”
The doctor inserts the probe and tilts the screen on the monitor.
“Well, this isn’t that,” he says, and points, so that we can see the tiny, insistent flicker of the heartbeat. Bill, who’s never been through this before, who has no children of his own, starts to cry. Not a few sniffles or a discreet tear or two. Full-on, silent, tears-streaming-down-his-face, shoulders-shaking man-tears. On the table, I roll my eyes at the doctor. “Want to look at another pussy?” I ask.
• • •
Bill and I both know the risks. When you’re forty-five, half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage . . . and of the ones that don’t, the rates for complications from stillbirth to autism are much higher than they are for younger women. But we also know how real it felt, once we’d seen that little flicker. My doctor is cautiously optimistic, telling us that a visible heartbeat means that the risk of a miscarriage has decreased significantly.
“But I’m so old,” I moan.
“Not really,” the doctor says. “Come back when you’re fifty-two. Then we’ll talk about old.”
I was ready for him to tell me to go home, report directly to bed, and spend the next eight months holding still with my legs crossed and my midsection swaddled in bubble wrap. Instead, he tells me to take prenatal vitamins, avoid tuna, and come back in a month. Yes, I can exercise. Yes, I can travel. “Just go and live your life,” he says.
We try not to get too excited as we begin to make plans. First, we have to get married. “You need to give this baby a name!” was, I think, how I put it. Bill and I have had desultory conversations about a wedding at some point down the road, but the pregnancy lends a new urgency to the endeavor. In ten days we’ve compared calendars, selected a suitable Saturday, sent out save-the-date e-mails, ordered invitations, drafted a prenup, hired a rabbi and a caterer and a florist and a violinist. Bill buys me a beautiful ring and basically shoves it at me over the dinner table.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” I ask, shaking my head at the total and complete absence of sentiment.
“Jennifer Agnes Weiner, will you marry me?”
Good enough. I glare at him a little longer, which gives him time to explain that he’s so anxious about having something that expensive in his care that he wanted to make it my responsibility as soon as he could. I put on the ring, buy an adorable little bridal hat, a fascinator with a birdcage veil, and a dress with a forgiving waistline. January goes by at a crawl. We talk about names—Ruby or Josie for a girl, Archie for a boy—and when, exactly, is the right time to tell my daughters. I go for acupuncture once a week and stay away from sushi. Every night that I don’t start bleeding feels like a victory. After ten weeks, we’ll go for the genetic testing that will tell us whether things are chromosomally normal. I book an appointment with the counselor for a Monday, and, on the Thursday before the ten-week mark, I fly up to the Berkshires to spend a relaxing, take-my-mind-off-things weekend with a friend at Canyon Ranch.
I haven’t told anyone but a few of my best friends about the pregnancy. I hadn’t planned on telling anyone at all, but my mom and Molly had both figured it out after we’d announced the wedding. (“That’s wonderful!” said my mom. “That’s crazy!” said Molly. “You’re, like, Halle Berry old!”) But at Canyon Ranch, I have to come clean. “You’re glowing,” says Juliana, and I’m so thrilled to tell her why. I schedule a prenatal massage and a mom-to-be facial, and I book a personal trainer to help me devise an exercise routine that I can keep up until the baby comes.
On Friday night, I go for my massage. Afterward, smelling like lavender oil, floating on a cloud of bliss, I amble to the bathroom . . . and, when I wipe, there’s a swipe of light brown on the toilet paper.
I think, in my heart, I know what’s happening, even as I Google for encouragement—as if blood is ever good news—and pray for the best. Little Ruby. Little Archie. I want so much for this to be real, to have a baby, my last baby, with Bill. I will be a good mother; I’ll use everything I’ve learned; I’ll have all kinds of help, a village to raise this last little one, and maybe I won’t be the youngest or the most energetic mom in the breastfeeding class or at the playgroup, but there won’t be a mother who will love her baby more.
By Saturday the spotting has turned into bleeding. Reluctantly I go to the local hospital, where I wait for hours alone in an exam room, until a nurse comes to hook me up to an IV. The plan is to pump me full of fluids, filling up my bladder, which will help with the ultrasound. “Are you Jennifer Weener the writer?” she asks, putting the needle in the crook of my arm, and I say that yes, I am, and she starts to tell m
e how much she loves my books. I’m trying not to cry as I ask her for her address and tell her I’ll send her a signed copy of my latest. The first rule of womanhood is that you never yell when you feel like yelling, or throw things when you feel like throwing them. You want people to like you, so you behave, even when what you want to do is scream and pull your hair and say, instead of Thanks for reading, This isn’t fair and Fix it and Tell me it’ll be okay.
It takes forever to be wheeled down for the ultrasound, and once I’m there, the technician isn’t allowed to tell me what she’s seeing. “You need to talk to the doctor” is all she’ll say. But I know, from her silence, from the stillness of her face, that the news is not good.
“I’m sorry,” says the doctor. “I am not seeing a heartbeat.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry, too.” Calling up Bill, telling him what had happened, is the hardest part, one of the worst things I’ve ever had to do. “Oh,” he says, and starts to cry, which makes me cry harder. I’ve been a mother; he’s never been, will never be, the biological father of children. We’ve tried not to get ahead of ourselves, tried not to let ourselves hope, but how can you not hope? How can you see a tiny flicker of a heartbeat on a screen and not imagine holding a baby in your arms?
My mother and Clair drive up from Connecticut to get me. They feed me dinner and drive me to their house. Bill meets me there and holds me while I cry. On Sunday we drive back to Philadelphia and spend the afternoon in numb silence, walking the dog, reading the paper. We eat. We watch The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and I sing, in my head, “ ’cause females are strong as hell.” We push through the hours until it’s Monday morning, and we are back at the office where the pregnancy was confirmed, in a waiting room in another doctor’s office, a waiting room full of rosy, glowing, hugely pregnant women. There’s another ultrasound; another confirmation that there will be no baby. “Except there’s still a pregnancy in there,” says the technician.
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