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flipping through old photo albums while ostensibly tidying the den, i come across a collection of photos entitled “June 1998.”

ten years ago.

the span of time is not so shocking as the irrefutable visual evidence that i was not, as my internal clock testifies, a mere child a decade ago.  apparently i am not actually eternally twenty-four after all. in fact, i was not even twenty-four then…i was twenty-six, a year married, living in Halifax and working on my M.A. and holding down three part time jobs and utterly, totally confused about my place in the world and how to make my way in it.

to top off all that angst i had bad hair, the result of an unfortunate first encounter with highlights and the effort to grow out years of a pixie cut into something longer.  two brassy walrus tusks swooped down from my brow, framing me in yellow.  i refused to cut them because they were, well, long-ish.  note to self: yellow is not your colour.

there is an end-of-year-celebration shot of me and my students, a G.E.D class that i taught through the local community college, for whom i’d dragged my carcass into my car and out of town at 7:30 every morning for half the year, out to a free elementary school classroom in a fishing village on the coast, where we’d all tucked our knees up under our chins on the tiny chairs and tried to figure out high school math together.  i look at them and wonder where they are now, the stevedore who’d come back to school because his union would no longer keep him on unless he got the qualification, the girl who smoked so much she literally set her alarm through the night so that she wouldn’t wake up nicotine deprived, the local drug dealer, the couple with the three little kids, the woman who brought me her hand-me-downs through the year because she thought i might like some new clothes.

there is a random shot of me taken at the other teaching job i held that year, the one i hated in principle: tutor for one of those “we’ll fix your children” farms learning centres that pay their (fully trained, experienced, qualified) teachers ten dollars an hour and charge you twenty for the honour.  it was the first job i got when we’d landed in the city the September before, and i’d gradually dropped my hours down and down until i only had one client left…the little girl who appears in the picture with me, beaming into the camera.  Mercedes.  i stayed with Mercedes through the school year because i liked her too much to leave.  she was eight, a roly-poly, bespectacled imp with severe learning disabilities but a higher emotional IQ than almost anyone else i’ve ever met.  i adored her.  urchin-like, frumpy little fussbudget daughter of a slender, made-up mom who always seemed bewildered by the child she’d produced, Mercedes had me at hello.  she had more sophisticated work avoidance tactics than federal bureaucrats do - we’d open up our books, and i’d offer her a choice of what to start with when suddenly, with perfect guile, she’d peer up into my face through her coke-bottle lenses and inquire, just like the local biddy at a church supper, “now, how’s your Nannie?  my Nannie’s been sick, you know.”   and sucker that i am for Nannies, we’d end up in a ten minute conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with symbol recognition or basic multiplication but was often one of the nicest i’d had all week.  i secretly wanted to take Mercedes out for coffee and a smoke.

there is a photo in that collection of me on a back deck with a guitar in one hand and a bottle of Southern Comfort in the other.  the bottle is largely empty.  i appear largely smashed.

there is another photo of me singing my heart out over same guitar on same deck the night the cops showed up to ask us to cease the caterwauling.  most politely, they actually waited ’til our chorus of “Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz” had dribbled to a halt before interrupting.  they were complementary about the singing, but the neighbours…well, you know.  besides, isn’t that song supposed to be sung a cappella?  our friends from Toronto were visiting that night and went home and regaled their friends with tales of the weird, friendly cops in the Maritimes.

there are a lot of pictures of me and my first husband.  we look pleasant.

there is a shot, smoke-obscured, of my friend Antony and i leaning back into an old, sagging velvet couch in the office where we produced two issues of a national arts and literature magazine, all uber-cool and sharp, clean b&w lines.  there were five of us who spent that spring and summer toiling in that smoky office before the whole venture went defunct, taking the third of my part-time jobs with it.  i was the editor.  i loved the work, the words, the creativity, the deadlines and the late-night meetings and the sheer freedom of it after four years spent as a teacher.  i disliked having to remind either of the cocky little upstart writers who’d started the whole deal that they would, y’know, eventually have to pay me.  one eventually did, right before he wisely bailed out of the sinking ship and moved to South Korea.  his name was Dave.

now, ten years later, i live with that cocky little twerp…who a few years and half a world hence, i noticed might be the love of my life.

time does crazy things to a person.

i suspect and kinda hope that the trajectory between now and ten years from now is a little more linear than the one that brought me here from June 1998.   my twenty-four-year-old soul will grow a little more aged on the outside, i suppose, and there will be the inevitable surprises and sorrows that mark one along the way.  but at thirty-six, i know - and accept - who i am in a way that would have been incomprehensible to the girl/woman searching back at me from that June 1998 collection.  and i looked at those pictures, and at her unlined brow framed by garish highlights, and thought, thank god i do not have to go back.

…Bon enters stage left, peers around with puzzlement, as if expecting something to fall from the sky…

then lies down.

she smiles tentatively, then looks up again sharply, suspiciously, and scans overhead.   she bundles herself into a small ball, looking very content…but most uncertain about this odd state of affairs. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

after my u/s appointment, at which all Down’s Syndrome markers were totally written off, baby was active and measured a healthy happy normal percentile, no uterine septum was detectable, and fluid was plentiful, my doctor came out and announced to the receptionist - and the entire waiting room - “Bonnie has a beautiful big long cervix!”

it’s not a compliment i’m accustomed to receiving in public, i will admit, but i tried to smile and preen graciously, the very picture of a Miss Cervix Universe contestant.  i begin to believe we may make it after all.

and baby looks mysteriously and amazingly like the little girl i was sure i’d never have.  consider me knocked over with a feather. 

i married Isis on the fifth day of May
but i could not hold on to her very long
so i cut off my hair and i rode straight away
for the wild unknown country
where i could not go wrong
…

she was there in the meadow where the creek used to rise
blinded by sleep and in need of a bed
i came in from the east with the sun in my eyes
i cursed her one time, then i rode on ahead

Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child
what drives me to you is what drives me insane
i still can remember the way that you smiled
on the fifth day of May, in the drizzlin’ rain

- Bob Dylan

we do not have the usual kind of anniversary.  there is no ceremony to commemorate, barely an event that marked one day from the next to anyone around us.  we began almost in secret, taboo, old friends evolving from one life to another in a window crowded with empty bottles and full ashtrays and late, late nights that became early mornings crouched at sunrise on damp concrete stoops together, still talking, whilst a foreign country woke up around us.  and i had known you too long not to know that a part of you belonged to me, beyond faithlessness, and yet was sure the boundaries on the rest were tied in chains.  and how heady, how terrifying, to watch the chains slide, to hold the Pandora’s Box of you & i in our hands and risk opening it, risk losing it all.

we slipped in eyes wide open, staring at each other, afraid to look away.  it has been seven years.  i still remember the feeling of relief, the recognition of now, i have lived.

we have lived more than i’d bargained for, and survived.  you have remained my friend, the one who knows me, the one i trust.  you have held me up through days and years i couldn’t see my way forward. you have had the grace to let me hold you up, in my different way.  we have each become something we were not before, and there is balance in it, better.

i look for the itch.  i know it well, have lived its dissatisfaction, its loneliness, its regret and wonder and longing for elsewhere…in another life, eight, nine years gone.  but i cannot remember its contours, anymore, cannot see its shadow.  we chose well, i think, in this gravely embarked upon and most serious fling.  this life’s work.

and too i remember the way that you smiled, that very first morning.  i made oatmeal, served up in plastic bowls.  it was the fifth day of May, in the drizzlin’ rain.

all i have…and love.

three years ago.

it was three years ago today i left the hospital for the first time after nearly three weeks of bedrest. i’d been airlifted in during winter’s last April gasp, but in my hermetic isolation in ye olde Craftmatic, the ground had transformed into a mushy carpet, spongy with sprigs of green poking through it. i felt like Rip Van Winkle, utterly out of time.

we drove out of the city, to the old tower on its outskirts, the one i’d climbed as a child every time we visited. my legs were weak and i walked gingerly. i was not in pain, per se…just timid, afraid i would break. the tower was closed, too old, too dangerous to be left open for tourists any longer. i stood in front of it, staring, as if i looked long and hard enough i might catch a glimpse of a younger me, might disappear with her into a different time, any other time than this.

she did not materialize, that former self. and i realized, viscerally, that she never would again…that there was no going back. i had stepped off the side of my own flat earth.

i turned in the rain, then, and tested my footing on the slippery bank of overgrowth there that leads up and then down, eventually, to the harbour. i climbed a little, until i was alone on a low ridge, looking down through the brush on tiny sailboats, seabirds. and when i was sure i was far enough away that no one could hear me, i spoke into the wind, and spoke his name for the first time in the thirty-six hours since he’d died.

i had a son. his name was Finn.

it was only a whisper, spoken to raindrops. but i knew it might be a very long time before i had the courage to say those words aloud again, to risk exposing the gaping wound i had suddenly become, to risk being that crazy lady talking about her dead baby. i knew too that i needed, desperately, to mark him on the world, to tell someone of my joy and my pride in him, of my sorrow, to tell that he had been here.

my tears mixed with the rain and those eight words echoed.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

it was only in the year and more after his death that those echoes found expression anywhere, for me. it was here, where i could speak without having to meet anyone’s eyes, that i began to be able to write my way through the grief and love and anger that had left me unmoored, cut off at the knees. here, for the first time, i could own the whole of my story, find a balance within it - be the mother of a dead child without only being the mother of a dead child. and here, for the first time, i found people like me, mothers mourning and keening and raging and weeping, mothers bearing witness to lives too short.

i wrote to Finn on his birthday, i am okay now. i didn’t add that this blog has had a great deal to do with that healing - not just as a space to speak, but also because you have heard me, have taken in my darkest bleatings and said in return, received, here, listening. you have offered love. and more, you have offered that love to a child you never met, a child whom only a couple of people ever got to meet, to touch. my child. i feared him being forgotten, erased; feared never being able to sing him into existence, somewhere. thank you for being my somewhere. you have given me grace i had not imagined existed.

blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

the first few paragraphs of this post have two homes, today.

i am celebrating…it is May, the end of cruel April. i am still pregnant. i am beginning to hope.  but with the same words, i am also celebrating the start of a different kind of new beginning. six of us, all of us Medusas, deadbabymamas, are collaborating on a new blog called glow in the woods…what we hope will be a warm fire amidst the bleak cold of grief, a community for families struggling to get through infant loss, stillbirth, and sorrow. it would be in bad taste, i suppose, to call it our new baby…but it is May, people, and i am feeling more cocky and flippant than i have in a long time. please click over, come see us, and if you know someone who might find some solace in our company, please send ‘em our way, and our welcome. our doors are open.

…did i mention it was May? may it bring real spring, finally, and blessings to all.

it is your birthday, little one, and you are not here.

i made cupcakes last night anyway, and when your father and your little brother come home later we will go out into the back yard where your trees are budding, just barely, and have a little picnic and talk about you and celebrate you.  because it is your birthday, and you would be three today.

but you are not here.

i know the cupcakes are not for you.   these cupcakes are for the living.  they are an offering, i guess, a ritual, a way of honouring what we do not know how to touch.  they are a way for your father and i to tell your brother about you, now that he is getting old enough.  i do not really expect him to understand…i’m still not sure i understand, myself.  but he likes cupcakes, knows they are only for special occasions.   you liked cupcakes, too, back when you and i were a world unto ourselves: i will tell him, someday, that you two had that in common.  your little feet used to dance inside me, tapping out your sugar rush, making me laugh.  i used to tap my fingers back, in response, the two of us symbiotic and easy in our cupcake afterglow.

there is another little one there inside now, Finn, in that same fragile sanctuary, another brother or sister.  s/he too will have cupcakes tonight.  for you, for this special occasion, even though you are not here.  and s/he may dance or kick, just like you did.  and those cupcakes will be bittersweet.

there was so much i wanted to show you.  when you first died, i couldn’t look at things without showing them to you in my mind…these are clouds, little one, that’s a kitty and they’re soft, these are berries i don’t know the name of…aren’t they pretty?  i don’t know if i thought you could hear me, see through me somehow…i just…needed to tell you.  i still want to.  i want to show you the tulips that are coming up in the front yard, and the worms in the earth, and tell you how your mother loves you and just…be your parent, Finn.  because you are my child, you were my firstborn, my baby.  but you are not here.

what i can tell you is that we are not so broken, anymore, by your going.  that we are healing.  i didn’t want sheer bitterness to be your legacy, i didn’t want to honour you by becoming something less.  and yet it feels like such betrayal, for me to let go…to accept and say, it’s okay.  it was time when you went; i told you that then and i meant it, with my whole soul.  you were hurt, and hurting, and i could not help you.  you did nothing wrong.  i do not know if it will ever be quite okay that you’re gone…i doubt it…but it is easier, now.  do you understand?  and if i say, i am okay now, will you forgive me?  because even after three years, i am still afraid of losing you…wherever you may be.  i am still afraid of failing you.

i am still your mama, and proud of you.

i  love you, little one.  and down here with the tulips and the trees, we’re having cupcakes and remembering.  happy birthday.

…or how a three-day, two-party, four-cake,  triplicate-dinner bonanza of second birthday celebrations ensured that Oscar will now expect pure sugar with every meal for at least the next month.

every little boy should have a mother on bedrest for his birthday, apparently.  parties materialize from all corners.  mamas gain ten pounds and like it.  teeth hurt.  good times are had by all.

the first cake was gelato and sorbeto, at Auntie Cindy’s, with cousins and friends and Grandmaman & Grandpapa.  all cakes are now greeted with the gleeful cry of “ice!”

the second cake, upon return to Charlottetown, sported homemade boiled icing by Grandpa Tom.

in the full swing of the party spirit by day 3 of the party circuit, Oscar welcomed guests to party number 2, hosted by his babysitter.

and downed a cupcake to boot…

to cap the festivity round-robin, Nannie dressed as a clown to surprise Oscar at her house.

but the Elmo cake was the crumb - or ze waffer-thin mint - that broke the camel’s belly…and sweet Oscar blew up like Mister Creosote in that Monty Python sketch.  i swear, he said fug off, i’m full.  then he asked for more.

he is two, and wild and beautiful, and has consumed more sugar in the past three days than in the entire rest of his life to date.  he is my joy.

happy birthday, little one.  may every year be so sweet.

when i started this blog, i had vague goals, especially timewise.  i thought maybe i could actually keep it going for a couple of months.  maybe.  if i didn’t run out of things to say.  maybe even longer, if i actually found a voice.  i thought it might be cool to try to blog through Oscar’s first year…a record, a witness to that experience.  i thought that was about as far into the future as i could commit, and as far as my ego could imagine anybody actually possibly conceivably reading.  it seemed a lifetime.

and yet it’s been two years today.  and i can’t imagine stopping, not really.  even in stretches like this where i struggle, where my internal narrative runs amok and i do not know, anymore, what is worth saying and what is just better left to die on the vine, unspoken neuroses being so much more charming than spoken.   but i think after two years, dear readers, we’re past charming.  or certainly i feel well past charming, and more in the, erm, “settled” phase of things, where toothbrushing gets a little more optional.  i think we’re in the lounge-about-and-scratch-ourselves stage around the crib.  and my neurotic self thanks you for being here anyway, even with the bloom all off the rose and whatnot.

and since two is the cotton anniversary, and we’re letting it all hang out, please feel free to don a celebratory pair of tighty-whities or something else equally uncharming, scratch, and tell me what i secretly wonder whenever i watch those weird cable makeover shows…are there really women out there who wear lacy underwear, day in, day out, year in, year out?

enlighten me.

this week has not been a pleasant journey.

drowning in work after an unanticipated ‘vacation’ spent getting pretty blue thread stitched into my lady parts, i came down with Oscar’s cold on Monday. then i saw my regular hometown OB, who felt me up and could find no evidence of any cervix left at all, other than the stitch. so my pelvic rest got upgraded to real, bonafide bed rest and we got ordered back to Halifax for another appointment this Friday. and i was not to drive, so Dave booked yet another day off work. i sent copious work emails from our couch, feeling out of the loop and out of control, and tried not to over-research the failure rates of cerclages and the chromosomal risks of fetuses (fetii?) without nasal bones at 12w4d and scar tissue septums (septii?) in uteruses (uterii?), and i waited for Friday with the dread of someone who feels like bad omens are in the air. about thirty hours before we were to leave for Halifax, i woke up in the middle of the night nauseous and wretched, and not the kind of nauseous and wretched that goes with pregnancy. the kind that goes with flu. turns out when Oscar woke, with alarming screams, that he’d been having the same problem. his crib, floor, and wall were newly decorated with memories of the previous evening’s strawberries, and the whole room was pungent with sourness, dried vomit caked in his hair. his father bathed him, washed the contents of the bed, scrubbed. i lay around on the bathroom floor trying to smile at my miserable child whilst moving as little as possible.

twenty-four hours later, with no further signs of illness from O and my own day of retching behind me, Dave packed the car, and i reclined the passenger seat, and the three of us started of for Halifax, where my little family would visit cousins and i would - my doctors had cautioned - likely be admitted, either for another cerclage (for double luck) or to be deposited head-down in a craftmatic without even bathroom privileges for the coming, um, next three months.

it was a sunny morning. i ate an Egg McMuffin and marvelled at its rubbery goodness after thirty-six hours of nothing but the back and forth of juice and bile. Oscar was conducting an elaborate kissing session between plastic ponies and Thomas the tank engines in his car seat, and we were arguing with the CBC morning show. it was the high point of our week. and then, with little warning, a high-pitched squealing noise issued from the back seat, a whine that built in pulses into the gutteral, shocked, wet shriek of alarm that a not-quite two year old strapped into a car seat and throwing up most of what he’s eaten in the last twenty-four hours emits when he finds himself sick in a moving vehicle. one gush. O’s shirt, pants, and the car seat take most of the hit. two gushes. Thomas and friends are showered in half-digested blueberries. three gushes, and half the back seat of the car is awash in puke. it’s a Kia Rio. we pack tight. and we are past the point of turning back, especially since this appointment is so urgent, but we are also still three full hours from our destination.

so i swivel in my seat and try to comfort the poor child until we can stop at a gas station and Dave can lift him from the car and carry him through the cold, busy parking lot, drenched in vomit, for a change of clothes and a wash up. i scrape the reeking back seat and its contents with baby wipes, my throat revisiting my McMuffin with displeasure. Dave returns, deposits a now cheery, freshly-dressed Oscar onto my lap in the front of the car, then removes the car seat and takes it away to scrub it. i pine for the vinyl seats and sticky car seats of my childhood, with their uncomfortable but blessedly non-vomit-absorbing qualities. Oscar has a little of his rice milk from the car cooler. Dave re-installs the soaking wet car seat, covering it with a recycling bag so O won’t shiver to death. we set off again.

an hour later, same whine. i swivel again, quicker this time, ask Oscar if he needs to stop. we’ve just missed the exit, but i am nothing if not courteous. he tries to say yes, and loses his rice milk all over himself. we go to the next exit. we stop. we are less thorough this time. we dispose of pukey recycling bag, wipe down seat, change O’s clothes, place him on a bed of Irving plastic, give water, no milk, start off again. the appointment time is looming.

twenty minutes later, same story, except that this time his poor little stomach is going for the big guns, bringing up the deep, undigested bits like he’s auditioning for a part in “Stand by Me” and his eyes are big and frightened and the sun is beating in on the car and the reek is overwhelming and i am on my knees, beltless, in the front seat trying helplessly to calm him and comfort him except i am losing it myself and i start to sob and choke, half-sick, too much, overwhelmed, careening down the highway backwards in a little silver car that smells like a frat house puke party when i am not even supposed to be sitting up straight and i try to say, “it’s okay baby” except i still have a cold and i’m crying so it comes out as gibberish and all i can think is my god, this is the stupidest trip in the world and yet i cannot think of any options we had to do anything differently and this, this, is what really does me in, the utter powerlessness of it all, my inability to help my child or my unborn, to keep either safe and i collapse back in the front seat crying like a baby and then the cell phone rings and Dave, looking for an exit, picks up and says, “vomit express” and i say “no, vomit comet!” and we laugh because hell, what else are you going to do?

so we pulled in, and Dave cleaned him up again, and then the poor little creature, bless his heart, fell asleep in his wet, stinky, garbage-bag covered car seat and Dave cancelled the visit with the cousins and booked a hotel room for he and O and they dropped me at the hospital and in i went, just on time. and my doctor greeted me with a hug and a concerned, “are you by yourself?” and i explained and they ushered me in for the ultrasound and we discussed worst-case scenarios and they called in the med students because i’m special like that. but then she pulled up the screen and there it was, not only that same big round-headed baby with its beating heart but a cervix, with a good centimetre or more still above and below the stitch, not perfect but as good as they left me and fine, fine for the moment and my doctor looked stunned and measured again and there were smiles and congratulations all around the room. we did not see a nasal bone yet again but one of the med students ran to get my screening results and the Down Syndrome risk, all things combined, is that of a 27 year old mother which i most assuredly am not and so i am good with that, far more afraid of my body failing this child anyway than i am of anything else. noses are not the most important thing. and the septum - which is likely a scar tissue product of last fall’s D&C - is not likely to cause any significant problems until somewhere between 28-32 weeks anyway, which if my cervix holds til then will be a bridge we cross when we come to it.

and so i got to walk out of there, still on orders of fairly strict bedrest but not bedpan-style, not head down, not hospitalized, not yet, and i got a cab to the hotel and found my boys, still with the slight stench of vomit about them, and we got to be together and so the week, for all the wretchedness of its journey, has ended far better than i ever thought it would, even in destinations not quite planned.

though i’m not looking forward to the drive home.

Oscar is pining, for the first time in his short life.

his grandparents, Dave’s parents, were here visiting last weekend. a good time was had by all, especially those under three feet tall. Grandmaman and Grandpapa treat the boy like the sun in the sky, and he rises to the occasion, demanding and beguiling their attention from the moment he wakes to the bedtime story Grandmaman weaves for him, rocking in her lap. between them and his Nannie, my mom, his is an embarrassment of grandparental riches. and this is what we moved home for, really, after all those years of vagabonding…the blessing and bounty of seeing our parents with our child, our children, seeing him loved like that. we got lucky.

’til now, Nannie, the local grandparent, has been the one who got most of the glory from O. he learned to say her name over a year ago, one of his first words, and insists that i remind him that Nannie loves him, every night before he goes to sleep. the two of them go on playdates to her place every couple of Saturday mornings, wherein my serious, proper mother apparently dons plastic fire helmets and cavorts around like a banshee. O came home a few weeks ago telling tales of “wheee!” and “Nana!” and when i asked him, disbelieving, if he was trying to tell me that Nannie drove fast, he was most earnestly affirmative. my mother, who stops three feet early in intersections and pumps her brakes in July. with her grandson, she’s a wildwoman. he adores her.

but poor Grandmaman and Grandpapa, though O’s always enjoyed them, haven’t held quite the same presence in his mind until now. Oscar sees them every month or two in person, and has since birth, and waves to them even more frequently on the webcam. they’re topics of conversation in our house, but until this weekend, Oscar’s filial love for them has been of the “out of sight, out of mind” variety.

no longer.

since the moment they left Monday morning, Oscar has been looking around corners and waking up at night, asking hopefully, “Wama? Bapa?” he had never really had a word for Grandmaman before this week, so that when he first asked for her i thought he was asking for his lovey, his stuffed rabbit…a substitution which affronted and exasperated O most intolerably. he misses them. he feels their absence, and it is new to him, and weighty. there’s a look on his face that i’ve never seen before…he’s wistful, uncertain. he knows they’re not just down the road, somehow…that this is different from when Nannie goes home and comes back tomorrow or in a couple of days. they were here, in our house, and now…they’re not. and the house itself seems as if it’s emptier, for him, no longer sufficient just to us three. i ask him if he feels sad, and he says yes, and there are hugs, and extra webcam visits with New Brunswick, but still…for the first time, i am watching my child cope with the feeling of loss, with the sadness of not having someone you love nearby.

and i know this is a gentle way to learn, and i am grateful. but the high, sweet voice that calls out “Wama!” as if he really believes that maybe we’ve just been hiding her under the cushions all week? it reminds me how much crushing it takes to make it to adulthood, makes me want to lay my body down over him and keep him safe from hurt, keep him small like this, where the saddest thing he’s ever known is that his wonderful Grandmaman and Grandpapa went home for a bit, and will be back next month.

and makes me wonder, too, just a bit, if i was ever that small, and that innocent.

and there i was again in that same goddam room for the third time, that room with its stark, giant clock, that room that has only ever hosted endings for me, or the beginnings of endings, bright with blood. and first the machine crapped out the moment she pulled the sensor towards me, and we waited, making awkward idle chitchat, while it rebooted and i pretended to be composed. there was a nurse there, and a nursing student, though both of them seemed out of place since i’d thought this was a clandestine affair, this visit, date almost, this secret promised viewing in the closed and hallowed halls of Labour & Delivery. ’til yesterday, i had not seen my OBGYN since the week before my D&C last November. no visits to check the drop of hcg levels or confirm the thoroughness of surgery. the followup appointment - delayed due to the holidays - was cancelled in January thanks to a storm. the replacement appointment after the storm got hijacked because my doctor herself was sick. by the time i finally saw her yesterday, it was for another maternity visit…i am nine weeks today. theatre of the absurd. and such a terrifying leap of faith, this try, this shot. so i figured this trip to L&D was a favour, a kindness slipped into her busy delivery schedule because she knows me and my history all too well, even though ultrasounds in our part of the world are hoarded and doled out like prized crumbs and better say thanks.

she laded me with blue jelly. the chitchat stumbled to a halt. i looked at the screen and saw only fuzz, and looked away. i stared at the clock, instead, that trusty abominably ugly clock that has witnessed too many minutes of me lying in that bed, fearful and waiting. she tried. she twisted, cocked her head. i looked her in the eye and realized hers are almost the exact colour of my own. and she met my gaze and said, “you know what i’m going to say. i’m not seeing what i’d like to be seeing here. but that could just, umm, be me.”

it is an in joke, of sorts. three years ago, this same kind, frank, capable doctor “snuck” me into L&D for one of these sly side ultrasounds because i’d seen her twice for what appeared to be an unfortunate, mortifying bladder issue, and she wanted to make sure instead that i was not leaking fluid. that sunny April morning, she pronounced all well with the fluid surrounding my 23-week baby, and after a little begging on my part told me she was 90% certain we were having a girl. six days later, i found myself in the room with the clock, blood and fluid all down my legs, waiting for an airlift. Finn, our son, died ultimately of the lung complications suffered because i had, indeed, been leaking fluid for a month unchecked before the sac gave way entirely. she knows this, my doctor. i know that had she caught it, there was still nothing she could have done. so we live with this between us, this sad, wry truth that she may not excel at ultrasounds and yet is the only one who has ever gone out of her way to try to give me peace of mind with them. and i trust her because she is honest, and human.

but when she said, “it could just be me,” i could not hear her, not really, because my heart had already sunk into that stark, certain, brutal helplessness of having one’s fear realized, yet again. she left the room to call down to the radiology lab to see if they could see me. the part of me that weighs and measures and never took my eyes off that bleak, institutional clock face registered what a gift it was to have these strings pulled, to actually get in for a vaginal ultrasound ASAP. most of me, though, was scrambling to hide. my brain tore through sad little shreds of narrative and metaphor wherein i tried to tell myself i could do this again and come out whole on the other side. i refused to believe myself. i would have thought that the prospect of loss, like so many things, gets easier with practice…instead, for me it becomes more intolerable, more surreal.

the nurse insisted that the student nurse walk with me down to radiology. poor little soul, all of twenty-one and chipper. they let her come in with me to the tech’s lair, when they would not let even Dave come in November, not even when we were almost sure that the news was going to be bad. she had the good sense to sit in a corner and not try to hold my hand.

belly ultrasound and the tech said nothing except that my uterus seemed tilted back and sucked her teeth and asked if i’d mind the transvaginal and i nearly leapt off the table trying to get my damn pants off, because what the hell is dignity for if you can’t shove it aside now and then for things more important? then the probe, and she sucked her teeth again and turned the screen and there it was, hiding in the back, way away in that pelvis that seems to be spreading daily, a little round head and wiggling limbs and a heartbeat, 170 bpm. and i said, sweet fucking merciful Jesus and my legs began to shake like a small dog’s and then i would have let that little student nurse hold my hand, i would have, but she was trying very hard to politely not notice me spread-eaged on the table and was instead smiling intently at the screen.

never once in my reproductive history before today have i had a doctor say, “uh oh” and had anything but the very worst case scenario turn out.

i said to Dave that maybe my luck in this department is like Brigadoon. it hides in the mists, and i needed a leap year - a moment out of the ordinary ordained calendar - to bring it out.

so badly i hope that it holds.