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i’ve never really been an outdoorsy sort.

my childhood memories of the delights of nature mostly involve being cold, or damp, or slightly unsure of what to do with myself.  i had an aversion to bugs, and other than my grandmother’s ancient raspberry bushes – which yielded more bugs than berries in any case – little connection to the concept of the fruits of the soil.

but this spring, i want to go outside like never before.  most of this is sheer and simple contrariness: the weather is terrible and i’m confined to my postage stamp of a backyard at best, therefore i wish to conquer the wilds.  or at least the local park.  i want to walk.  i want to plant things.  i want to just…go.  somewhere.  anywhere.  we ended up at the ER yesterday with Oscar for the second time in two weeks – oh yes, we make fine use of our universal health care here at chez crib – and it was…exciting.  which is pitiful.   i just want to touch something other than a computer keyboard, see sights that aren’t yet another doctor’s office.  i am beginning to dream, in my fitful sleep, about those rare occasions in my past where i’ve hiked mountains and rambled in meadows and camped in sand dunes…i considered most of those experiences vaguely unpleasant at the time (ask me about trailing the short-eared f&*#$ing owl all over a frozen wasteland of dykes on the last day of the old millenium and how i thereafter resolved, over a good stiff hot drink, to never go outside during this century) but suddenly, uninvited, the pastoral forays replay in my dreams like siren songs, all tarted up and sexy.

i know i’m being petulant.  i knew what i was getting into.  i would have given my teeth to be in this position, safely this far along, a few months back.  i still would, would be thoroughly jealous of myself, if i believed it at all, if etched on my brain in my own handwriting were not that journal entry from early April 2005 that reads, “we are having a daughter, a daughter! and Dr. X says everything is fine and we are so close now to all that i can remember wanting.”  all of it smoke within weeks, ruins, the cruellest of jokes.  so i roll through this endless cycle of days feeling confined and detached and overwhelmed by all the minutiae slipping by me, waiting for the axe to fall on this foolish dream and wondering if i shouldn’t just pack it in now and start running already, running far far away from the reckoning that must have my name on it, running to meadows or mountains or whatever in nature has the capacity to contain me and all this wild, terrible fear, this unshakable sense of being sacrifice for the impending slaughter.

…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. 

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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.  :)

looky, looky mommy…that lady’s gone shack-wacky!

this is what the shrill little kiddie voices in my head have started saying.  it worries me.  when even the most tender and inexperienced of your personal imaginary voices notice that you’re stark raving mad a little peculiar these days, perhaps you need to get out more.

i’ve become grumpy, impatient, like an old codger in a home.  if i had a meal tray, i’d rap on it with my spoon and pester the nurse about why my mashed potatoes are cold and where are my damn peas and didn’t i ask to go out for a smoke or wait, was that yesterday?  i can’t remember.  the world has closed down around me, and the minutiae loom, suddenly irritating.  i am a Prussian officer, demanding that Dave empty that dishwasher now and stop dawdling about it and why won’t Oscar lie still so i can change the sodden rag that his diaper has become and doesn’t he know i can’t chase after him and is that fucking dishwasher empty yet?  if i have to do it myself, i will, you know.

but i shouldn’t, not really, and there’s the rub.  those who can, do.  those who can’t, harp. or rail at the dislocation and incompetence and sense of burden that overwhelms them sometimes…caught between the semblance of normal life still tangible around the house and the shifted reality underneath, snagged at the limits of their own patience.  there is no stress release here, no casual encounter, no random accomplishment, no exercise, no sex, no nothing.  and it is the helplessness, i think, that is spreading what’s left of me thin and raw…the subconscious realization that as we close in on twenty weeks we cross into the Danger Zone and are cast, supplicant, on the mercy of luck and fortune.

it gets wearing, and wearying, this lack of agency.

i do have a doctor’s appointment this morning, ending the nearly four-week drought between official visits.  seeing as i’m watched by two teams in two separate provinces, it’s by far the longest i’m likely to go in this entire pregnancy.

i hope i get a lollipop while i’m there.

outside my window, a peaceful snow is falling. tulip buds huddle tight closed against the icy blanket. we had to drag out Oscar’s winter boots again this morning. part of me thinks this is ridiculous – that after a winter this long, this laden with storms, that spring is somehow obliged to hurry up and arrive once Mayday is only a week away.

another part of me – the part that spends all day indoors, on the couch – is more equivocal. meh, says the shut-in, snow, schmoe. i don’t own a chaise lounge. what do i care if it snows all summer?

it will not, i know. but this is Canada. we’re a snow-ridden folk. i remember driving home from college for the summer one year, with my childhood best friend, in a late April snowstorm so bad we had to follow the taillights of the car ahead. the road was whited out, and at one point as we crawled along, inching down the highway, we mulled over the ironies of dying in a snowstorm on summer vacation. oh callous youth, so unfearful, so amused.

i am no longer that girl. my mind still plays the wry ponies of doom, casting narratives, but they do not entertain me any longer. they make my heart leap in my chest, make me swallow dryly. my eyes dart, seek escape. and these visions are with me always, now, no longer novelties of an out-of-season adventure. that restless, invincible, curious self of youth, with summer stretching out before her, all possibility and late night beers to be drunk…she caught the last train out of here a few years back.  i do not think we will see her again in these parts…she was young, and i am not, and will never be again.

instead, i nest inside, internalized, waiting for a summer of waiting. i try not to obsess about the disconnect of the fact that i still do not look or feel terribly pregnant, that my belly has not popped this third time around like it did the second, that i’ve only felt tiny flickers of what might be movement, that i know too many people now who’ve suffered the brutal blow of a heartbeat just…disappearing…and that i live that nightmare every time i let my mind stray near it. in a fit of neurosis this morning, i ordered a Doppler. it arrives Monday. a part of me hates the thing i’ve become, the fretter, the wretched, tied in knots by my steady stream of fears.

but i know well that spring is not really obliged to come, you see…and for some, never does. the summer stretching out wild before you disappears – forever a mirage – once you understand that it is not truly an inevitable promised land, but only a turn of luck that can change in an instant.
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of course, three hours after i ordered the Doppler, i felt it, hard under my waistband, the tap and flutter and queer twist of the small life inside. unmistakable this time, insistent. and it kept up for minutes and i lay still and laughed, hand cupped on my belly, tears streaming down my cheeks, watching the snow fall outside my window.

two years ago this morning i woke up exactly 36 weeks pregnant, rolled awkwardly over, smiled at Dave as the sun poured in our bedroom window and the cat perched atop my enormous belly, purring, and said, “God, i hope i don’t go into labour today.”

he looked me cock-eyed.  i was almost ten weeks more pregnant than i’d ever been before…and while we’d spent most of January, February, and March silently hoping each morning that the day would bring precisely nothing in the way of labour, never before had i actually spoken the words aloud.

but he knows me.  “why today?” he inquired, with the exaggerated tolerance of one who does not expect that the answer will hold much relevance.

“it’s Hitler’s birthday.”

“yes….” and when i looked stricken, as if his lack of immediate and evident reaction was dooming our offspring to a life of wretched, hopeless flailing against an evil horoscope, he laughed.  “ummm, yeh.  but nobody knows that,” he said.

“well, i know it,” was my reply.  and then the floodgates of neurosis burst.  “…and Finn died on April 30th, and that’s the same day Hitler died, and i don’t want some weird kind of Hitler theme in my children’s dates!”  i finished on a slightly hysterical note, and then sulked righteously, feeling silly but strangely content, entrenched in my petulance and my warm spot in the bed.

i’ve always remembered dates without effort.  my fixation on them, though unintentional, was a strange, ever-present part of the way i coped with the grief and helplessness of the year between Finn’s birth and Oscar’s.  the dates were a grim truth or consequences game of life and death, a measuring out of patience and endurance: on this day last year, or when i last did this, or it has been twenty weeks since he died and in another twenty weeks this baby might have a chance at viability. but that morning, serious as i was about the whole Hitler connection and also my sneaking suspicion that it meant i’d truly turned the corner into crazy, the conversation was…light.  it assumed that a baby born that day – however unauspicious the date – would live.  it was, for the first time in almost a year, the closest Dave & i came to joking about birth.

and so we kept going.  “how do you know all sorts of other horrible people weren’t born on other dates that you have no idea about?” Dave countered.  he rolled out of the bed and picked up the laptop. he likes obscure historical information.  and before he went to work that morning, Wikipedia most kindly helped us identify not only a variety of pleasant, innocuous things which had happened on April 20ths of years past, but which famous folk had been born on each day of the following two weeks.  i set my sights somewhere in May.  and promptly went into labour about 8 pm that night.

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Oscar was born at 1:47 am the following morning.  he made it safely into April 21st, thus putting him in the fine birthday company of Queen Elizabeth II and Iggy Pop, whose sensibilities visibly compete in his cusp-of-Taurus soul.  he passed through me like a thunderstorm.  i went into labour at book club, eating trifle.  for an hour or more i sat with my secret, a Cheshire cat silently timing the increasing, regular contractions.  when i left, i don’t think anyone but me believed that i’d be having a baby that night.  i made my way home at ten, found Dave webcasting live, smiled and waved, sniffed the tumbler on his desk to see who’d be driving to the hospital, and went upstairs to pack my bag.  we took some last belly photos, laid down for a few minutes to watch the Lamaze tape a friend had sent months before, before another year of childbirth classes got cut short by my untimely admission to hospital for bedrest.  i wrote in my journal in the quiet of our yellow kitchen, posted a quick post on the fledgling blog.  and about twenty minutes too late, not long before midnight, we left for the hospital.  by the time we arrived, five minutes later, i was in full-blown, five-centimetres-dilated and hard contractions every minute kind of labour.  the second helping of trifle threatened a reappearance at every turn.  and then, without warning, when the overwhelming pain would not allow me to bend in the middle and thus sit on the birthing ball i’d been so hopefully looking forward to “enjoying,” i went into a complete, disassociative panic attack.  it was what i’ve since discovered is a classic post-traumatic-stress-reaction panic response, not uncommon in women who’ve had traumatic or ill-supported births or post-birth infant losses associated with their previous experience of labour.  but no one had ever mentioned such a thing, and it had not occurred to me to anticipate it, look it up, prepare for such an eventuality.  not until my labour ramped from zero to sixty in fifteen minutes and there was suddenly no respite from the brutal, muscular jaws of my uterus and my scarred cervix and i could not catch my breath, could not breathe at all and the fifty-one weeks in the interim were burned away as if with acid and i was animal and desperate and pleading and frightened, so frightened, and this time i knew exactly what the abyss looked like and i knew i was not strong enough for that.

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i went into labour twice with Finn.  the first time, they stopped it with drugs and they airlifted me and put me on bedrest and high doses of antibiotics and more than two weeks later i began to believe all would be well when i woke up one morning in my hospital room with a strange twinge in my belly.  they strapped on monitors and wheeled me down to Labour & Delivery faster than i could even rescue my long-distance phone card from my bedside table, so i had to call Dave’s sister, locally, and get her to track him down in Charlottetown where he was closing on our new house, our first home.  he had just set foot inside the door, had not even signed for the keys, when he turned around and hightailed it back out the door for that loneliest, scariest four-hour race to the hospital.  there was no single day where, even stuck in different provinces, we just got to celebrate being homeowners for the first time.  just like there was no single day where we just got to celebrate being parents.

i did not believe, i don’t think, that the timing could really be that impossibly bad; that of the seventeen days i’d been in hospital to date it would, it could be that one, that one with the carefully scheduled dryer delivery and the phone and internet hook-ups and all the necessary paperwork that Dave had to be there for.  i had accepted that the baby would be early, had thrilled to reach the 26 week mark the day before, representing a 75% chance of survival.  i was feeling positive, prepared to deal with altered timelines, expectations.  but not that morning.  just not that morning.  i spent the first hour or two of active labour in total denial, sure the meds would stop the increasing tide just as they had before.  when it became evident that they would not, and i knew Dave was still hours away, i moved from denial to shock.  then the pain overtook me.

when you labour that early they strap you to your back on a delivery table, because the baby must be monitored at all times.  i had back labour.  i had scar tissue on my cervix that was preventing dilation, even though my contractions came a minute apart for almost two hours straight.  i had young nurses who were competent but inexperienced, unable to rise to meet me and hold my eyes through that fog of pain.  when i broke with all my own preconceived notions and begged for an epidural, i discovered the main body of anesthesiologists for the hospital were on strike, and due to some c-sections that morning it would be close to two hours before i could expect one.  it was exactly two hours.  Dave arrived ten minutes later, and for a window all was calm.  then the baby’s heartrate dipped badly, and suddenly it was rush and bustle and there were noises being made about a c-section and i said yes, yes please but the doctor, white-haired and cold and never met my eyes said no, no we’d have to do a vertical cut and it’s just not worth it for this baby at this point and i remember blinking, yet another shock because clearly my baby needed to come out and i didn’t give a shit about me thank you very much and i was honed in utterly on the 75% chance of survival, you see, because we’d already had a bad enough day so surely all would be well if we could just get the baby out.  and an older nurse who had come in a moment before with the 3 pm shift change, curly-haired, she looked me in the eye for what felt like the first time all day and said meaningfully do you want a second opinion?  and i said yes and then there was someone else there and he wanted to just check one more time manually and i felt nothing, numb, but he said the cervix is gone – the scar tissue had torn, finally – this baby is coming! now! and an alarm and two quick pushes and my eyes locked on Dave’s, beseeching, and in a rush of blood i saw one small, perfect ear as ten people in yellow gowns and masks rushed into the room and they whisked him away, our tiny son, the baby i had just birthed.  it was 3:24 pm.  he lived for eleven hours.

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so it was that i went into Oscar’s birth, exactly fifty-one weeks later, four weeks early, assuming that it couldn’t help but be better, that so long as i came out with a live baby on the other end all would be well.  and yet the irony is that i walked out of Finn’s birth broken-hearted but feeling nonetheless amazed and proud of what my body had done, however insufficiently.  i was awed by the fact that i had borne him, made him in the first place, from that perfect ear to his tiny toes, replicas of his father’s.  in the hours before he died, i was so high from the sheer wonder of having given birth that had you handed me an ashtray instead of a baby to hold in those moments, i think i’d have cradled it tenderly, fallen in love.  for months after he died, one of the only ways i could manage to treat myself with any care and respect whatsoever, to stave off the bleakness and the craving for destruction was to remind myself, “i am Finn’s mother.”

Oscar’s birth did not leave me with the same sense of anything, except ultimately, relief that he was safely out and then bewilderment and guilt that i could not summon the same high for a successful birth as i had for the doomed one. O’s delivery was quick and dirty and out of control, a clusterfuck of interventions i didn’t want and didn’t believe i needed, and it culminated not only in a third-degree episiotomy – done with scissors i still see in flashbacks – that i begged them not to do and that caused me raw pain for a year afterwards, but worse, in being rushed off to the OR only minutes after birth to have the stitches ripped open again because the placenta did not disengage.  i had good nurses, good solid nurses, and Dave with me until the moment they took me away, but they could not reach me where i was, in the grip of visceral flashback.  i was helpless, and then acted upon, quickly and without my consent, because all was happening so fast.  i did not get to hold my baby for more than a minute.  i did not get to nurse him, to do more than glance at his small self, to breathe.  after the placenta was scraped out and the hemorrhage stopped, i was left alone in Recovery, shaking and utterly beaten by the panic and a sense of shamed, helpless violation and failure, and once again, shock, that i could have managed yet again to be so completely unprepared for what birth would bring.  and sure, somehow, that when i emerged from that dark night of the soul, that this baby too would have disappeared forever, another tiny ghost ripped away.

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he did not, bless him.  he was there, squalling and puffy, three hours later when i finally got to cradle him for a moment, hours again after that when the morning shift ultimately brought him back for me to try to nurse.  and so i landed, finally, shakily, gratefully, in the place that comes after labour, in the land of the living and of moving forward, of babies and spit up and sleep deprivation and smiles and joy and bittersweet milestones.

but labour, to me, is like another country, that only those who have been there can begin to imagine or describe, and that never turns out quite the same in any two depictions.  only now, a full two years after the night O was born, can i look back on that birth and say, with any conviction, all that matters is a healthy baby.  it does, beyond all measure.  and yet i hate the phrase, wince each time i hear it.  because being torn and broken and alienated does matter, does impact how a person experiences new motherhood, no matter how truisms may shame or belittle her experience.  birth can be a trauma and wound in and of itself that requires processing and grieving just as real and profound as that demanded by loss.  birth for me has been a profound and great and terrible thing, a wild horse that brings me to my knees.  every minute of it, both times, was worth it, to meet my babies, to watch my beautiful living boy try to blow out candles for his birthday.  i will do it again, without hesitation.  and yet i am terrified, utterly. i am afraid of more shock, more surprises.  i am afraid of a reprise of the guilt of having my body fail one child and my endorphins fail to soar at the birth of the other, afraid of what possibly could go wrong that i haven’t even thought of yet.  i am afraid of being that afraid again.

i wonder, sometimes, if it is like this for everyone, each in our own way.  and i wonder, in some small, fool part of me, if hoping that the third time’s a charm will make everything easier when the time comes around again.

hopefully it will be months and months away from April.

one of the strangest things about bedrest is that it’s never as restful as i think it’s going to be.

three springs, now, i have spent the lengthening days prone, watching the sun brighten outside my windows, imagining i can smell the warming earth.  at least this spring it’s my own windows, and they open…though we’ve barely crept above zero this morning so the breeze coming in is brisk.  Monday, we had snow.  i think spring is doing its best to delay itself in hopes of making me less jealous.

truth is, i shouldn’t dare say this aloud, but i don’t mind bedrest.  or not as much as i think i should.  it’s an excuse to lie down a lot, and i’m rather fond of lying down, if not necessarily of having to lie down.  it’s a respite from the bustle of things, and for a short period of time, it offers a window of solitude that few of us get in our busy lives unless we are sick or otherwise miserable.  i am neither.  and i am busy enough that boredom is really only a state of mind.  i’m still working from home, ostensibly full-time, plus trying to tie up external projects and commitments that have been lying fallow, and organizing our taxes – i haven’t even turned on the tv yet, in two full weeks of couch lounging.  i am not yet stir-crazy.  but i am growing lonely, as the days pass.  i miss being out in the world, interacting, making choices, being an agent – however modest – in the shaping of my own day.

the worst part about bedrest is the passivity.   one must buy into the notion of one’s incapacity, on some level, in order not to keep leaping up and doing things when no one is watching.  bedrest this early, when there is not even a belly and more than a flutter to remind one of who this is all really for, is an exercise in disassociation, in foregrounding fear, in unharnessing oneself from one’s usual responses to impulse.  truth is, i disassociate from my body quite easily, relic of years of disordered eating and internalized shame, but the process carries baggage.  i feel vulnerable when i am not free to do for myself.  i feel subject and beholden to those who have to do for me, and apologetic for the burdens my incapacity places on them.  and thus i disassociate not only physically but socially, pulling inward, conserving myself.  the isolation begins to show.

and i do not know how to break it up, to remain engaged yet still.  there is no motion here, not while Dave is at work and Oscar at the sitter’s, no coming and going except by the cat.  she brings me her measuring tape, her beloved plastic string, and sits patiently, staring up at me as if i might magically leap from the couch and race about the house trailing it like Tantallus.  i do not.  she continues staring.  i work, focusing in spells, consumed, and then drift, unmoored by the lack of routine and context.  i consider the date, count days, realize i could reasonably be doing this for another sixteen weeks.  the mind boggles, bounces.  i flit back to the date: it is the 38th birthday of my college boyfriend, my first love, and nearly fifteen years since the day after graduation when i last laid eyes on him.  gone, just like that.  i try to remember what his skin felt like, and fail utterly.  i bounce again, note that it is the 42nd or 43rd wedding anniversary of my ex-inlaws, who for a time were family…but they are gone too.  i send them anniversary wishes, from my head to theirs, and wonder, absently, if the date has any significance to anyone currently a part of my life.  i decide no.  i decide that i need some mental discipline, that i need to get back to work.  my brain trudges reluctantly to the tasks at hand.

i’d hoped for things to be different.  my full-time job was supposed to come to an end March 31st, and i was going to be working only three days a week, one at the office, two from home.   the other two days i was going to have Oscar home with me, and we were going to run errands and go to Jellybean Gym together, and take spring walks with his new tricycle and i was going to sort through all the old toys and rearrange stuff around here and shed the clutter and paint the new windowboxes and i was excited, so ready, so looking forward to spring days with my boy, doing stuff.  but i cannot do.  and i cannot have O home with me right now, not alone, because i cannot lift him, nor chase him.  we cannot go for walks.  and i sorrow, a little, at the spring i imagined – our last gasp just the two of us, you see, or so i hope with wistfulness on all sides – slipping through my fingers as i lie here dull and quiet, staring at the dust on the ceiling fan.

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.

the place lurks in the dustier corners of my brain, almost like a dreamscape…a warren of banally familiar rooms and hallways examined in tedious detail over months of enforced, enclosed exposure…and yet i do not think about its innards, have never even tried to connect all its pieces and the experiences they represent into any kind of coherent whole.  it is too much to try to take in.  it sits there, institutional, a monolith acknowledged only at the surface, in donations at the local Dairy Queen and testimonials of happier endings from telethons and fundraising letters.  from the first time we drove out from under the parkade barrier, new parents and childless all at once, this hospital has been an indelible, impossible temple of our past and our possible futures, both.  our first child lived his entire life here.  he died in my arms in a rocking chair nurses set out for us, a tableau wherein all but us knew their parts well.  at his death, it was decreed that any future pregnancies – those that got to the twelve week mark, of course – would be monitored here, on an outpatient or inpatient basis as required.   this hospital is the place we faithless hopeful turn, no matter how uncertain its promises or fraught with pain and memory, no matter how incessantly bad its food, year in, year out.

the first time i came here i was airlifted in, all urgency, to wait in isolation for weeks for a birth that turned out worse than we’d ever really believed it could.  the second time i came packed, warned by my doctor at home that the next regular checkup would likely result in preventative hospital bedrest.  it did.  i stared at the walls for weeks on end, grappling with fear and boredom and the assaultive power of memory to overwhelm one with something so mundane as the shape of a drawer pull, the baby blue of a ratty curtain.

and so i came this Tuesday for the standard ultrasound, at the appointed time in the expected place, and still i was struck by the utter weirdness of being there and how i felt like a sad, small child, inanely proud at knowing where everything was, which doors in the Fetal Assessment Unit lead to where.  the 7th floor, Fetal Assessment and bedrest ward combined, have seen more of me than some apartments i’ve rented.  and were looking to see more…that ultrasound’s results were not so standard after all, and so we agreed that i would return the next morning, to stitch my weakened cervix in an effort to allow this pregnancy to reach viability.

a cerclage is only minor surgery, maybe fifteen minutes.  it means two days in hospital at most.  and yet the night before i was clingy, anxious, almost desperate to get things in order. some part of me expected to stay, to be removed from my life for weeks or months, held in stasis…and i felt helpless, unprepared.  i have been expecting a stint in this hospital during this pregnancy, only later…just as i expected a stint for the last pregnancy, which – had all gone differently and November not brought miscarriage – would have come about now.  so the place has been looming large in my expectations for months…but i was not entirely ready, not at all.  the place is too much to ever be fully ready for.

i went in Wednesday morning, checked in, had blood drawn.  the admitting clerk directed me to the third floor, which took me aback, because in my mental map of the place, the third floor is the NICU.  Finn died there.  we have been back since, to see other babies…but like the college room where you lost your virginity if you were a late bloomer like me, the place remains quite singular in my mind, a stage for that one event.  i recalled, on the way up the elevator, that the convenient maze of protection my memory has put up around its unrevisited sore spots had utterly blanked the fact that he was also born on the third floor, that that’s where L&D is, too, a wing of the hospital i’d never been back to despite all the months i spent there pregnant later with O. 

he was born in room 310, i saw as we rounded the corner.  the nurse led me through the wing.  i paused for a second in front of that room i hadn’t seen in almost three years, in front of the door, compelled to look in and yet awkward about barging in unannounced on someone else’s labour.  i wanted, i think, to see if i could see some shadow of my child more clearly there, the little son i barely glimpsed at his birth; if the configuration of walls and light and machinery would trigger some gift of recall my conscious mind cannot.  but i did not.  i got corralled, instead, down the hall to a small utility-type holding cell with a stretcher in it, where i dolled myself up in a johnny shirt and spent the next two-and-a-half hours lolling about on the cot and left the past behind and forgot, for awhile, even to fret about the present.

the surgery went well.  my doctor announced three times that it had been a really good idea to do it now rather than later, which i found oddly comforting even though, really, it’s news more dire than one would hope for.  recovery was odd.  they’d given me a spinal and my hips and legs were so utterly deadened that i kept reaching my hand down to my meatlike thigh and wondered why they’d entrapped me in a fat suit.  my brain was convinced that my poor legs were all cramped up in frog-fashion and that i desperately needed to straighten them, even though they were actually sticking straight out in front of me and i couldn’t move a muscle in any case.   my nurse was kind.  the lady on the other side of the curtain had twin girls.  we listened to them, all new and healthy, and the new mother lamented that she’d been told she’d have to stay three nights with them because one was small and i bit my tongue and tried to focus on the sound of the babies, telling them apart, wishing them well.  her luck does not take away from mine, i whispered to my meatloaf frog-legs.  we are just both here.  we are just both here.  now move.  one foot twitched, at a bizarre angle.

they were supposed to move me originally to the seventh floor, the bedrest floor, to stay.  then the sixth, where Dave & Oscar had been waiting, unbeknownst to me.  then word came back that i’d be going to the one floor in the hospital that i have no association whatsoever with: the fifth floor, the nursery floor, where moms who’ve delivered normal, healthy babies go.  i thought this was entertaining.  but my room on the fifth floor wasn’t ready so they wheeled me back out to the third floor L&D ward.

i had forgotten the room, but i knew it, well.  it’s a birthing suite, not that different from 310 three doors down where Finn was eventually born.  the night i stayed in it, three years ago, was the very first night i spent in this hospital, flown in with my water broken, Dave rushing by car to make it from Charlottetown.  i remember it as low-lit, with many nurses coming and going in hushed tones, checking for contractions, to see if labour had stopped.  i remember trying to come to terms with what 24 weeks might really mean and whether i could comprehend what it would mean to us to have a child with serious disabilities and struggles ahead of him or her.  i remember trying to comprehend the possibility of death, and mostly failing.  i remember seizing, though, as best i could, on the fact that labour had stopped for the time being…and very consciously deciding that i would not let my fear overcome me, that i would love and attend to the baby within whatever might happen, that whatever time we got together, i would not turn away from.  i did that, and i never regretted it.  but i realized Wednesday, staring at the same walls, that it was not a decision i could ever truly make again.  i am institutionalized now, broken, in a sense, no longer whole enough or naive enough to be able to summon that purity of spirit without cringing in fear of the after.  i whispered an apology to the stitched-in fetus for what i wish i could give again but can’t, and waited for them to take me upstairs.

and i whispered again to my still-tingly legs, this time about the two versions of myself, there is no comparison.  shit luck does not always mean shit luck.  we were just both here.  we were just both here.

we both used to live here, separately, married to other people, living other lives.

eight and ten years later, respectively, here we are again, turning a doctor’s appointment into a vacation, wheeling Oscar down streets that seem far more city-ish than they used to, teasing ourselves with notions of moving back here, spending more time on these old streets. there are more people like us here, shabby faux urbanites who get excited about Korean restaurants and Belgian beer and neighbourhood coffee shops…and in truth even after a decade gone, we have more friends still here than we do at home.

but we were going to go home today.

instead, the doctor’s appointment this afternoon turned into a four-hour extravaganza of history and questions and more questions and not only are we going with a cerclage after all but we are going with said cerclage at 9 am tomorrow morning. here. so here we stay, for a bit.

my cervix is already shorter than it was at 22 weeks with Oscar. it was my decision, ultimately, which i think i would’ve preferred it not be, but it is made.

there are risks…infection primarily, but doing it this early and while i still have some cervix left means that the risk of losing the little round-headed alien i saw on the ultrasound today is in the 1-2% range. whereas i suspect this cervix’s chances of making it even to 28 weeks without a stitch might be…um…worse. there is no certainty of this, mind you…of any of this.

but we will stay and Oscar and his father can be urbanites for a few more days whilst i revisit the perinatal bedrest floor of the IWK.

be careful what you wish for, says i.

first day of spring, and a holiday to boot. freezing rain. crocuses still nowhere to be seen on horizon.

on paper, twelve weeks today…though i suspect that auspicious jubilee won’t really roll around until Sunday or Monday, given what the ultrasounds have shown and my tendency towards longer cycles. silly, to be equivocating about a couple of days…but when you deliver preemies, accurate dating and even a few days extra gestation matter. or rather accurate dating and even a few days extra gestation can matter…they haven’t, in my own personal experience, but they can. so it’s more my doctors focusing on the discrepancy for the moment. my fingers are plugged deep in my ears, and i don’t really want to hear anybody.

maybe least of all myself.

i have been silent, absent. even in person, i find myself wanting to retreat, be left alone. Dave is living with a shell who repeats robotically, i’m tired, i’m hungry, i’m nauseous, shouldn’t that cat litter go out? i am unavailable, at any level below the surface. it’s not a lack of things to say, exactly, but a lack of things i want to say, want to hear myself saying, want to lay out on record. i remember now why i did not start this blog until just two weeks before Oscar was born…i’ve wondered, in the interim, why i hadn’t taken Dave’s suggestion months before, and blogged my way through all that bedrest? but now i remember. at some random point, i began to believe that O would really come to be…and only then was i able to construct any kind of coherent narrative to describe how i felt about him, about carrying him, about being pregnant again. until then, i felt like a balloon full with toxic waste and hope and love and fear and recoil all sloshing around together, and i never knew, if pricked, which would come pouring out.

and i am as reluctant to put my hope out there to be seen and made vulnerable, pitied, as i am to uncover the paranoia, the sludge, the scar tissue that puckers and pulls and mars my relationship to the whole concept of pregnancy.

i don’t want to hear myself when i wake at four in the morning, heart pounding, certain it’s over and this baby has died and that i will simply have to check myself into the psych ward this time because i just do not have the resources right now to adjust my sense of myself to accommodate loss and despair any further, as if that were something anyone could control or delimit by saying, um, no, no thanks, not now. and even more certain that even if i did turn myself, supplicant, on the mercy of the white coats, they cannot and will not help me there, that i will be left alone again, Humpty Dumpty, to put myself back together.

nor do i want to let my penchant for dates and seasons run away with me, and wax effusive about how the long season of advent and waiting after the miscarriage in November now culminates in my thus-far-safe arrival into something like a second trimester just at the beginning of spring, however much those treacly sentiments flit through my brain. they are there and in a sense most narratively pleasing, and yet they are false promise, all bedecked in Easter bonnets. they make me feel frivolous and foolish even for entertaining them. they make me rage at the blind innocence of the “out of the first trimester and you’re fine” discourse that makes those of us who bear its untruths into Medusas in a world where people are uncomfortable being reminded that 12 weeks is no guarantee of anything.

but oh, how i wish it were. just as i wish the snow would go, and it were really spring, and with the mud and the rains and the cruel rawness of April would come the promise of new life as sure as crocuses and the balloon man who whistles far and wee.

i want to know how to speak this. i am just waiting for the ashes in my mouth to turn to rich, red earth, waiting for time to tell. two more seasons, yet, to abide.