I was feeling lovely and peaceful and philosophical, and then yesterday hit, and now today, when I would have been 13 weeks pregnant and my baby would have been the size of a medium shrimp. Instead, I'm still wearing my pajamas, practically neglecting my sweet (alive and well!) little boy, passing clots that look like leeches.
I remain fascinated by my own body insides. I have always been body-curious - a pimple-squeezer, a tissue-examiner, a toilet-paper-checker. (In fact, if I weren't so drawn towards my own fluids, I wouldn't have known I was bleeding for several days. I could have miscarried quietly at home, without my traumatic Emergency Room visit. Last night in one of those morbid conversations I'm always roping unsuspecting Rob into, I explained that if I get pregnant again and this happens again, I am staying the fuck at home. If I go back to the ER, it will be because the bathroom looks Hitchcockian and I'm scraping myself up off the floor to dial 911. Dramatic? Yes. But my mother recently went to the ER in an ambulance, and they were lovely to her. I was treated like nothing because I was walking and talking normally, and, medically, my situation was merely unfortunate.) I keep wondering what it looks like inside my (broken)heart-shaped uterus right now. As much as the blood saddens me, it's also fascinating. What will it look like today? What might this be?
I'm also mildly annoyed at the encouragements to think about the "baby." When I (thought I) was pregnant, I tried talking to the baby - "Hi, in there! Hi, sweetie! It's Mommy..." - and it felt so forced and fake. I didn't think of Westley in "baby" terms until he started kicking me, and even then, I often forgot that there was a tiny human inside me. I realized years too late that it would have helped me to be reminded during labor, "You're having a baby. This is your body helping the baby to be born. Soon, there's going to be a baby!"
I suspect I may be atypical in this regard, but it is oddly comforting to me to think of my miscarriage in terms of "not baby." As much as it makes me feel stupid and unobservant - shouldn't I have known that I was pregnant with nothing? - my blighted ovum was a huge relief. I can't imagine the state I'd be in now if I'd seen the thing I feared most, a dead baby, in the ultrasound image. No heart is immensely preferable to a stopped heart.
Perhaps I'm in denial. (It's a stage of grief, after all.) Maybe all this there was no baby, there was never any baby stuff is protective. Looking at that blood and tissue as simply blood and tissue frees me from a sadness that I imagine could destroy me. Or at least put me on the fast track to alcoholism. But if I really think about it, plumbing my psychological insides, I realize that I truly don't believe in this baby. That perhaps I never really did.
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