Goodbye What Was Never Meant To Be

The morning of my first 2nd trimester appointment, I pulled on the maternity skirt my friend had lent me and a shirt that sort of masked the barely there bump of belly. It was amazing how my belly went up and down; poofed out then popped back in as flat as it had been before. I told my husband, as he got dressed, that sometimes it didn’t even seem like I was pregnant.

As I lay on the bed with my legs in the stirrups, he held my hand as we watched and listened to our doctor maneuver an ultrasound wand over my belly. All we heard were crackles and pops, like the cereal. [I could almost imagine those silly little elves pressing their pointy ears against my skin.] She had me turn on the main ultrasound machine, just in case she didn’t have the right spot. We watched her face, her efficient face, normally so business-like and multi-tasking with a purpose, we watched the face that we trusted to give us the straight shit on things get a little quiet and a little less business-like. We watched her eyes, eyes that were normally efficient and quick to dart to her next task, get a little sad and slow. And we listened as she told us that we were having a miscarriage.

Our baby, it seems, had stopped growing sometime between the 8 week ultrasound when we saw the heartbeat, and the time the 12.5 week ultrasound rolled around. Our baby, it seemed, was one of the less than 5% to go away after the heartbeat. Our baby, it seemed, was dead.

Goodbye Polite Society

Pregnancy is a strange anti-filter device for the world. To survive polite society, people usually have some sort of filter on their brain, keeping them from saying everything they think. You may think your boss is a prick, for instance, but that filter keeps you from saying it aloud, and thus succeeds in keeping you gainfully employed. You might think your husband is getting a bit chunky, but you keep it to yourself to make marriage work. You might think your friend is a fucking loser, but you keep it locked deep inside. Without the internal filters keeping our mouths at bay, polite society wouldn’t be so polite at all. It would, in fact, be a pretty unpleasant if interesting place to be.