Redrawing the Map

My hiking boots squished through the mud of early winter that covers the foothills of the Wasatch Front, the mountain range that lines the eastern side of the Salt Lake Valley. Seth walked a few paces ahead of me and our perfect specimen of a dog, Charlie, trotted in between us, blond ears flapping as he enjoyed the hike, blissfully unaware of the tension in the air. I was mad. Seth had said something just absolutely awful that I could not remember if you offered me a thousand dollars in Chipotle gift cards and a nine hour massage… but whatever it was, I was mad and had every right to be and it wasn’t my fault and I was NOT overreacting and he should know better forever and ever amen.

More mud flew as my stomping feet made contact with the soft ground, the result of a light snow with still-warm earth.  I continued to impart my grievances regarding the Really Bad Thing Seth Said, and with every sentence I uttered I could feel more conviction and frustration and anger brew up inside me and bubble out in the form of emphatic arm gestures, wide variances in voice pitch, and poorly formed sentence structure. He responded with unique combinations of exasperated defensiveness and genuine but confused attempts to understand where I was coming from. Finally, as it was clear the exchange was heading nowhere near our wedding vows, he sat down on a rock, heaved a big sigh, and said, “Babe, should we just go home? I’m just not sure what I can do to make you happy right now.”

I stared out over the city, deep down thankful that he had thrown a wrench in my hamster wheel but also not ready to address what was really going on. As I gazed across the valley, I could feel my face wrinkling up the way a toddler’s does when she realizes that shutting her fingers in the door really hurts. I could feel deep sobs well up from parts deeper than my reasons for being angry at Seth. As they tumbled out despite my best efforts, out also came the root of my emotion: “There’s just… no one… to yell at.”  I stumbled towards him like a rag doll, sat down on a smaller rock next to him, and folded myself onto his lap, a bid for comfort and an unspoken apology.  He heard this silent regret and gave me a safe place to land. He stroked my hair and whispered things like, “I know. It’s not fair. You can yell at me some more. It’s not fair. I’m sorry.”

Rewind eight weeks earlier. Our tenth IUI (fertility treatment) had failed. We had begun to untangle ourselves from the emotionally and financially taxing but yet also familiar routine of pills pills pills pills pills supplement supplement supplement ultrasound shot insemination pills pills pills supplement supplement supplement  pray hope pray cry repeat.  We decided to keep doing the cheap and easy stuff (pills and supplements) but stop the expensive inconvenient stuff (shots ultrasounds inseminations) and refocus our attention on adoption. And while I expected this to bring a certain amount of anxiety and sadness, I actually found a tremendous amount of peace. I needed to step away. We had been riding the Infertility Train for awhile, and its route was starting to make me dizzy. We made the conscious decision to step off and began crossing the platform for the Adoption Train. Unlike the Infertility Train, this one wasn’t yet associated with loss and disappointment. The Adoption Train gleamed with possibility and promise.  It was shiny and new and I felt certain that train would take us to a wonderful place. We had one foot on the first step, and then –

Two lines. Two pink lines.

I stood in the bathroom around 11 pm the Monday before Thanksgiving. I stared down at a pregnancy test upon which I had halfheartedly peed, thinking There’s no way I’m pregnant, it’s just that my hormones are all messed up from fertility treatments, so my “schedule” is way off. But what to my wondering eyes did appear but two tiny pink lines as I whispered Holy shit and stared aghast in the mirror. This was insane. The first month we didn’t do any shots or pee on any sticks or pay anyone $500 to inseminate me like a common barnyard animal… we’re pregnant.

I ran to the bedroom to tell Seth. By tell Seth, I mean I woke him up (not an easy feat), stuck my phone in his face to record his reaction, put the recently peed-on stick mere inches from his face, and said, “Seth. Babe. Sethbabe. Babe. We’re pregnant.”  I waited for him to leap out of bed, pull me into his arms, and spin in circles.

He blinked and stared at my blankly. “Huh?”

“We’re pregnant!”

Pause. “Yaaaaaaaaaaaay.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, I mean, I just woke up…”

Lesson learned – the next time I have exciting news, I’ll just wait til morning.

In all fairness, he really did try to be present, despite that waking him is like trying to rouse a bear mid-January. He held me while we had our “Holy shit!” time together.  While there was certainly excitement, there was also a healthy dose of skepticism. We’d been here before. We’d traveled this path and didn’t like where it led.

We went through the next few days in an odd haze of excitement and disbelief.  We found ourselves experiencing a significant case of emotional whiplash – we were marching so confidently towards the Adoption Train that changing our plan, although exciting, left us standing in the middle of the platform, not sure which direction to head. Yet over the next few days, my HCG levels continued to rise, along with our hopes. We began to inch cautiously across the platform towards the train that had led to disappointment in the past.  I may have even snuck peaks at baby name blogs, which is The Thing You Never, Ever Do When Trying to Keep Emotions In Check. We knew our miscarriage risks were high, but we could feel ourselves slowly stretching one foot towards the step of the We’re Pregnant Train.

And then it came time for our first ultrasound, midday on a Friday. I had had some mild bleeding the day before, and I had already spun it in my head – It’s over. There won’t be a heartbeat. It’s over. But when familiar images popped up on the screen, there was something different. Blip. Blip. Blip. Seth saw it before me – “I can see the heartbeat! Right there!”  I felt like my heart was sitting on a launch pad, ready to soar, my cautious mind telling it to hold on, not yet.  I held my breath and waited for the doctor’s assessment. “Looks like the heart is beating at about… 66 beats per minute.” My heart rolled off the launch pad… plop. I had read enough to know that that number should be around 110-120. As he repeated more numbers, I sat there in a daze, staring at the meeting of the tiles on the floor. He turned the machine off and his voice softened. “With bleeding and a slow heartbeat, we know that things aren’t looking very good. It’s too early to call it a miscarriage, but…” He said some more things, but his voice was muted and distant, as if I was underwater and he was trying to get my attention from the surface. Seth’s hand found mine, and the doctor’s voice continued, sounding further and further away. I waited with little response, hoping he would leave.

As the door shut softly behind him, Seth leaned in and held me. I continued to stare at the floor tiles. I didn’t say much and I don’t recall a lot of crying.  I still felt like I was underwater, numb, disconnected from the world.  Seth and I sat there mostly in silence. I eventually looked at the clock and said, We both need to get back to work.  And the “need” – it was a different kind of need. Our respective workplaces didn’t really need us. They would have continued functioning without our presence. The lights would’ve stayed on and nothing would’ve spontaneously combusted without us. But – we needed to go back to work. We needed to remember that we are more than a couple who can’t seem to get or stay pregnant. We needed to remember that there is more to this world than this small room we have been living in, this dark room with the words Infertility Lounge stamped above the doorway, this train that provides hope and promise and yet has never taken us to the destination we hoped it would. And while the colors and sounds were muted and we went through the motions like robots slugging through waste deep water, that was good. We needed to get outside ourselves.

That night, I texted a few friends who knew we were pregnant. I shared the doctor’s prognosis and the heartbreaking joy of seeing a heartbeat – our child’s heartbeat – for the first time. I shared that the likelihood of the baby’s survival was minimal. And these friends – they are warriors. They prayed. They encouraged. They offered any and every form of comfort they could dream up.  I could feel them fighting and pulling for us. I could feel their prayers. I spent a large part of that night curled up with my cute dog and cute husband inside. But I could hear them. I could hear their prayers outside the window, these beautiful friends standing in the rain for us. I borrowed their strength and whispered something like, Yes, God – what they said, please. I know that’s probably not going to happen. But I still need to ask.

Back to that muddy hike overlooking the Valley, my head on my husband’s lap, wishing that I really was indeed furious at the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Thing Seth Said.  He didn’t, of course, say something awful – at worst it was probably annoying. Yet that was just the only tangible target at which I could aim my emotional dart.  That’s one of the tough things about grief that is diffuse and abstract; it can be hard to gather it all up and direct it in any direction that brings relief.  Sometimes, it gets haphazardly hurled outward, and those closest to us happen to be in its path.  And while it’s not fair and we should always be careful of our aim, I’m thankful Seth stood back and gave me the space to let all those emotions gurgle up, even though some of the mess got on him.  I’m thankful he could see through my dust cloud of anger and self-righteousness and notice the pain and sadness in the center. I’m thankful he named that pain and then gave me a soft place to fall.

At the doctor’s appointment on Monday, the ultrasound screen showed what I had prepared myself for. I stared at the tiles again while the loud silence echoed in the room. I heard the doctor’s instructions without really listening, all too familiar directives he had uttered a few months earlier.  I felt the post-visit instructions in my hand and read them without committing anything to memory. When the miscarriage didn’t happen naturally, I took the pills to induce it. It was painful and long and sad. I moved from couch to shower to bed to bathroom floor, looking for relief.   Everything was muted – emotions, sounds, color, social interactions. I felt emotions rise up inside and vie for a spot in my consciousness. Anger – Why is this happening again? We weren’t even trying for it this time. Fear – Is this always going to be our story? Will we ever be parents?  Helplessness – We’ve tried everything. Why isn’t it working? I cast a side eye at each one and examined them, yet never lifted an arm to choose one. All those emotions took energy, something I didn’t have a lot of.  I found myself settling into a meditative numbness. The world passed over me and I found it challenging to drum up the desire to engage with it.

As humans, we like things resolve. We want our songs to end on a major chord and we like our movies to have a storyline that fits neatly with our worldview. Yet sometimes there isn’t a way to tie things together. Sometimes the ragged threads of life stick out with no discernable pattern and the puzzle pieces lay in a pile on the table, and we are unsure how to make it look like the picture on the box. Sometimes you stand in the middle of the train platform, spinning in circles and frantically reading the schedule and the destinations listed on each train, but none of them match up with the map you’ve drawn. And as you hope and pray and try to will the trains to change their course or for a new train to show up, you begin to wonder if maybe the way to a resolution is to redraw your map, yet you don’t really know what that looks like or what train it will lead you to. So, eventually, you sigh and take a seat on the platform. You watch the trains come and go. You study your map and consider alternate routes. And, sometimes, you just wait.

Waiting on the platform is hard. It is no one’s final destination, so we want to get off of it as soon as possible. We like to feel like we are making progress and moving forward, so we run up and down the platform, chasing trains and second-guessing decisions. Because, if I’m honest, I’m really (expletive) tired of waiting. All the crosswords in my carryon are completed, and the scenery inside the station is getting really old. Yet while I have learned to sit with the pieces that don’t fit, I still notice a drive within me that is determined to make some beauty out of these mismatched pieces. So, for today, here is the good I see:

 I am so deeply thankful for those of you who have joined us on the platform. Thank you for sitting with us, even though the benches are uncomfortable. Thank you for bringing comfort food and movies and bad jokes. Thank you for bringing your silence and your willingness to not have any answers. Thank you for not emphatically insisting that we try out this one train your cousin’s neighbor’s stepsister got on that worked out for her.  Thank you for praying for us and not being upset when we sometimes let you do all the praying. Thank you for reading this blog as I sort out my drawer. Thank you for showing up with your texts and calls and emails that just remind us that you love us.  Thank you for insisting that we leave the station every once in awhile to remind us of the beauty that exists where we are right now.  Thank you for loving us even when we feel like we haven’t given much outside ourselves. Thank you. We appreciate it more than you know.