bricks

Prologue. 

Heavy 

That time 

I thought I could not

Go any closer to grief

Without dying

I went closer,

And I did not die.

Surely God

Had his hand in this,

As well as friends.

Still, I was bent,

And my laughter,

As the poet said

Was nowhere to be found.

Then said my friend Daniel

(brave even among lions),

“It’s not the weight you carry

But how you carry it — 

Books, bricks, grief—

It’s all in the way you embrace it, balance it, carry it

When you cannot, and would not,

Put it down.” 

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard

The laughter

That comes, now and again,

Out of my startled mouth?

How i linger 

To admire, admire, admire

The things of this world

That are kind, and maybe

Also troubled—

Roses in the wind,

The sea geese on the steep waves,

A love

To which there is no reply?

— Mary Oliver

I.

This is a story about the weight of grief. I am writing this to try to put it down, let it rise and fall with the tides. I cannot.

Each baby lost — a love to which there is no reply.

An echo in the chamber of my chest,

the empty cavern of my womb,

the empty hollow of my hands.

I have one living child, William. He just turned five years old. He’s so very alive. I love to run my hands through his downy blonde hair and pet his pale, velvet skin while he watches something like “Is It Cake?”

I have lost four babies. We named them each: Aidan, Tess, Ronan and Frances. 

We also have a nephew, Francis or Frankie, who was born after we named that baby we lost. His parents didn’t know about Frances when they named him.

Frankie is two now. He has a shock of strawberry blonde hair with one curl at his neck and I often privately cry at his beauty because, as he grows, he is a gemini to the child I lost. His mother and I got pregnant right around the same time. Our nieces and nephews and neighbors are a balm to my aching heart because they can play sibling to our son.

I have had ten failed transfers of embryos, some with two embryos. It pains me to not even have the stats down right. I want to honor each potential child, those lives that lie dormant in my body, their cells shed or absorbed, a part of me, parts of me lost. So much love. No reply.

On the other side of the world, children are starving to death. Their mothers must witness this. No reply.

On another block in my own city, this is happening, too. No reply.

II.

On the ceiling, one square light was covered by a vinyl decal. A reproduction of a blue sky, with clouds and scattered red poppies. The other tiles were sterile. Pebbled. That particular off-white that says “medical” before any beeps or cold instruments let you know. Or maybe that’s what the ceiling tiles looked like at the fertility clinic. The exam room I was in most often had 27 pebbled ceiling tiles. A few had accrued significant dust around the seams. I feel like I’ve watched the dust collect over the last three years. Wait, no, it’s been four. Nearly five.

III. Friday august 4 1:27 pm 

A cherry

I lost the baby. There was a heartbeat and now there is a dead baby, the size of a cherry, floating inside me. The pit in my stomach is a cherry. The cherry has facial features and fingers. The cherry had a nursery, all dreamed out in my head. The cherry had a whole life, with a brother and cousins and neighbors to share a playhouse with, white with a red door, where they would pretend to cook each other hot dogs and say “trick or treat!” in the middle of July. I lost the baby. As if we were at a carnival and I bent down to tie my shoe, letting her hand drop to my side, and when I looked up from the ground littered with popcorn and stray pink tinsel catching the waning daylight, she was gone. I lost her. She’s not on the carousel, bobbing up and down beneath the big round lights on a giraffe. She’s not standing before a strange mirror, trying to see how long she can make her sweet face look. Distorted. Distorted in my mind. She. I keep thinking of the cherry as a she. But only because Billy decided it was a “goirl” because he wants a sister. She had a heart beat. We saw her heart beating, strong and fast, a swift flicker of light on a dark screen. Three times. We saw her heartbeat three times. And then, none. Stillness. Just floating like debris in space. I lost her. Where did her heartbeat go? How does my heart still beat? How does Billy’s? I like to rest my hand on his chest, warm and soft. Partly because my palm can still stretch the width of his tiny chest. Partly because I need to feel his heart beat sometimes to know its still there. How does he exist? Why does one baby’s heart beat every day, making the life of the most beautiful boy I have ever known possible, real, alive, when another baby’s heart stops, making the life never happen outside of my body? She lived her entire 9 weeks in my body. My body was her only home. My body was the only place that knew her. Her name is Tess. Billy named her after the girl across the street who he loves. He wants her to be his sister. It was the closest we’ve gotten to making his wish come true. Sort of. His wish. Our wish. A baby for us all to love. I still love this baby floating inside of me. I want her with such desperation. 

Poppies symbolize eternal sleep. They stand for remembrance and hope. Just four tiny pills and our child who never was really awake will be no longer a cherry, just a red poppy. 

IV.

“What sets [George Saunders] apart,” Zadie Smith said in Interview, “is his willingness not only to go into the heart of darkness but to suggest possible routes out.” How do I go into the heart of darkness and suggest a route out when I don't know if I believe in one? Maybe that’s the answer. I have to imagine it. 

I have seen the heart of darkness. It’s an ultrasound where there’s a still, black blob on the screen. Motionless. Now how do I imagine my way out? I’m stuck in that exam room. Poppies on the ceiling. I never left that room, did I? I don't think I even felt the subsequent loss that followed that third one because I was still in that room. It was impossible that, after everything, we lost that baby. We were so close. I was so sick. Deliciously, satisfyingly sick all the time. Vomiting with a shit-eating grin on my face, several times a day. 

I am buckling Billy into his car seat, saying goodbye to Grandpa Bill after a short visit on a summer afternoon. He puts his cold hand on my neck and leans in close. “How are you doing?” he asks, as if I had just arrived instead of being about to leave. “I’m ok. I’m scared. But I am so happy to be pregnant.” I confessed, tears heating up in my eyes. He stared at me as if he had forgotten that I was. Pregnant. I wouldn’t be much longer.

V.

I am infertile, yet I am a mother. I hold this contradiction. I love that my body gave me William. I hate that it has not given me a sibling for William. I love being a woman. I hate being a woman. 

VI. 

Different versions of myself lost and gained since the dawn of motherhood

I lost the version of myself that could sneeze without peeing. Sometimes I can do it. But sometimes I can't. 

I lost the version of myself that could stay up late writing, lost in thought, like when I would sit in the kitchen in the coach house while my cousin/roommates Sara and Claire slept upstairs. I loved the way it felt to eat olives in the dark and write about the quality of light coming through a cracked bathroom door. Often, trying to examine a transparent egg yolk color and why egg yolk always came to mind for me. Now, it feels connected to fertility. Maybe it always was. Or, writing in the spare bedroom on Iowa Street, Tommy asleep in the other room. I didn’t worry about his sleep then like I do now. I would just write, post-it notes all around me like scattered debris from an accident, fragments of language thrown around, the wreckage of my writing. The metaphor makes it sound violent, tragic. But I mean it to be energetic, entropic, beyond my control. A feeling of freedom. 

I lost the version of myself that was free to do what i wanted when i wanted. Smoking a joint alone on the back porch at our second place, a little further east on Iowa Street, in a peach sweatshirt. I couldn’t wear a peach sweatshirt now, without it getting ruined. I wonder where that one went. Probably into an alternate timeline with my other self, who’s sitting on a porch in the cold, reading Joan Didion under a blanket. That self would be worrying about never getting to be this self. I always wanted to be a mother. Motherhood was the rabbit and i was the dog. Still, I am the dog. Rabid with infertility. Chasing more motherhood. Rabid on the rabbit run. 

I lost the version of myself that could walk over to Kaelan’s and sit on the roof and drink rose on a Sunday afternoon, laughing at the way the sun hit the Sears tower, making it into an angry robot, like it was putting on a show only for us. I miss the limitless friendship time. 

VI. What have i gained besides chins

I have gained a version of myself that is a mother. I have Billy, a truly perfect human. This version of myself has a child who plays with my hair and named my pony tail “poof poof.” He pets it like an emotional support dog. In the night, I'll feel him touching my face just to make sure it’s still there and still the same as he knows it. The version of myself that I have been since he was born is the only version he knows and, even though he shouts, “I hate you! You’re the worst mom ever in my life!” when i tell him he has to go to school today or can’t have ice cream for breakfast, he loves me. “I love you more than daddy. I love you more than cheetos and cheetahs and lions,” he tells me in the dark, his soft legs wrapped around mine, his arms around his cheetah and his lion. I have gained a version of me that is loved foundationally. Not just unconditionally. But the love this child has for me is the foundation of who he is. His whole identity is built on loving me and the way that I love him. He will be shaped forever by this love that flows between us, our foreheads together, smelling his sweet breath as he laughs because it is funny that we just have our foreheads together for no reason except that we want to be that close to each other. 

I have gained a version of myself that would truly do anything for someone. And I have lived so many of these extreme scenarios through my OCD. these images and thoughts that intrude my mind, where terrible things happen to billy and i know i would do anything to stop them. To protect him. To keep him safe. Anything. This is a version of myself that’s impossibly strong, lifting cars and all that. This is a version of myself that can endure years of torture, chasing a sibling for my son because i believe that’s the ultimate way to show him one depth of my love. There are many depths, with reefs and ugly fish with no eyes down there, and glowing creatures we’ve never seen. But this is one depth. The years of IVF and losses depth. This is for him. And for Tommy. And me. And for us all as a unit. But I know I would do anything for him, including this.

I have gained a version of myself that carried him. And delivered him. It wasn’t how i wanted it to go, but the sacrifice of an emergency c-section is one I would make into eternity to have each rich, buttery moment I get with him. I built him with my body. And miracles. We are forever a part of each other. I am transformed by him and he was, is formed by me. It’s easy to focus on all the failures my body has given me but this was my greatest triumph. 

I loved to place a cold La Croix can on my belly and he would chase it, kicking at the cold. I have gained a version of myself that has done this and wants so desperately to do it again. I have gained a version of myself that held him on my chest while I was still cut open. I can feel the aching glow bloom above my heart, just thinking of his damp, little head being placed there by Tommy, his father, my husband. I have gained a version of myself that fought through the recovery from the emergency and the c-section. That managed to nurse my baby, despite the blood loss and struggle and pain. I loved nursing my baby. The magic of it. The let-down, calming us both. Feeling connected, still, physically. Providing for him with my body, still. I have gained a version of myself that sustained my child, and still sustains him in new ways. I give him hugs when he is sad or hurt or just walking past me because I can’t let him past me without reaching for him, I love him so much. I wrestle him into his school uniform in the morning. I zip his coat. I make him french toast sticks and strawberries, sliced in half. I clean his cups and his underpants. I hold him when he sleeps, still. My left arm beneath him. The warmth of his soft head buried in the bend of my elbow and shoulder. We are still a unit, then, sleeping. “Mama!” he cries, searching for me or finding me or demanding me or thanking me. I have gained a version of me that is his mama.

I have gained a version of me that lives in this house with my son and my husband. This is a version of me that I have wanted to be my whole life. I’ve always wondered who I would be when this season arrived and here I am. A mess. Yet, here. “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” I will be William’s mother. I know that, and that can never change. There’s nothing better that I could dream of. I am living my dreams and I have been sleeping through it, rushing and blurring the time, holding my breath, hoping it would go faster. But i am here. I am right here in this moment, with itchy bruises on my belly, injection sites all green and purple around my belly button. This is now and this is who I always wanted to be. I am a version of myself that is a writer. I have whole days, now, to write and drink tea that tastes like lavender and mint. I write or read or eat a bagel or take a bath in the cold daylight, until it’s time to retrieve my son from my former school and bring him home to our beautiful old, drafty house. I pass my husband in the kitchen and we kiss. Or hug quietly. This is now and this is the version of myself i have dreamed of. I know something is missing but if we never get it, i will still have lived my dreams. Perhaps this feeling is gratitude.

I have gained a version of myself that can do hard things. Losing babies is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And they are a part of me. Each of them. Aidan, Tess, Frances, Ronan. The ribbons that represent you are somewhere in your brother’s room. He found them on my desk and squirreled them away and I think it’s beautiful that I can’t find them in there right now. 

VII.

It feels like the world is ending yet I am dying to bring forth new life.

IX.

Motherhood is a radical act.

A bright, fiery rebellion against evil.

Because it is pure love.

Even when there’s no reply.

X.

I am infertile, yet I am a mother. I love being a woman. I hate being a woman. 

The contradiction makes me think of “All Fours” as a title. It seems like it’s degrading and vulnerable, but it’s sturdy. Being a woman is all of those things. 

This is all about being a woman, right now. 

It’s infertility and abortions. The access and denial. The way power keeps us suffering. These intimate crises that should be private but feel so exposed, like forgetting to wear a bra to an interview, loose boobs and cold nipples, or having your bodily autonomy debated by men for generations, as if it was theirs to decide and dole out. These giant forces that affect our tiny lives. I’m so angry. I want to set them all on fire. Let them scream like i have. Terror. What a weapon to wield. 

I see Claire and me on the couch after something that only women know happened to her, too. Eating beef stew because that’s what she likes. A meaty comfort. Listening to old episodes of the OC on the TV.  She did the same for me when I needed her. Not beef stew but comfort. Sitting in it together.  Finding something hideous to laugh about because pain and tickling run along the same nerve endings.

I see Emmet Jane. She is probably two. She stands on top of a pile of snow and says she wants to eat the sun. I am with Molly and Annie and Liz. We are in the thick of sharing the very real intimacy of a sleepover as adults. It’s delectable. This is what friendship is made of. We will always hold each other, even from far away, we just don’t know it yet. But maybe we do.

I see Emilia. She’s not yet two. We’re in her nursery, lit only by a table lamp. She’s pretending to read Madeline and her guesses are very good. She is hope.

I see Anna and Hillary and me on the floor on my porch. Eating Swedish fish or maybe it was gummy worms, and trying to figure out what was really going on in our lives. Now we’re at Meghan's house, in her yard drinking the new cocktail Hillary liked that summer. The kids run around us, laughing and crying and asking for snacks. We talked about all the losses we were experiencing. All the losses, surrounded by all the gifts. Joy and sorrow in the backyard in Michigan. 

On the same porch, Hillary sat with me after William was born. I nursed him. She took a picture, even though I was shy about it. She said, “You’ll want this one day.” She was right.