The Nursery

The grass is mown, the berries picked. We have romped in the river, and held hands around the little table on our porch before supper. We have ridden bikes, hiked through the dense hemlock forest, and tried to weed the garden. I have cooked dinner on my own stove, shopped once again at my own store, and re-connected with friends. I am home, yes. I am home. Missing my other home, but I'm home.

The nursery is empty again. This is a chapter of my infertility journey that I touched upon several times, and the relief that I am flooded with as I lie in wait for its next occupant is indescribable.

Since Charlotte died, everything about our house has changed. Everything. (was this intentional?) The dining room is somewhere else, we have a newly-added living room, new bedrooms, renovated bathrooms, everything has been painted, the gardens have been moved, extended, replanted... everything EXCEPT the nursery, in which time has stood still for six and a half years. The little stars still shine on the pale blue ceiling, the buttery yellow walls warm the tiny room like a little sun-filled tent, the crib still stands in the spot where Greg proudly completed assembling it one February day while Charlotte practiced her calisthenics in my womb and I thought I was destined for the best life ever.

And then life unfolded, and I don't have to tell that story, and we can fast-forward through two more babies moving into that room at perhaps nine months of age and staying put until... until they were shuffled aside by the next occupant, was my plan. That's how it worked for Liam, anyway, and I assumed that it would work this way for Aoife, as well. I was, in fact, so bold in my assumption that I had been played my bad hand in baby-making that I re-decorated the guest room for her in the winter of 2008, so certain I was that I would soon be needing the nursery back for baby #4. Baby #4 who took a year and a half to come, and whom I became certain after a certain period of time would NEVER come, and so I wondered what would happen to the nursery when Aoife moved out, and there was nobody to move in.

Certainly I could not stand the empty nursery again. This time it would stand as a failure of another kind. But it would be missing two babies, in my mind, one who I missed and cried for but shouldn't need a nursery for anymore, and one who I wanted but couldn't create and stamped my foot on the ground and swore in frustration for. I would have to dismantle it, I supposed. I would have to take the crib apart, store it somewhere, figure out an alternative use for that little space, and try to keep hope that one day I would re-assemble the nursery for the miracle I could hardly bear to hope for. I gave myself the deadline of March 27, 2009, which was Aoife's third birthday. I couldn't realistically keep her in the crib for my own mental health purposes any longer than that, I reasoned. She had been staring longingly at her new "big girl bed" for over a year now, and at three I couldn't hold her off any more. It would happen then. I would grit my teeth, and I would do it.

And it was only 9 days before my deadline that my period failed to come, and because I was visiting a newborn baby in the hospital that morning, I figured I'd better extinguish the hope that was brewing somewhere in my deepest pit of myself, because I couldn't go and see the newborn and think that there might be a chance that I'd be there again, could I. So I peed on the little cheap pregnancy test that had come free with my ovulation kits, and I could see that control line come up fast and pink, and so I threw that little f***ing strip across the counter in frustration because HOW could I have been so stupid to have thought that a missed period would mean I was pregnant when I was so OBVIOUSLY infertile. I brushed my teeth and my hair, muttering under my breath and feeling foolish for having held onto five minutes of false hope, and I was just about to leave the bathroom when I saw the pee-soaked stick where it had landed on the back of the toilet seat, and I figured as a good housekeeper it belonged in the garbage. I lifted it up to throw it, with animated gusto, into the trash can, and that's when I saw the second pink line, which had showed up while I was spitting f-bombs into the sink along with my toothpaste. Miracles do happen, occasionally, after all.

So the move-the-nursery plan was abruptly cancelled, and my little Charlotte's bedroom gets to stand for years longer, my little corner of my heart can live there when it likes, and now I just have to let hope live there in that empty room while my living children fill up the other rooms until the month of November arrives.

And don't you wonder how I'm doing with all this? What it feels like to have two living children and a few years of unsuccessful attempts in the void between Charlotte and myself? Yeah, I wonder too how I'm doing, too, because I spend a lot of time making sure that I'm not thinking about how I'm doing. I am trying to be present with the kicks and bumps that delight me all day long, and I'm trying to choose my set of names so I can have somebody to think about hypothetically. But I can't do much more than that. I can't think to myself, at Christmas I will have a six week old baby. I think to myself, will there be a baby at Christmas? I have not had any specific freak-out moments where I've actually imagined something going wrong, but I still think in the hypothetical to a really severe degree, to the point of some real dissociation. This is a very obvious reaction to a pregnancy after a loss, but I have to be honest-- there was a part of me that thought that by the third time, I might have gained a little more trust in myself and in my baby. This is what it is, and things shall be what they shall. And I will sit back, feel the baby battering at my organs, enjoy the rise of bile in my esophagus, and hope that the stars line up in my favor this time around.

A year from now, perhaps that nursery will be in use. At least for now, I don't have to take it down.