Still, but Born

Still
Birth

I never, ever put those two words together.

But more than that, I never put the words

Still
Born

together, and put them into a sentence with my daughter's name in it.

Why? It's true. That is the technical term for what happened. It's here in Webster's:

stillborn: adj; dead when born
stillbirth: n. 1. the birth of a stillborn fetus 2. such a fetus

Now, I realize that is what happened. But look at that definition. I can hardly take it, this other term they use: fetus. She was nothing but a fetus to them, just a fetus. This full grown, seven pound, dark haired, healthy girl-fetus. We were all those, once. Only when we were born, we got to be called a baby. My child: a fetus. A stillbirth. I hate those words.

They degrade my child, to my ears, they lower her status from baby to something other-than; they make her less of a real thing and more of a term. Calling her stillborn puts her into a statistical category; she becomes something familiar. It is insulting.

After all, we've all heard about a baby being stillborn. We've read about it in books from the old days, when labors were longer and there were no doctors and it happened more often. The baby was stillborn, and the midwife would take her and wrap her in a cloth and she wouldn't let the mother see. The child was never named, and the mother was encouraged to quickly forget.

So should I be doing that? Forgetting? I think not. Being fixed on not forgetting is part of what I do, I think, when I say she died during the birth. This is, of course technically true: she did die during the birth, and by saying this I get to avoid calling her stillborn. We don't forget anymore. So I don't use that old word.

Sometimes I wonder whether my absolute refusal to use the word (and I can tell you with absolute certainty that I have never in my life referred to Charlotte as stillborn) is a form of denial. I don't want her to die. I don't want that to have happened to her. I think there is also a piece of me that is latching onto the fact that in our society, if your baby takes even a breath, even lives for one minute or two hours or a day or a few weeks, suddenly it all seems so much more legitimate to everyone that you get to miss that baby. Somehow, when it is so clear, when I say stillborn, that she never took a breath, it's as if she never happened. When I say that she died during the birth, it's almost as if I'm trying to prove just how close she got to life, even though she just missed it by a hair.

This is of course highlighted by the paperwork, in that of course she cannot have a real birth certificate, only a death certificate. And yes, yes. I do have the Certificate of Birth Resulting in Stillbirth; which you have to apply separately for later on because it doesn't happen automatically. But it's still not a birth certificate. She still never had life to them, she never existed on paper. It breaks my heart.

This is part of why I loved recording the StoryCorps interview with Greg yesterday, because we talked extensively about Charlotte, and now she is archived in the Library of Congress. You can't look her name up as someone who was really born but you can hear all about her if you go to the Folklife Center. At least she is somewhere.

Lastly, I will throw one more term into the pot: two words I found scrawled at the bottom of my discharge slip. They cut into me like a cattle brand, they seared my heart, sucked my baby down into a whirlpool.

Fetal demise.

I don't even need to write about this. How would you feel if someone called your baby this, even if you knew it was true? Her name was Charlotte Amelia. Please call her that.

What words get you?

When I look out into my world right now it's as if there is a little, dimly-tinted screen over my eyes. I don't feel uplifted or optimistic. I feel as if I wish that if I had all this wisdom to spread about the pain of losing a baby and then the joy that can actually, possibly follow, then it should be joy I write about, joy. And of course the pain, but the pain of losing that one baby, and not about any other pains that might follow.
Tonight I am just sickly worried about the health of one of my children, I am feeling melancholy and missing Charlotte after recording a very intense and moving StoryCorps interview with Greg this morning, and I'm feeling pretty certain that I am permanently infertile and will never again have the pleasure of holding a newborn babe against my bare skin.

Ashamed, I feel as if these emotions should be causing me to spout some sort of excellent writing, but instead they render me mute; I have nothing to say. I want to crawl away and hide and come out and have at least the hereafter, the post-Charlotte; the things that seemed, at one time, to be manageable, to be okay.

But we all know how these things go... certainly after a little ice cream, a long sleep, some pancakes in the morning? Tomorrow could bring new sunshine.

Let's hope it does.

My sister is a psychologist, a good one. I could say this just because she is a good person, but there have been times in my life when I have needed her so desperately and she has worn that hat for me, and she wears it well. In her work she has crossed paths with a variety of people under many different circumstances. Among the most compelling to me were a number of older men that she worked with at a VA hospital some years ago. Their various disabilities and psychological illnesses are irrelevant to me and to this story, because what touched me most was this: these men were completely alone in the world. They had, literally, no one. No parents, no siblings, no aunts or uncles who cared. They had no spouse, no girlfriend, and no children. These people had nobody who loved them. Not anybody.
I could hardly wrap my mind about this concept, and it made my heart literally ache. To imagine being so alone, to have nobody to turn to when you needed something, to have not been touched in a gentle, soft way in decades. I couldn't imagine having nobody to care for, no one to think about, and knowing that there was nobody to think about me. To know that if you died, there would be nobody to claim your body. To be virtually alone.
I compare this to my own life, and it makes me want to pull the covers up over my head and hide, because I am so blessed with so many people whom I love, and who love me. I don't even know where to begin. My family is huge, everyone is happy and good to each other (mostly), I have so many good, good friends. There are dozens of places I could turn for anything.
I wish I had the clarity of mind to always feel this absolutely blessed when I'm having the worst day of my life, when my children are pulling me in six different directions, when my husband forgot to call and say he's going to be late, when I forgot to thaw the dinner, and it feels like everything is whirling around me in a sandstorm. Wouldn't it be sublime if I could just step outside of that situation and say, so many people love me, these two children are alive and well, and my husband will be home... eventually. But, I'll think it today, and perhaps I'll be reminded of this sometime when things seem too whirly to compute.

One man's story, I shall never forget. His parents were dead, no siblings to speak of. His wife had left him years before. He had no real friends; he was homeless.
His children? One daughter, stillborn forty years earlier. My sister said his eyes filled with tears as he told her. She was his only child.

This Thanksgiving, I say with a great, deep breath of gratitude, I have so much to be thankful for.

I'm not usually wordless... I have so much to say that doesn't burble out during the course of my everyday life, and here is such a great place to let it flow.

Tonight, however, time is of the essence...

so I thought I might provide some visuals of some of the daily events of the past few weeks... our trip to the circus, a ride in the shopping cart, a skirt I made, Liam's storywriting, and our Thanksgiving trees.

Now I have to go up to our town hall and vote in a special town meeting so that the library can gift a building to the town to build a brand new library. Yee-haw. I love small town New England politics. I will get lots of knitting done.

This is still new to me; and somewhere I never thought I'd be.

How easy it was to put the blinders on; does one never stop being innocent in some ways, even when innocence is lost? I shake my head in dismay at myself, ashamed.

I just cringe at the memory of myself saying it, so many times: getting pregnant is the only thing I don't have trouble with.

As of now, having past the magical anniversary, I have had a multitude of tests all of which cannot determine why I would not be getting pregnant. Mysterious, unexplained infertility. Awesome.

And I am now at the point where, had I conceived when I thought I first would, I would be shopping for Christmas with babe in arms.

Today, as I was taking advantage of Northampton's pre-holiday "Bag Day" sale, I bumped into several people whom I had not seen in quite a while. Oh! They said, how many kids do you have now?

Two, I said, trying to keep a straight face. Just two. Not three. And not four. I realize the fourth baby never happened, but there is this feeling of almost wanting to justify the lack of the fourth almost as much (but not quite) as I want to remind people of the first. Bookends to my two living children, the "perfect family", to some people, but lacking to me. The ghost child and the child that didn't happen, they surround me now as I flicker my way through this life.

I have tried, please believe me. I look at my two gorgeous, happy, sprites that fill me with so much joy, and I try it out, like a mantra: this is my family, this is my family. They have each other. But I can't accept it. I don't know why, I just can't.

There are times when my own story escapes me; it has become such an integral part of my own geography that the details become lost upon me in the rush. This is something that I don't think I've ever consciously realized about the road that I have walked, and it humbles me to the point of almost feeling like an imposter in this world of floundering babylost people.

I never existed out in the world without hope.

What is hope? It was Liam, this tiny seed growing in my womb, conceived not three months after Charlotte vacated. The unexpected delighted in how-could-it-happen little being that planted his feet firmly into my life, as if throwing me a ring-buoy, and has been there ever since.

Certainly there were the days, but there were only 102 of them, where I had nothing. Only 102. For those days, for ALL of them, I was devoted entirely to my grief. I did not work, I rarely socialized, I barely cooked, ate, exercised, or grocery shopped. The only times I left my house were for things that related to Charlotte-- a foray to place her memorial stone, a writing group to lay down my soul on paper, a walk with Greg in a private wood to share our deepest thoughts. My memories of that time-- my sitting time, I call it-- are mostly of me frozen on the couch, my eyes fixed on her tiny footprints that were balanced on the mantlepiece (and still are, not in a frame, just balanced there as if we just casually set them there a few moments ago and plan to move them). I recall being laid out on the nursery floor, the smell of wet wool as my tears literally soaked the rug beneath my face. I remember the sunlight on my bedroom wall as I would wake up in the morning, sucking in the dead air of my room and wishing I could sleep forever. We slept for 12 hours a night that summer, at least. It was all I could see fit to do.

And by the time I went back to work, 15 weeks after Charlotte's birth and death, I knew I was pregnant. At the time, I didn't think the notion of being pregnant was affecting me much, the whole idea seemed so uncertain. But of course it did, of course. How could it not? How could the very idea that something was growing-- even if it might quit on me-- not provide me with something in the way of hope?

And so what do I have to offer, at times, in knowing what it feels like to go for months and years without hope, or to never have hope again? I can equate it only to those early months, and I pray that the later months and years do not sear as wickedly as those early months alone did.

It makes me feel so lucky, which I am in those certain ways.

The Power of a Name

Somewhere out there, in western Australia, a mother like me who had heard about me went out to the sand one evening and, thinking of my daughter, created this.

I feel speechless at this beauty.

Thank you, so very much.

(see the creator at www.namesinthesand.blogspot.com... and many thanks to my new friend Sally who made this happen)