the stillbirth
"When are you due?"
08 November 2008 08:06 AM Categories: Childhood hangover
There was a girl from the health clinic, tall and black, doe-eyed and silent, that I kept seeing around town. She was seventeen and pregnant again. Twins. Sometimes she would appear at my hangout, the Wilmington Public Library, supporting her belly in both hands as she lumbered to the ladies room, staring at the carpet in front of her.
I was not going to be that girl. I was not that girl, marked by pregnancy, announcing my mistake and stupidity to everyone. Most of my friends didn’t know about it. Even my new boyfriend was clueless, in more ways than one: all that direct contact with my ever-rounding form and he never asked a question. I was going to spend my last trimester in hiding, living with my father and stepmother. Everyone swallowed the story, my need for a little time away.
It seemed to be working, the baggy clothes campaign, the stony denial, but one incident brought doubt. A friend, Lynne, and I were out skipping school at the usual place, a shopping mall near school. We stopped in a boutique where Lynne bought a pair of earrings. As she was ringing up the sale, the salesclerk gave me a friendly glance.
“When are you due?” she asked.
I blushed. She blushed. We were both briefly, awkwardly silent, before the clerk quickly covered for me. “Oh, no! You’re too young! I’m so sorry!”
Thank you, lady.
Later, at the food court, I asked Lynne “Am I getting fat? Do I look pregnant to you?” gently patting my belly, camouflaged by loose-fitting clothing. Lynne dipped a French fry in ketchup, gave me a quick once over. “You look fine,” she said, and shoved the fry in her mouth. That was that.
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Another existence to be denied
16 September 2008 08:44 PM Categories: Childhood hangover
The meeting with Golden Cradle Adoption Services was surreal. After months of concealing my shame, suddenly I was carrying a wanted commodity. There was no ambiguity in my decision, no noble sacrifice. I resented the baby. I could barely take care of myself. They could have it. Mom, as an adoptee, was conflicted.
So there my mother and I sat, sunk into opposite ends of a comfortable couch, leaning forward to tell the social worker our feelings, sketching out my genetic profile. We filled out reams of forms, information about family health problems, questions about my diet, my drug and alcohol use.
Who knew what mysterious weaknesses I might be carrying? My father’s side of the family had endocrine problems, heart disease, diabetes and a tendency toward dark moods. When the veil of depression fell, some family members took to alcohol or other substances with an addict’s zeal. An affinity for darkness and a desire, a need, to obliterate myself in its face are part of my hardwiring.
What about my maternal lineage? My mother’s family history was a big blank, an open field where the quality of the soil and provenance of the plant life was a mystery. Like my biological grandmother and my mother before me, I had gotten knocked up young and out of wedlock. Only my mother had chosen to marry, to keep me in the fold. This predilection for teen motherhood, the easy and careless ways of our womenfolk – did that count against me?
Adoption was a closed affair when my mother was born. In 1950, the presumption was that a “chosen baby” would grow up satisfied, would never want to know the story of her beginnings. The privacy of the birth parents was paramount. Mom, however, did want to know and set out in adulthood to find her birth mother. Through a third party the woman revealed the depth of her silence: she hadn’t spoken about her first child at all, even keeping the secret from her husband and subsequent children. She wanted no further contact, no dramatic revelation, no recognition of reunion. When pressed on the name of the birth father, she was especially vehement. She would “never, never tell.” It stung.
In private, we speculated, joked about the freedom bought by ignorance. Her missing history provided a unique vantage, a way to step outside of the American obsession with ancestry. We could build a story about her origins outside of the confines of family fact, but the story never got very far. Polish or German? (My orthodontist, after assessing her facial structure, was pushing for Polish.) Catholic or Protestant? (Well, she did seem to have a thing for Catholic guys.)
To imagine too much seemed self-delusional. Of course, her parents might have been love-struck, two highly intelligent beauties who consummated their love after much deliberation in a sacred act of commitment and rebellion. Imagining what could be the truth – sex forced upon a young woman not ready or pregnancy as the inevitable result of one night between two clueless teenagers – led to a sense of hopelessness. Her birth father was the silent partner in this transaction. A ghost.
The adoption process had changed in 36 years. My child would know my name, would be able to trace his genetic strengths and frailties back a generation or two. His new family would send me pictures. I would be permitted to write him letters. But when we were in those Golden Cradle offices, he was another existence created to be denied. I was young and angry, and what was happening didn't seem real.
My biological grandmother, my mother, me: we all played a role in the conspiracy of suppressed connection. It was a gift passed along the generations. A present for my firstborn.
So there my mother and I sat, sunk into opposite ends of a comfortable couch, leaning forward to tell the social worker our feelings, sketching out my genetic profile. We filled out reams of forms, information about family health problems, questions about my diet, my drug and alcohol use.
Who knew what mysterious weaknesses I might be carrying? My father’s side of the family had endocrine problems, heart disease, diabetes and a tendency toward dark moods. When the veil of depression fell, some family members took to alcohol or other substances with an addict’s zeal. An affinity for darkness and a desire, a need, to obliterate myself in its face are part of my hardwiring.
What about my maternal lineage? My mother’s family history was a big blank, an open field where the quality of the soil and provenance of the plant life was a mystery. Like my biological grandmother and my mother before me, I had gotten knocked up young and out of wedlock. Only my mother had chosen to marry, to keep me in the fold. This predilection for teen motherhood, the easy and careless ways of our womenfolk – did that count against me?
Adoption was a closed affair when my mother was born. In 1950, the presumption was that a “chosen baby” would grow up satisfied, would never want to know the story of her beginnings. The privacy of the birth parents was paramount. Mom, however, did want to know and set out in adulthood to find her birth mother. Through a third party the woman revealed the depth of her silence: she hadn’t spoken about her first child at all, even keeping the secret from her husband and subsequent children. She wanted no further contact, no dramatic revelation, no recognition of reunion. When pressed on the name of the birth father, she was especially vehement. She would “never, never tell.” It stung.
In private, we speculated, joked about the freedom bought by ignorance. Her missing history provided a unique vantage, a way to step outside of the American obsession with ancestry. We could build a story about her origins outside of the confines of family fact, but the story never got very far. Polish or German? (My orthodontist, after assessing her facial structure, was pushing for Polish.) Catholic or Protestant? (Well, she did seem to have a thing for Catholic guys.)
To imagine too much seemed self-delusional. Of course, her parents might have been love-struck, two highly intelligent beauties who consummated their love after much deliberation in a sacred act of commitment and rebellion. Imagining what could be the truth – sex forced upon a young woman not ready or pregnancy as the inevitable result of one night between two clueless teenagers – led to a sense of hopelessness. Her birth father was the silent partner in this transaction. A ghost.
The adoption process had changed in 36 years. My child would know my name, would be able to trace his genetic strengths and frailties back a generation or two. His new family would send me pictures. I would be permitted to write him letters. But when we were in those Golden Cradle offices, he was another existence created to be denied. I was young and angry, and what was happening didn't seem real.
My biological grandmother, my mother, me: we all played a role in the conspiracy of suppressed connection. It was a gift passed along the generations. A present for my firstborn.
The dammed
10 August 2008 01:32 PM Categories: Childhood hangover | The struggle
Skipped my Sunday morning run. I’ve been snapping at my family. My mood is foul and it’s best to stay away from me (thank you, H, for taking C to the birthday party). I’m trying to stop my snarls, but my emotions are simmering, close to the boil.
And I’ve been trying to figure it out: why?
I am filled with untapped ideas and complex emotions. They are waiting in my mind, rapping at the walls of my skull, tugging at my brain: Give us life! Make us real! They are desperate for description, for a life on the page.
But I don’t have the language. The words aren’t coming. My subconscious is hog-tied.
If I knew the why of it all, then maybe I could fix it. So I try to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling, try not to beat myself up with what I should be doing or how I should be spending my precious moments of free time. What is the emotional component to this word clog? Which key will open the box?
One clue: I’ve been struggling with the never-ending stillbirth story. What felt complete looks like it will need a rethink, mainly based on the suggestions of a couple of shrewd readers. Their comments weren’t critical, but instead showed other paths I could take, the way it could expand even within its strict confines of time and place.
Aha. The key. My subconscious isn’t hog-tied. It’s working.
I was sixteen and living in an unheated two-room summer cottage adjacent to my grandfather's house when I became pregnant. We called the cottage the "Little House," or the "Upper Room," names taken from a children's story and the bible, symbols before the fact, names repeated in an irony-free world. This was where I lost my virginity, where I got pregnant, and where I later gave birth to a preterm baby who never took a breath.
My life in the Little House was free from supervision. It was full of lies and neglect, tears and isolation. The events leading up to and directly after the stillbirth, combined with other emotional scars from childhood, have defined how I feel about myself, have colored my interactions. I know how to keep a safe distance.
As I keep on writing that particular story, it changes. Not the facts, but the feelings. I find other ways of telling, understand how the experience that separated me can also connect. The distance falls away, I uncross my arms, open my heart and mind.
I sometimes, however, ignore the darker emotions of neglect and anger associated with that event, wash them away in a wave of sympathy for my under-equipped parents. I don't know how to feel the feelings, to give them voice, without directing blame. Is it possible to forgive but still be angry? My writing turns into a mincing dance around the unspeakable.
The story is worth the work. But I also want it out of my head, done.
The feelings need time. They will out.
And I’ve been trying to figure it out: why?
I am filled with untapped ideas and complex emotions. They are waiting in my mind, rapping at the walls of my skull, tugging at my brain: Give us life! Make us real! They are desperate for description, for a life on the page.
But I don’t have the language. The words aren’t coming. My subconscious is hog-tied.
If I knew the why of it all, then maybe I could fix it. So I try to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling, try not to beat myself up with what I should be doing or how I should be spending my precious moments of free time. What is the emotional component to this word clog? Which key will open the box?
One clue: I’ve been struggling with the never-ending stillbirth story. What felt complete looks like it will need a rethink, mainly based on the suggestions of a couple of shrewd readers. Their comments weren’t critical, but instead showed other paths I could take, the way it could expand even within its strict confines of time and place.
Aha. The key. My subconscious isn’t hog-tied. It’s working.
I was sixteen and living in an unheated two-room summer cottage adjacent to my grandfather's house when I became pregnant. We called the cottage the "Little House," or the "Upper Room," names taken from a children's story and the bible, symbols before the fact, names repeated in an irony-free world. This was where I lost my virginity, where I got pregnant, and where I later gave birth to a preterm baby who never took a breath.
My life in the Little House was free from supervision. It was full of lies and neglect, tears and isolation. The events leading up to and directly after the stillbirth, combined with other emotional scars from childhood, have defined how I feel about myself, have colored my interactions. I know how to keep a safe distance.
As I keep on writing that particular story, it changes. Not the facts, but the feelings. I find other ways of telling, understand how the experience that separated me can also connect. The distance falls away, I uncross my arms, open my heart and mind.
I sometimes, however, ignore the darker emotions of neglect and anger associated with that event, wash them away in a wave of sympathy for my under-equipped parents. I don't know how to feel the feelings, to give them voice, without directing blame. Is it possible to forgive but still be angry? My writing turns into a mincing dance around the unspeakable.
The story is worth the work. But I also want it out of my head, done.
The feelings need time. They will out.
Dead on arrival
22 June 2008 09:27 PM Categories: Childhood hangover
I got out the autopsy and hospital records again recently, a way to remind myself of the sequence of events, background for the next version of my stillbirth story. In a thick stack of photocopies from microfiche, I can read about my hospital stay, see the medical advice they gave me about postpartum care. There is a "Certificate of Emergency Baptism," which seems especially antiquated and a little presumptuous, especially when I've never been baptized myself. I probably ok'ed it, though. It wasn't my soul who was being saved.
There on the fading photocopy of an autopsy authorization form is my signature. It's the writing of a teenager, rounded and totally legible, unlike the scrawled signature I have today. Then, the autopsy. They cut him open, weighed and measured his organs. Everything was for the most part normal, or "unremarkable" in autopsy parlance, with the critical exceptions of his lungs. The causes of death are listed as prematurity and bilateral pulmonary atelectasis.
Even now when I read it I feel a moment of panic: was he born alive? It did seem to me like he was moving initially, but my mother says otherwise. If we had been at a hospital or closer to emergency care, would he have lived? But the record is titled "Record of Fetal Death (Stillbirth)."
Does that leave me off the hook?
About two months after his death, I got a call from a parent running a bereavement group. The hospital had passed on my number and he was inviting me to their next meeting. As we talked, he mentioned that his stillborn child was a Christmas baby.
"That must have been so hard for you, right around Christmas," I said stupidly.
"Well, it's hard no matter what the season."
He was so kind, as if we were in this together.
I gave him my address and got off the phone as quickly as I could. What right did I have to grieve? The child I never wanted, who I was going to give up for adoption, was dead. Perhaps I even willed it, or brought it on with dark feelings and too many Budweisers. I wasn't a parent. I didn't deserve to feel anything.
For many years, I had a recurring dream. The baby had arrived. I wasn't prepared: no clothes, no diapers, no place to sleep. And somehow, the infant would slip my mind. He languished in a cold room, too weak to cry, his stomach knotted with hunger, a soaking diaper clinging to his skin.
By the time I remembered, it was too late.
There on the fading photocopy of an autopsy authorization form is my signature. It's the writing of a teenager, rounded and totally legible, unlike the scrawled signature I have today. Then, the autopsy. They cut him open, weighed and measured his organs. Everything was for the most part normal, or "unremarkable" in autopsy parlance, with the critical exceptions of his lungs. The causes of death are listed as prematurity and bilateral pulmonary atelectasis.
Even now when I read it I feel a moment of panic: was he born alive? It did seem to me like he was moving initially, but my mother says otherwise. If we had been at a hospital or closer to emergency care, would he have lived? But the record is titled "Record of Fetal Death (Stillbirth)."
Does that leave me off the hook?
About two months after his death, I got a call from a parent running a bereavement group. The hospital had passed on my number and he was inviting me to their next meeting. As we talked, he mentioned that his stillborn child was a Christmas baby.
"That must have been so hard for you, right around Christmas," I said stupidly.
"Well, it's hard no matter what the season."
He was so kind, as if we were in this together.
I gave him my address and got off the phone as quickly as I could. What right did I have to grieve? The child I never wanted, who I was going to give up for adoption, was dead. Perhaps I even willed it, or brought it on with dark feelings and too many Budweisers. I wasn't a parent. I didn't deserve to feel anything.
For many years, I had a recurring dream. The baby had arrived. I wasn't prepared: no clothes, no diapers, no place to sleep. And somehow, the infant would slip my mind. He languished in a cold room, too weak to cry, his stomach knotted with hunger, a soaking diaper clinging to his skin.
By the time I remembered, it was too late.
The Girls Who Went Away
08 April 2008 11:35 PM Categories: Childhood hangover
The Roe v. Wade decision came down over a decade before I was a pregnant sixteen-year-old, but I completely identify with the experiences of the women interviewed in Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.
I wanted to read it for insight into my biological grandmother's experience, the teenager who gave birth to my mother in a Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in 1950. What was it like for her? How did she get there? Why did she keep my mother's existence a lifelong secret, never telling her later husband or subsequent children? What about the birth father? Or the more intriguing question: do secrets have their own genetic legacy? Is it any coincidence that her daughter got pregnant at 19 and had a shotgun wedding and that her granddaughter had her own troubles?
So I picked up this excellent book, with sad stories of a time before easily available birth control (or abortion) and sex education. And I found a part of my own story: isolation, secrecy, and shame. I am not alone.
Yes, it may seem from my current blah blah blah on the topic that I've spent the past 22 years chatting openly about my first pregnancy, telling my unlucky seatmates on long airplane rides, droning on at playgroups about the sad outcome. But it's been a big secret. Huge. Even now, as I write on a blog whose url I have in my e-mail signature, I am completely terrified of what my friends and passing acquaintances will think. But I want them to find out. I'm tired of the secrets. And I think they will be kind to me in their hearts, even if the whole thing may freak them out a bit.
Right??
I wanted to read it for insight into my biological grandmother's experience, the teenager who gave birth to my mother in a Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in 1950. What was it like for her? How did she get there? Why did she keep my mother's existence a lifelong secret, never telling her later husband or subsequent children? What about the birth father? Or the more intriguing question: do secrets have their own genetic legacy? Is it any coincidence that her daughter got pregnant at 19 and had a shotgun wedding and that her granddaughter had her own troubles?
So I picked up this excellent book, with sad stories of a time before easily available birth control (or abortion) and sex education. And I found a part of my own story: isolation, secrecy, and shame. I am not alone.
Yes, it may seem from my current blah blah blah on the topic that I've spent the past 22 years chatting openly about my first pregnancy, telling my unlucky seatmates on long airplane rides, droning on at playgroups about the sad outcome. But it's been a big secret. Huge. Even now, as I write on a blog whose url I have in my e-mail signature, I am completely terrified of what my friends and passing acquaintances will think. But I want them to find out. I'm tired of the secrets. And I think they will be kind to me in their hearts, even if the whole thing may freak them out a bit.
Right??
Lacunae and mortar
23 April 2008 08:14 PM Categories: On writing | Childhood hangover
How much to tell and how much to leave out?
I hacked away at my stillbirth piece recently, snipped away most of the backstory, trimmed the interim stuff, and shaped the conclusion into a neat little bob. It went from around 2700 words to 1300 and I was pleased. But my readers were not. They wanted more about me and my life, from the time of the pregnancy to the story's conclusion in my current, normal, well-adjusted life. (How do you do it, girlfriend? Smoke and mirrors.) And when I reread it, I knew they were right.
I'd love to give more, but which more should I choose? Writing this piece is a delicate business. How do I get across my almost total isolation without whining about it, how do I show what it was like to be fifteen and sixteen, practically on my own, with no allies? And how do I stay a sympathetic character? This was no love child. I was full of anger and hatred at what felt like a parasite, an unwanted growth. In some ways the stillbirth was an escape, albeit one with a lifetime of guilt, pain, and flight from grief.
So I'm back to it, filling in the lacunae with the mortar of my experiences, moving things around and bringing myself back. Again.
I hacked away at my stillbirth piece recently, snipped away most of the backstory, trimmed the interim stuff, and shaped the conclusion into a neat little bob. It went from around 2700 words to 1300 and I was pleased. But my readers were not. They wanted more about me and my life, from the time of the pregnancy to the story's conclusion in my current, normal, well-adjusted life. (How do you do it, girlfriend? Smoke and mirrors.) And when I reread it, I knew they were right.
I'd love to give more, but which more should I choose? Writing this piece is a delicate business. How do I get across my almost total isolation without whining about it, how do I show what it was like to be fifteen and sixteen, practically on my own, with no allies? And how do I stay a sympathetic character? This was no love child. I was full of anger and hatred at what felt like a parasite, an unwanted growth. In some ways the stillbirth was an escape, albeit one with a lifetime of guilt, pain, and flight from grief.
So I'm back to it, filling in the lacunae with the mortar of my experiences, moving things around and bringing myself back. Again.