It all ended twenty-three years ago today.

And the story is just about really, finally, complete. The final excerpt (still in draft mode) is below. For other excerpts from the work in progress as well as posts on the topic, follow the stillbirth tag.

I'm putting this experience to bed now.

Photo by PhineasX.

Gusts of words swirl around me that week. I walk right through them. Who needs to talk? Dad is explaining the baby’s name to his father: “She said it was the first thing that popped into her head.” “Jennifer didn’t know what was going on,” my stepmother tells the phone receiver. At an aunt’s house for Thanksgiving, we sit and hide behind the blast of televised football and the scraping of forks, my paternal grandfather’s frequent throat-clearing sounding a note of general disapproval. Six days after the birth I try the nightgown trick again, tighten it over my empty abdomen. Flat as a pancake.

On an unseasonably warm December day, wisps of clouds pulled across a cerulean sky, Dad drives me back to Maryland. There is clean-up to be done. He drags the stained twin mattress to the end of the driveway, props it against the fence, bloodied side in. (“Very tasteful of your father,” Mom tells me later, with more than a hint of sarcasm.) My parents share a laugh at the ancient pack of pilfered Pall-Malls I’d jammed underneath it – if they only knew about the empty beer bottles hidden in the box spring of the other mattress. Dad gives me an awkward hug, waves goodbye from the car. I open the door to the Little House.

Smells become part of the background of a place, as invisible as the color of the ceiling or the punctuation of electrical outlets against wallboard. You forget how a house smells, forget it practically the moment you close the door. The stale air of the Little House hits me like a slap in the face. It is the scent of bottled-up mildew, of pressed wood and formaldehyde, the smell of isolation. I take a canister of Lysol and scour the room with an antiseptic rain, spray the walls and floor until they are damp. Over the afternoon I slowly change the feel of the place, moving furniture and taking down photographs.

When the familiar urge hits, I walk quietly into the main house. From my grandfather’s room comes the sound of MacGuyver, then the jingle of a commercial. An ice-cream scoop sits in the sink beside a spoon and scraped bowl. Grabbing a large tumbler from the dishwasher, I kneel to open the china cabinet, reach for the Johnny Walker Red on the bottom shelf. I walk back to the Little House clutching my glass of whiskey and Coke between both hands, taking careful, deliberate steps on every slate stepping stone, as though one misstep onto grass means bad luck. After locking the door behind me, I take a sip. The drink is strong and bitter, cold and soothing. Humanizing. Some drink to numb the pain. I drink to feel it. I begin to cry.

On Monday morning, puffy-eyed and stoic, I walk to my mother’s for our ride to school and work. She is cranking up the ancient, oil crunch era Toyota with the nonworking gas gauge. An egg and scrapple sandwich lies on the passenger seat, on top of the paper. I hop in, open the Wilmington News-Journal, take a bite of food. Mom puts the car into gear and backs out of the driveway.

Everything around me remains the same.

Tags: the stillbirth, guilt, teen pregnancy, The Little House

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.

Tags: teen pregnancy, school, secrets, the stillbirth

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.

Tags: adoption, Mom, teen pregnancy, family, the stillbirth

The Little House is nothing fancy. My grandfather and uncle built it in the early 1970s, two rooms slapped up over a concrete slab. A suburban shack with aluminum siding and a roof of grey shingles on tarpaper, it has no heat, plumbing or telephone line. Inside, the chemical tang of cheap paneling and indoor/outdoor carpeting competes with the earthy funk of mildew. Spores thrive beneath the floor squares, bloom underneath the pattern of brown and gold fleur-de-lys, while black colonies spread on the dark side of the faux wood walls, invisible hordes that constrict my lung passages. I always keep an inhaler nearby.

My first memory of the house is from the summer of 1972. I am three, walking the 20 feet from the cottage to my grandparent’s place, planting my sturdy feet in thick grass and clover. I take off in a run when the ball of my right foot meets something small and sharp. It burns. I begin to cry. Someone – my aunt? my grandmother? – whisks me into the main house, probes tender flesh with pointed tweezers to remove the bee’s stinger. Afterwards, I lie on the family room sofa in cool air conditioning, injured foot propped on a pillow, a thick paste of soothing baking soda drawing out the pain. I watch cartoons, sucking on a straw to get at the last of Coca-Cola over ice.

That was over thirteen years ago. My grandmother has been dead since 1979 and the Little House is now my home. I spend my days waiting for darkness to fall. Bring on the night, I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight.

Inside the main house at 9:30 p.m. sharp, my grandfather takes out his hearing aids and removes his prosthetic foot, trapping himself in bed for another night of muffled sleep. Four houses down the street my mother, blinded by man and money troubles, sleeps in a cocoon of sadness. My father is sixty miles away, a prisoner of debilitating depression; his kindly wife is totally focused on his well-being. Unheard, unseen, and seemingly unimportant, I slip into the night or let the night slip into me.

This is where my power of description seizes up.

Really, I’m on the road to forgiveness, and I don’t want to rehash the past in angry diatribes here.

But – the inevitable but – I am in the midst of the never-ending stillbirth story, attempting to write about my time in the Little House, a companion piece to my biological grandmother’s experiences and as I try to get my mind around it I find myself asking: WHAT IN THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?

When reality broke through, when my pregnancy became apparent and ended a month later in a stillbirth, in dramatic labor occurring in the Little House, when it became clear that I needed parenting, WHY DID NOTHING CHANGE?

These are not new thoughts, but the underlying feelings have changed. My anger before was mainly self-directed, anger at my family turned inward: what evil in me brought on their rejection? But now I am reaching a different conclusion: my mother and father had so little respect for themselves, for their power as parents, that they gave up, figured I was fine on my own, or maybe even assumed that they would only make things worse. My mother stopped parenting; my father never even started. They deserve my compassion. It's no use getting angry at those who don't see their own worth.

Now I have to work through the feelings, unpack the meaning of the Little House, dense with suppressed emotion, so much a part of who I am. I’ve left it almost completely out of most other versions of the stillbirth story because it feels like an emotional bomb. As I try to get back into that time of isolation, loneliness, self-hatred and anger, my self-protection (or something) kicks in.

It is time to control the explosion through language, to capture the shards of the experience on the page.

I'm scared. But if I don't go back, the experience controls me.

Tags: writing, existential angst, grandfather, grandmother, The Little House, the stillbirth, teen pregnancy

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.

Tags: existential angst, storytelling, teen pregnancy, forgiveness, writing, the stillbirth

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.

Tags: teen pregnancy, guilt, secrets, the stillbirth

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.

Tags: teen pregnancy, writing, the stillbirth

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??

Tags: adoption, the stillbirth, teen pregnancy, secrets