"Mrs. H wasn't there for part of the day," he
said. "We had a sub. And do you know why? It almost made me cry when she
said it. She was at the hospital. Her friend was having a baby."
I put on my therapist voice. "Did that make you
sad?" I asked. He nodded. "You were thinking about Zimbo?"
Jasper hates the name Balthazar and only calls him Zimbo.
More nodding. I got him in the car and started driving home.
"I'm different from other kids," he announced a
minute later. "I mean, I look like a normal kid on the outside, but I'm
really not."
"You think the fact that you had a baby brother who
died makes you different from other kids?" I asked, hating my syrupy,
condescending active listening even as I employed it. Because wasn't he saying,
in the way that children have of cutting to the heart of things, exactly what
I'd been thinking too?
Having a baby marks you on the outside, but not forever. I
gained 46 pounds during my pregnancy. By the end my friends would smile
sympathetically as they watched me lumber up the hill from school after
dropping off Jasper. One day the guy at the coffee shop, who hadn't been paying
attention to my growing girth, finally noticed it. "Yikes!" he
exclaimed, passing me my ham and cheese croissant. Yep, I agreed. Yikes. Pregnancy is a
huge physical commitment and sacrifice that is quickly forgotten and totally
worth it, unless you did it for nothing.
Now I look like a normal kid. I look like my biggest problem
is the chip in my windshield, the dearth of country ham in Portland, OR, or the
flying ants trying to invade the living room. If you saw me at the grocery
store or the coffee shop, you wouldn't have the faintest inkling. If you hadn't
seen me in awhile you might think I had had a relapse in my ongoing struggle
with brownie addiction, and that my son's nightmares or my obsession with
internet shopping had kept me up a bit too late at night. If I didn't tell you,
you would never know.
I try not to look at women who have just had babies. I try
not to look at the babies who are always with them. The mothers have giant
breasts and flabby midsections too, but the reason is obvious. It is nestled
right there on their bodies where everyone can see.
Apparently it's a thing to get a tattoo in memory of your
dead baby, for that very reason. You mark your skin to make visible that your
baby was here. You display that loss on the outside. I'm just a little too old
to be part of the tattoo generation, and I'm from Louisville, after all. As a
child I read The Preppy Handbook, and not ironically. Yet I've thought about
it. Just his name, I think. On my chest, over my heart? Or do I want it
somewhere where people will see it and ask me about it? Do I want a reason to
tell that story over and over?
My insides have never matched my outsides anyway. In high
school it was often thought that I was snobby. When my husband met me he
thought I was a "sweater girl from Connecticut." The weird, the goofy,
the shy, the radical; it doesn't necessarily show. Maybe I'm getting tired of
the incongruity. I've never been a
normal kid, why should I look like one? Maybe now I want it all on the outside.
Honestly, though, a tattoo seems a pallid response to the
situation. Really? That's it? A little ink under the skin is all I've got for
my dead baby? A shaved head, I could see. Sackcloth and ashes. Some
mortification, maybe.
We all understand that you never know what's going on with
anyone, but it's easy to forget. The guy I accidentally cut off in traffic who
then rolled down his window to flip me off more emphatically as he passed, was
his daughter just diagnosed with leukemia? I never think about that, I just
think he's an asshole. The checkout lady at Zupan's who didn't smile or make
eye contact, did her mother just die? We assume everyone is OK because that
assumption makes every transaction easier. Until we're not OK and then we're
reminded, brutally, that there are uncounted millions walking around with their
guts ripped out.
*
"Well, stillbirth is very uncommon," Jasper said
when I asked him if his brother's death made him feel different from other
kids. He sounded about thirty-seven years old. "Do you know anyone else
who had stillbirth?"
Oh fuck, I thought, I should have called the Dougy Center. Portland has this great resource for
children in grief. But we thought he seemed OK, and we wondered if putting him
in a room with kids who'd lost parents and older siblings might make him feel
more alone than not.
I told him again about Tanja and the grief group I went to a
few times and the blogs I read. Later I asked him if he might like to meet W
and O, Tanja's stepsons, since they had been around his age when their brother
died, and they would understand what it was like.
"Yeah, I bet they would understand," he
considered, looking off into the distance, remembering. "It was horrible."
Everybody's got stuff, a writer said to me a month or two
after Balthazar died. This is yours, she said, and I wanted to kill her. She
wasn't wrong, her timing just sucked. This is my stuff. This is Jasper's stuff
too, and I can't fully know all the ways in which it affects him, all the
things he thinks about and doesn't tell me. I hope it doesn't warp his life. At
Back to School Night he showed me a book he had written, entitled All About Me.
All of the children had done them, and responded to the same prompts. One of
his pages said "I feel happy when my mom hugs me. I feel sad when someone
I know dies." I imagine he was the only child in the class who finished
the sentence that way. But, then again, I don't know. Maybe we are different
than the other kids, or maybe not. Maybe we are more like them than we think.
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