Meet Virginia

When my friend Tanja was pregnant with her son Lincoln, she didn't want to have a baby shower. Our mutual friend Miriam and I talked it over, and we decided we'd host a dinner part at our house and invite a bunch of Tanja's friends: a well-known chef and his new girlfriend, people from the ad agency. We ate caprese salad and chicken from the grill and a coconut cake that didn't really turn out. Then after dinner, when we were all (except Tanja, of course) comfortably tipsy, Miriam and I just "happened" to have some adorable onesies and cup and plate sets and Petunia Pigglebottom blankets wrapped in pale blue paper for her.

I still feel horribly guilty about that shower that wasn't supposed to be a shower. What under other circumstances might have been a minor annoyance perpetrated by two pushy friends now seems like a monstrous crime. And I wondered at the time whether she didn't want a shower because she intuited that he would die. Now I look back over the months and weeks before Balthazar was born and ask myself the same thing. Of course in retrospect it seems that I must have always known, but that sense of inevitability is faulty thinking and it is so prevalent it has a name. It's called hindsight bias.

The evidence suggesting that I might have somehow known is as follows:

1. A crib skirt and five owl wall stickers arrived from Dwell Baby in late March. I did not open the mailing envelope. Everything else in his room was set up, but for some reason I tossed that package in the room and just left it there;

2. I had made an ipod mix for labor and delivery, entitled Babymaker. After he died, I changed the title to Broken Heart, but I didn't have to change any of the songs. Did I really put a song called Goodbye Stranger in the mix? Yes, I did. Also Little Green, Both Sides Now, When the Stars Go Blue, White Winter Hymnal, When the Circus Comes to Town. Now, I have to admit that my musical tastes generally run to the folkie and sad. But still;

3.When the midwife asked Jonathan and me what we were going to do for birth control going forward, the two most obvious options were vasectomy and tubal ligation. If I were going to get my tubes tied after the birth there was paperwork to fill out in advance. Jonathan and I bickered over who would do what. Neither of us wanted to be the one to have surgery. So ultimately we decided to do nothing;

4. I spent most of the pregnancy in a state of rage. To be honest, this wasn't one I put on my own list, but one that was suggested to me by others. There's a whole post about anger to come, but for now I'll just say that this was given to me as evidence that I had some deep intuition that Balthazar would die. Which means that this whole idea that I knew isn't just something I made up to torture myself. I asked myself the same question about Tanja, after all. And now others are speculating about me.

Mothers are supposed to have some profound mystical connection to their unborn babies. It sounds great when everything goes well. I could push on my belly and feel him push back. I could talk to him and imagine he was listening. But when something went wrong, that belief in something almost supernatural between us became just one more cudgel to  use against myself. Some moms who have lost babies say they knew all along, and seem not to blame themselves, but to me, knowing that someone is in danger requires action. I realize now that the flip side of belief in a magical maternal-fetal connection is the expectation that I should have been able to save him with my mom superpowers.

This "knowing" trope is deeply unfair, I think, though it's of a piece with the way our society tends to blame people for their own misfortunes. Our minds have so many tricks to play on us, to make us think we're in control. Better to pile on the guilt, the responsibility, rather than face the abyss of our own powerlessness.

So Tanja didn't want a shower. I didn't open a package. Some people don't like to be the center of attention at a party. Some hugely pregnant people are lazy about opening their mail. Ominous portents, or just things that happened?

I did sense that something was wrong on April 1 and 2. It will haunt me for the rest of my life. And I did act on my fears, just not fast enough. But "knew"? Because of course if I had known in the way we think of knowing, I would have done things differently. I would have sprinted to the hospital in Milwaukie on winged feet, despite the fact that I couldn't successfully lumber to the end of the block. I wouldn't have dicked around with The New York Times or Bridgeport Village or pizza and basketball on TV. I consider myself a very intuitive person. But intuition isn't magic, no matter what the lead singer of Train says.

While I was pregnant I read about the woman who had to spend the last four months of her pregnancy upside down in traction. I felt really bad for her, until Balthazar died. Then I thought, "I would've spent four months in traction, if I'd had the chance!" Of course I would have. Any babyloss mom would have. We just didn't get that choice. 

In September, October, November of last year, when I was mad as hell and Balthazar was the size of an olive and then a lemon and then a peach, I can say with some certainty that I had no foreknowledge whatsoever.  I worried that something could go wrong because I'm an anxious person who's on the internet a lot, but "knew"? I refuse to take that on.