Photographs and Memories

I have a very clear memory of Jasper's quickening. I was visiting England for the first time, by myself, researching my second novel. I don't think it's possible to overstate the deep Anglophilia I had nurtured since childhood. It ran from A.A. Milne to Frances Hodgson Burnett, Queen Elizabeth I to Evelyn Waugh, the Bayeux Tapestry to Frances Bacon. You might even call England my first love. But unlike Vienna, where I went to research my first novel and where Otto Wagner's stenciled apartment buildings and the golden dome of the Secession building and the timeless bustle of the Naschmarkt had lent themselves agreeably to my attempt to reimagine the past, time refused to stand still for me in England.

Or maybe it was just that I had fallen prey to the fallacy that in another time I would have been Jane Austen, when the truth is I would have been her charwoman.

I was on a shoestring budget, which meant that the bathroom was always on a different floor. That actually matters when you’re pregnant. I swear I'm not a picky eater, but I had trouble finding food that I could stand to eat at a price I could afford. Once in Kensington I asked for a table for one and was turned away, and I cried and walked in the rain to a Sainsbury's and bought an inedible sandwich. A couple of days later I broke down and went to a "modestly priced" restaurant in Bloomsbury I had seen in a guidebook and ordered what turned out to be a $60 steak for lunch because fuck it, I was starving. Afterward I stood outside the Marlborough Hotel and looked at the rack rate posted on the door: $500 a night. I guess I thought that if things got bad enough I'd just say fuck it and pull out my credit card. But even fuck it, I'm pregnant wouldn't cover The Marlborough Hotel.

When I got to Oxford I climbed the tower of St. Michael's Church, where William Morris had married Jane Burden, and was unmoved. I walked down Holywell Street, the slum where Jane was born, and found it blandly gentrified. I walked out of town on the Iffley Road and instead of passing fields of the violets collected by William and Jane on their first date, encountered rows of drab flats and a Pakistani laundromat.

Later, in an attempt to recapture what I had loved about England in the first place, I went to Blackwell's and bought The Tale of Peter Rabbit in hardcover. I still didn't know if Jasper was a boy or a girl, but I suspected he was a girl. I read "her" the Peter Rabbit book, and sometime that night I felt "her" move for the first time. At that moment I no longer felt that I was alone in England.

Jasper is convinced that this is the reason England is his favorite country, though the in utero visit is the only time he's ever been there. What he loves about it, though, is not the charming children's literature or the Elizabethan costumes. He likes British money. He likes steam engines. He tells me about the man who invented the television and how he demonstrated it publicly for the first time at Selfridge's department store in 1926. I hope England doesn't break his heart, but that's a problem for another day.

Because he was the second, or because there was nothing particularly interesting happening in my life at the time, I have no corresponding memory of Balthazar's quickening. It happened earlier, and I understood right away what the flutterings meant. I made note of it, but considered it so unremarkable my brain didn't even bother to make a memory out of it. He was a squirmer, though, I remember that; he was so active that I told someone that I thought he might be the athlete in the family, and I laughed at how mad Jasper would be if that were the case.

There are no photos of me while I was pregnant with Balthazar, either. Well, there is one photo on Facebook, taken at a birthday party last February, but it's not a full body shot. It's pretty clear to me, from how puffy my face is, that I'm pregnant, but you'd have to know me to realize that.

I kept meaning to take some pictures, but something always came up, and I guess I was ambivalent about a photographic record of how enormous I'd become. I assumed, of course, that there would soon be baby pictures of his beautiful self. I could keep my unbeautiful self out of it.

*

There aren't enough memories. That's one of the problems I have, now that I find myself wanting to talk about Balthazar. Because the only time we spent together was when I was pregnant, my repertoire is pretty thin. How much he liked ham and cheese croissants and chicken pot pie, unlike Jasper, who was a shrimp dumpling man. How Jasper would sit in the chair with me and talk to him. He liked to "trick" Balthazar by saying "blah blah blah" very loudly. He was convinced that Balthazar would come out thinking that "blah blah blah" meant something.

I'm still not sure of how I will react if I start talking about Balthazar, whether I'll dissolve in a puddle. That's another problem. At Crossfit the other day I was talking about diet and telling my trainer Ben that there was no way to follow Paleo while you're pregnant.

"You have an alien in your body and they have their own agenda," I said. "Usually involving carbs."

He tried to look as if he could imagine such a thing. Then, inevitably, a woman asked me how many children I have, and I said one, he's seven, and she looked at me kind of funny because the way I was talking made it sound like I'd been pregnant more than once, and more recently than seven years ago. Especially when I grasped the flab around my middle and said, "This is the croissant part of me, right here."

I know I don't owe anyone anything, and we were doing squats at the time, but sometimes I think talking around the edges is more uncomfortable than just getting it out. But then with people who do know, I get all kinds of social cues that I am never supposed to mention it again. I can tell by the looks on their faces when I bring up the pregnancy, or even pregnancy in general.

I volunteer to teach art at Jasper's school because there is no money in the Portland Public Schools for art teachers. I was at a training session and in the course of making conversation I brought up the fact that another mom's sister had just a baby, several weeks early. Someone else volunteered that the sister's water had broken in our friend's car.

"That must have been alarming," I said. Then I said something like, "My water didn't break, either time, so I don't really know what that's like."

Oh God, the faces of the mothers said. Is she going to talk about her pregnancy? Where should I look? What should I do with my hands? Quick, someone find something else to talk about.

I really hate feeling like I've thrown the carcass of a raccoon onto the table, just by saying what came to mind. Maybe what I said was inappropriate. Maybe, as I have been told to expect by my friend Tanja, I have begun the period of mourning in which I will do anything to slip my dead child into the conversation, to everyone else's profound discomfort. But why shouldn't I talk about him?

Why shouldn't I talk about being pregnant? I know about one woman's preeclampsia and kidney damage. I know about another's placenta previa and postpartum hemorrhage. I know about the C-sections, the VBACs, the ones who were early, the ones who were late. I know about the NICU. It's just something moms on the playground talk about. It's one thing we all have in common. They are our war stories.

But if it ends the way mine did, with your own personal Wounded Knee, no one wants to hear about it. Everything that came before is invalidated. Nobody wants to hear about what it felt like to be pregnant with a baby who died. No one wants to hear how long you pushed. I sometimes feel like nine months of my life never happened.

It did, though. Every last bit of it happened, the heartburn and the backache and how I would greet my friends at the school dropoff with a cheerful "Twenty days to go!" Or however many it happened to be that day.

It all happened, whether anyone wants to hear about it or not. I've got the croissant part of me, right here, to prove it. If I had known how it would turn out, though, I would have taken a picture or two.