Anniversary

One year ago today I found out I was pregnant. It took a lot to get to that moment, but not in the way you would think. I did not struggle with infertility. I didn't have to do iui, or ivf, or have shots of Clomid. I didn't have multiple miscarriages. All I had to do to conceive Balthazar was convince my husband to try for another child. Once I did that, I was pregnant in four months.

The convincing, however, took years. Jasper was born in 2005, and raising him was much harder on our marriage than either of us expected. It took awhile for things to calm down. Then the economic collapse of 2008 dovetailed quite nicely with a total drought in our writing careers. With no money coming in, no jobs to be had, living off of a bequest from my aunt, it seemed foolish to have another child until things improved.

Except they didn't. I waited. I squirmed. I worked on a memoir. I tried not to bring it up. Sometimes I couldn't help but bring it up. My husband wrote a thriller and then another thriller while we fought about what to do. I waited some more. And then the spring of 2011, when I turned 40, I decided I couldn't wait any more. In the very near future the decision was going to be made for us by the passage of time and the realities of biology, and I wanted to talk about it before it was irreversible.

He had to make up his mind, I said. We could get a cat, and he could get a vasectomy. Or we could try to have another baby. It might not work, I said. Not everyone can get pregnant at 40. A lot of things could go wrong: miscarriage, Down's syndrome. We would be sorry if we didn't at least try, I said.

I said those things to ease my husband into the idea, the way I ease him into anything he's afraid of. Let's just go look at the house. Let's just see what the hotel is like. Let's just try and maybe nothing will happen. But I knew it would work. I knew I could still get pregnant. He thought about it for awhile and then he said he would do it. I didn't force him, I didn't manipulate him, but I did push him.

When I said we'd regret it if we didn't try, I wasn't blind the fact that something could go wrong. But if I am honest I must admit that I believed in the pregnancy from the very first. I believed in Balthazar, and I believed in myself. I believed in my body and my health. I believed in the law of averages and in Western medicine. I must have believed, too, in the protective power of my own privilege. I'm white. I have health insurance. I'm not overweight, I exercise, I have no underlying health conditions. It isn't something to be proud of, that presumption, though I don't think I assumed any more than any other woman with an uneventful pregnancy who wakes up on the 264th day thinking she will soon be bringing home a live baby.

I could make a list as long as John Lennon's of all of the things I've stopped believing in over the course of my life. But, like him, at the core I've always believed in myself. Now I'm not sure I have that anymore. It's one thing to fail, to not get the fellowship, to be rejected by the publisher, to have toxic sales figures. It's another thing entirely when your failure, involuntary as it may have been, takes someone else out.

Now I can't decide if I am sorry or not, that I pushed my husband so hard to conceive Balthazar. I thought that there could be nothing worse than living the rest of my life with the regret that I didn't have another child. But this, this is possibly worse. If I regret it, though, then I am sorry that Balthazar was ever born, which is the saddest thought of all.

I didn't mean to bring darkness and tragedy into our lives. Balthazar certainly didn't mean to. He was just a little boy trying to be born. But now that's where we live. In darkness.

The Dresser

Until today the nursery was still just as it was on April 3, a room suspended in time. Jasper's old crib is in there, made up with new Dwell Baby owl-print sheets. There's a stuffed animal tucked in where Balthazar would have slept. His blabla lions and face pillows are propped up along the side. Jasper's wooden rocking chair is next to it, with a pillow with an owl embroidered on it. I was so excited to find a cute print to perfectly match the Caribbean blue walls, and if I do say so myself, the decor rocked.

The diaper genie is ready to go. All of the clothes and towels and sheets have been washed in Dreft and folded and put away. Most of the things are Jasper's, but there are a couple of tea collection footie pajamas in Japanese prints and a onesie and a little hat with a gray print like tiny bird footprints. I bought them at Christmas so he would have something that was his own.

But he's not coming.

When Balthazar died my sister-in-law offered to fly out from Cleveland and take down the nursery for me. Her offer was well-meaning, but at the time it seemed inconceivable. Seeing the nursery, which I pass through several times a day because it is at the top of the stairs and the easiest path to our bedroom and Jasper's bedroom, didn't make me sad. Or, it didn't make me any sadder than I already was. Balthazar's ashes are there, in a wooden box from Ukraine that I found on Etsy. All of the cards that we received, the ultrasound photographs, the six pound eight ounce heart-shaped pillow a charity sent. I didn't need or want anyone to do anything to his room. As long as it stayed the way it was, it was proof that he had lived. I figured I would know when I had crossed over from being a bereaved mother to being a crazy lady. I would know when it was time.

Then for awhile I hoped that I would get pregnant with another baby right away, and he or she could just slide into Balthazar's place with little alteration necessary. But my husband doesn't want to try.

It's probably faulty thinking anyway. Even if I got pregnant and carried to term and delivered a healthy baby, it would not be Balthazar. And as it turns out, the crib has been recalled, so no matter what happens in the future it is not sticking around.

Today, four months and one week from the day that he died, I removed Balthazar's dresser from his room. Jasper and I have been sharing a closet for a long time now and it isn't big enough for both of us. We don't have enough furniture to leave something useful sitting idle for someone who is never going to use it. I took out all of those onesies and hats and hanna andersson baby socks and put them on the floor. Then I moved the little plastic dresser downstairs to my office and put all of Jasper's clothes in it. Maybe it's because it's not an heirloom but a $69 job from Storables, but it wasn't as awful as I feared. I only cried a litle when I asked Jonathan if it was OK to do.

Strangely, considering how much he talks about moving on and moving forward, he has had as much or more trouble with it than I have. He hasn't wanted anything in there to change, either. I'm not moving anything else in there. Not for awhile. I think we're at least agreed on that.

Sports Are Not Life

I haven't swum competitively in twenty years, but every four years I get sucked into the Olympics. I've spent the last few days thinking about Michael Phelps, trying to see if there are any lessons I can learn and apply to my own life. To my own situation. Frankly, I wanted to find lessons to apply. Like many Americans, I grew up with an absolute faith in sports as a metaphor for life.

So in his first race at the Olympics, Phelps finished 4th. In his first relay his team got 2nd. Then he got outtouched in the 200 fly. I was really curious to see how he would respond. After all, he doesn't lose at the Olympics. He almost never loses anywhere. Would he be able to shake it off, or would he fall apart?

That guy's mental toughness is second to none. He took responsibility for the result, admitting that his conditioning was a little less than optimal, that he'd been lazy on some walls in practice. He also acknowledged how much luck played a role in Beijing, where the stars aligned for him and he was on the winning side of some miraculous touches. But he didn't beat himself up. His confidence wasn't rattled. And then...he rocked his last four races, getting gold in all of them. What a satisfying narrative that is. Even more satisfying, maybe, than winning eight golds.

The problem is, a baby dying is not a botched 200 fly. How can I take responsibility for what happened when I don't know what went wrong, and when I did everything I could? I took my folic acid. I exercised, but not too much. I gave up drinking alcohol and coffee and eating raw cheese and raw fish. I was healthy. I had all of the tests. None of it helped.

I can recognize that I got very, very unlucky. 1 in 200 pregnancies end in stillbirth in the U.S. Not that many. But enough that there are a lot of heartbroken families out there. But there's not another race, another Olympics. Most likely there won't be another baby for me, and even if there is, it won't be this one.

I've always been a hard worker. To the extent that I succeeded in swimming it was my work ethic and my determination that got me there, not my talent. At Lakeside Swim Club I was Most Improved four years in a row. But I never made the Olympics. I never even made Junior Nationals. You'd think that would have clued me into the fact that all of this sports hoohah that we think says so very much about the human spirit, about anything being possible if you work hard and dream big and give it your all is complete bullshit. But it hadn't. Which is why, on April 5, two days after my son died, I was ready to get back out there and have another baby. A bigger, better baby than before! It would be a triumphant return to top reproductive form for a once-great performer! You can almost hear Bob Costas narrating.

In sports, this is where you redouble your efforts. Cut carbs from your diet, increase your yardage, add pilates and massage to your regimen. And that's what I wanted. I wanted to fight. I wanted to do anything but be with my own sadness and loss. I wanted my baby to have a terrible disease, so that I could fight against it and he could beat it. The truth is, I can't stand to lose. And the game was over before I even knew I was playing. Before I had a chance to fight. That's cheating, and I want a fucking rematch.

Some things are impossible, no matter what NBC says. My child will not come back to life, no matter how hard I work, how determined I am, how steadfast my will. I have to do something other than fight, something I've never done before: I have to accept. I hate the very word, but it doesn't matter if I hate it. There's no other word for it.

Captain Zimbo

At Sunnyside Medical Center there's a protocol for an intrauterine fetal demise. They put a card on your door with a picture of a leaf with a raindrop on it, so everyone who comes in knows not to ask you giddy questions about nursery color schemes. A social worker comes. They give you a lot of things, too: a packet of literature, a bead bracelet with your baby's name on it. One of the things they gave me was a teddy bear for my about-to-be seven year-old son Jasper. It was white and its arms and legs were seamed to give it the jointed quality of a more expensive Stieff bear. It had kind, sorrowful eyes and a red bow around its neck.

I thought it was both superflous and staggering in its inadequacy. Jasper already has a primary stuffed animal, a gray dinosaur, Finley, given to him when he was a year or so old by my aunt Barbara. Finley has been everywhere, to Louisville and Los Angeles, to Dubrovnik and Munich and Vancouver. He has been left behind in a Best Western in John Day, Oregon, and returned to us by mail at great expense. No stuffed animal could ever supplant Finley. And the unspoken sentiment behind the gift irritated me. 'Sorry you don't get a brother, but here's a lump of cheap polyester plush and fill, made in China by some kids your age, that ought to cheer you up!'

When Jasper said he wanted to name the bear Balthazar my heart froze. Jonathan said no. I don't think he could have endured it, giving the bear Balthazar's name. But then Jasper said he wanted to name the bear Zimbo, which was our nickname for Balthazar when he was in utero, given to him at Thanksgiving by his cousin Phillip. I told Jonathan we had to let him. The name was soon amended, for some reason, to Captain Zimbo.

I was not prepared for how attached I became to Captain Zimbo. I'd heard the thing about bereft mothers' arms actually physically aching for want of a baby to hold, and though that didn't happen, exactly, I did cuddle that bear in a way that I found embarrassing but couldn't help. Every night I would curl up on the couch, wrap myself in the fleece Star Wars blanket and hold Captain Zimbo while I watched Eureka.

Captain Zimbo became Balthazar's avatar, and something about calling him "Captain" set off a chain of associations, of connections. Balthazar became a pilot, in a Sopwith Camel, wearing a leather cap and flying goggles, flying away from me. Like the Red Baron, or Snoopy. He was as intrepid as the World War I flying ace, and as lovable as a cartoon dog, but as unreachable as either. As my yoga teacher Michele had said, he couldn't stay. He'd flown away in his little plane, on a mission I couldn't know or understand. The trouble was, instead of living in my heart as all the supposedly comforting books had said he would, he'd taken half of my heart with him and I was left on the couch gasping for breath, holding a ridiculous yet sympathetic toy.

On Easter Sunday, five days after Balthazar's birth/death, Jasper came down the stairs in the morning eager to find all of the eggs that he knew the Easter Bunny had hidden around the house. Jonathan and I had gone to the toy store on Hawthorne after we picked up Balthazar's ashes from Holman's, trying hard not to look at the jack in the boxes and the blabla lions with their yarn manes. I thought I was doing well, filling that basket. But I had forgotten the eggs.

I broke down and cried when I saw Jasper's disappointment. Poor Jasper came and sat on my lap and patted my arm. "I love you so much and I just want you to be happy!" I wailed. "It's hard times when babies die," said Jasper, sounding more like an elderly lady from Kansas than a six year-old boy. Pat, pat went the hand on my arm.

We sat like that for a few minutes and then tried to get on with Easter morning. Jasper got a new stuffed animal, a Tiger he named Tigy, in his basket and about five minutes later there was violence in the stuffed animal kingdom. Finley, jealous of Tigy's appearance, shot him and was immediately punished with a hard beating with a book. The chocolate lambs, the chocolate bunny and a monkey hand puppet we call Monkey Doctor performed immediate emergency surgery in an attempt to save Tigy's life.

"Finley's been dead for two years," Jasper announced during the surgery. "He's a robot."

"He's dead?" I said, trying to keep my voice neutral in the face of so much carnage. "I had no idea."

"When his mom found out, she didn't even cry," he told me. Finley's mom lived at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. We had taken Jasper and Finley there at New Year's.

I knew he was contrasting her brave, stoic behavior with my own. After all, all I did was cry. I wanted to hold it together for my son; also to let him know that it's OK to be sad. But at that point, to be honest, the whole thing wasn't entirely under my control.

"Let's get Tigy stitched up," I said, turning my attention to the crisis at hand. Tigy was saved, Finley forgiven, his zombie status forgotten for the moment. We ate chocolate and later went to the beach.

Apparently we both had to work things out on plush toys, just different ones. Thank God for cheap fill and polyester.

Birth Story, Part 3

This is the part I always try to avoid. This is the part where the pain is so exquisite I can't touch it, like air on a third-degree burn.

I started seeing a therapist a week after Balthazar died and at our first session she said, "I don't know what happened, other than that you've had a loss. Tell me what happened."
I told her about finding out. I told her about the labor, and the delivery. Then I started talking about how my parents reacted and how it felt to pick my son up from school and see all of the parents three days out.

If I were writing a novel I would unconsciously skip this part altogether and some editor would gently remind me that it's the most important thing, the heart of the story. This is the part with the dead baby in it.

The OB brought Balthazar to me. He had vernix on his face, which looked like clown makeup. They couldn't wipe it off, they explained, because his skin was fragile and might come off with it. Other than that he looked like a baby. He had dark hair. His nose and mouth were like his brother's. His eyes were closed and looked slightly swollen. He was still warm from being inside my body, but he didn't cry and he didn't move. He was a six pound, eight ounce lump. He was there, but he was not there. He was fully formed, but absent. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, but he was gone.

At birth Jasper was already so definitively himself, his right fist held close to his face, over his eye, as a shield, as a comfort, as a way to bash his way out. Who was Balthazar? He was an empty page, a blank. The charity that claims they come and take professional pictures of dead babies never came and so the nurse took the pictures herself. She asked me to kiss his head and I did, feeling guilty about my hesitation. I felt his fragility and his distance and I moved gingerly.

After awhile I gave him to Jonathan to hold. He broke down when he realized that he was unconsciously rocking a baby who had no need of being soothed. "Everyone does it," the nurse, said, unsurprised. "It's an instinct."

He kept pooping. I didn't know that a body could do that, which I guess just shows my ignorance and unfamiliarity with death. The nurse kept trying to wipe him clean, eventually taking a big piece of skin off of his behind. After that she put a diaper on him. But it was horrifying, seeing that happen. My son was injured, wounded. It shouldn't have mattered-after all, he couldn't feel it. But it did matter. The image of it kept me awake at night for weeks-the flap of skin coming off, the raw and damaged flesh.

Later the nurse put him in a bassinet next to my bed. She said that he could stay with us as long as we wanted and so he remained there all night. Once the nurse determined I was not hemorrhaging or feverish she left us alone. There was no way that I could sleep. I read the literature I'd been given like a college student pulling an all-nighter. Jonathan tried to sleep on the padded bench and then at 3 am gave up and went home. I was actually glad, because I needed some time alone with my son.

I told him that  loved him, and that his Daddy loved him, and how sorry we were that we wouldn't get to take him home. I apologized and said I had tried my best. I told him that I knew he had tried his best.

Before Jasper was born, I had a miscarriage at ten weeks. After the D&C the gynecologist told us that it hadn't been a fully formed embryo. It hadn't even made a yolk sac. Once we were over our initial shock and sadness, Jonathan and I used to joke grimly about the poor showing of that pregnancy. "Couldn't even make a yolk sac," we'd say to each other in mock disgust. But this was an entirely different thing.

What did he feel? What did he know? Was he scared? Do feelings and thoughts even obtain for someone who has never existed outside the womb? Can someone who doesn't know where he is or what is happening be scared? The questions would be impossible to answer even if we knew why he died, which we don't.

We would always love him, I said, and we would always be his mommy and daddy. There was really nothing else to say after that. Love was all I had to offer him. 

In the morning Jonathan came back with the hospital bag I hadn't been able to bring. The nurse helped me to dress Balthazar in a gray and white striped hanna andersson onesie and gray wiggle pants-his going home outfit. I wrapped him in a blanket from Churchill Weavers in Louisville, Kentucky, one my aunt's partner had given me when Jasper was born. The blanket was a beautiful cornflower blue.

Another minister came and sat with me, and I have a lot to say about that in another post. Then the geneticist came and looked over Balthazar. He had wild mad scientist hair and and wore corduroys and sandals with socks. He said that based on his examination he could see nothing wrong, but he took a tissue sample to do a chromosomal analysis.

By then I was dressed. We had signed the papers giving the hospital permission to perform an autopsy. We had called the funeral home and arranged for him to be cremated. And so, fourteen hours after he was born, we had to leave him.

I knew it would be the hardest thing, and it was. I was worried that they might not treat him carefully or respectfully. I was afraid they might not put his clothes and blanket back on him after the autopsy. All of that, though, was out of my control. I tried not to look at the body bag that was waiting for after we left. But it was time to leave. Our short moment together was necessarily limited by the exigencies of biology. His body was breaking down and no amount of time in the hospital with him could change that.

Our living son hadn't seen us in 30 hours. So we did the only thing we could do, and went home to him.

Birth Story, Part 2

The blue-eyed nurse ran the Doppler over my belly. Nothing. She asked me how far along I was. "Thirty-seven weeks, five days," I answered. The longer she tried to find the heartbeat, the sicker I got. I knew already. I just couldn't believe what I knew. Someone went to get the ultrasound machine.

"Oh my God, I can't believe this," I said stupidly, the way that every person in shock has ever said it. "I should have come in yesterday," I said to my husband. For a second the nurse with the Doppler thought she had a heartbeat, and I started to cry in relief. But it was just my own heart.

I saw his empty chest on the ultrasound machine. "There's no heartbeat," I said.
"His hand is in front of his chest," someone said hopefully. But I'd had six ultrasounds.  I knew this baby. The last time I'd seen him, four days before, he'd been playing with his cord. His hand had never hung limply by his side like that.

My baby is dead," I said to the doctor. It was not a question.

"It looks like it," she said. She made eye contact with me, but she looked more worried than anything else. Was she afraid I would throw myself on the floor and start tearing at my hair and clothes? I don't know how other people react to this kind of news. I suspect that, like me, a lot of them just shut down. She told me they were going to bring in a special machine to check for a specific form of prenatal arrhythmia. We waited. They checked. It was not an arrhythmia.

"What's next?" I said. "Induction?" I wanted to do something, anything. Get me to the next room, the next place, the next step. Anywhere but in that room where I had found out that my son had died.

The doctor nodded. "But you can go home and come back, you can take some time, talk about things..." I shook my head. There was no way I was leaving that hospital, knowing what I knew.

Jonathan was crying, but I told him he had to call our friend Gwen and let her know so that she could pick up Jasper from school and take him to her house for the night. I don't know how he managed to make that call, but when he came back in the room we all trooped down the hall to a labor and delivery room. It was a little after noon.

After that it was almost like any other labor. Except that there was only one monitor, on me. A couple of Korean nurses came in and chatted with each other while they tried to extract a lot of blood out of the vein on the top of my forearm, for all the tests they were going to run in an effort to find out what happened. I said "Ow!" rather pointedly when they painfully poked and pushed on my forearm, but I didn't say "Fuck!" until another nurse came back and told me that the other nurses hadn't gotten enough blood and she would have to take more, from the inside vein of the other arm.

Mostly, though, it was extremely important to me that I be polite to everyone. I said thank you to everyone. I did not cry.

Jonathan called his father. "Zimbo's dead," he said. I called my brother. "I have some bad news," I said. I asked my brother to call my parents and tell them, and also let them know I'd call them the next day, after the labor was over. I just couldn't talk to them, knowing what I had to get through.

I got a dose of Misoprostl. We ordered dinner. I seem to remember that we ate it somehow. I have no idea how those hours passed, but six hours later I got another dose of Misoprostl that finally brought on the heavy contractions. In fact, they were the strongest I had ever had, stronger than I'd had with Jasper, who was also induced. The nurse shot me up with Fentanyl, and we tried to watch the 40 Year-Old Virgin, but I couldn't focus on it. I felt high as a kite, but the pain was just as strong. I asked for an epidural, which was done carefully in between contractions. When the doctor came to check me after the epidural was in place, I was 7 centimeters dilated.

I was shaking uncontrollably, so they piled blankets on me. We watched The Voice, which I had never seen. I had a conversation with the nurse about Christina Aguilera, how everyone picks on her for being fat but she's really not fat all.

When the nurse took my temperature, I had a fever. I'm going to die too, I thought to myself. I have a raging infection and it killed my baby and they won't be able to control it and it will kill me too. I didn't feel much about it one way or the other. But when she took a bunch of the blankets off of me my temperature went back down to normal.

Much sooner than I expected it was time to push. Now I was scared. Did I remember how to push? Would it go on for 2 hours and 40 minutes, as it had with Jasper? What would my dead baby look like? I was terrified to see him.

I don't know whether it was because it was my second baby, or because he was dead, but three pushes and he was out. It was just after 10 pm.

"He's perfect," the OB said. "Just perfect."

And then I did cry. For my husband this was the worst moment, worse even than finding out he was dead, hearing my cry of anguish. I cried from the effort, the exhaustion, the relief of being done with the work, and the grief of the absolute futility of it all.

Birth Story, Part 1

It's hard to know where to begin a birth story like this. You start to feel like everything that ever happened to you your entire life was meant to lead you to this moment. Everything feels important, and you go back and back, looking for the beginning. Was it my fortieth birthday, when I told my husband that he needed to decide whether we tried for another child, or he got a vasectomy and I got a cat? Was it six years ago on Friday, when my friend Tanja's son Lincoln was stillborn and I got my first glimpse of a kind of grief I never imagined would one day be mine as well? Or does it begin in my childhood? Was all of that sadness meant to prepare me for this?

It's going to take a long time to work all of that out. For now, I'll begin at my thirty-six week prenatal appointment, March 21, 2012, when my uterus measured small. My midwife recommended I make an appointment for an ultrasound, which the woman in the x-ray department scheduled for April 6. I was already due to be induced on April 9.

My mother worries a lot and it makes me crazy, especially when there's nothing anyone can do, but in this case I agreed with her that it made no sense to wait that long. Wasn't the whole point to see if there was a problem? So I called back and insisted they see me sooner. My new appointment was on March 28.

Everything appeared fine at the ultrasound: heartbeat fine, amniotic fluid fine. His weight was estimated at 6 pounds 3 ounces, which put him in the 43rd percentile for his gestational age. The technician remarked approvingly that he was really active.

You see why I am having trouble knowing where to start. Was this important, or incidental? In light of future events it looks ominous, but did it mean anything?

Because I was still worried after the ultrasound. Balthazar's brother Jasper was 8 pounds 15 ounces at birth. Six pounds sounded awfully small for a baby of mine, even at 36 weeks and 6 days. I called my brother the pediatric geneticist. "Is everything OK?" I asked him. "I don't know," he said dubiously. But there was no medical intervention indicated for a baby who was just under average size.

"Hang in there and grow," I whispered to him, pushing against my belly to feel him kick, which he had always obligingly done.

On Sunday, April 1 I took Jasper to a birthday party at a playspace. My worry, which had been at a low level ever since the ultrasound, became acute. Balthazar was not moving much. I spent the party pressing on my belly, poking and prodding, trying to get him to respond. I ate a piece of birthday cake with raspberry filling, which I didn't want, with little effect. I went home and called the labor and delivery nurse, who predictably told me to lie down and do a kick count. I counted 10 kicks in 40 minutes, which was within the guidelines, though less than usual. Also fainter. But I thought I was probably overreacting.

That was the last time I felt him move. 

Monday, April 2 was my 41st birthday. I went to prenatal yoga and told everyone that I was worried. The teacher reassured me that everything was fine, that babies move less when they move down into the birth canal as they prepare to be born. "I wish I had a Doppler at home so I could check on him," I said apologetically and everyone laughed.

I guess I still hate that teacher, which isn't fair, really. There was no way she could know, and I suspect by then it was already too late. I thought I could feel his bottom pressing toward the front of my belly, but I now realize that those were just Braxton Hicks contractions.

He didn't die on my birthday after all. Instead he died on April Fool's Day, which has its own cruel irony. You thought you were getting a baby? April Fools!

That day I took my husband to a mall to buy running shoes. I browsed Anthropologie and bought a cupcake. That night I ordered a pizza and Jasper and I watched Kentucky beat Kansas to win the NCAA men's basketball tournament. I can't believe what stupid, frivolous, pointless things I did that day, while my child floated lifeless inside of me. How I managed to push down my worry, ignore my anxiety.

On Tuesday, April 3 I took my son to school. I went to a coffee shop and finished a piece I was working on. I mailed it to the writer who was helping me with my memoir. Then I went home and called Kaiser labor and delivery again and asked to come in for a non-stress test.

I still thought I would be reassured. I thought I might feel a little silly when everything turned out to be fine. I thought, that, at most, if anything were wrong I might have a C-section. Maybe even an emergency C-section, but then everything would be OK.