The Worst Birthday in the World
Five bouquets of peonies, a diamond bracelet, and a phone call
On my thirty-sixth birthday I received five bouquets of peonies, a diamond bracelet, and a call from my doctor to tell me that the pregnancy that had somehow happened, despite my having lost hope it ever would, was not progressing as expected.
Eleven months earlier we had given ourselves one year, and I had spent it living by a clock no one around me could read. Time, I learned, could be something other, measured not in its normal units but in ways that left me stuck in a Groundhog Day universe, a warped sort of calendar I couldn’t escape:
Days: days before I start measuring my hormones to know when to have sex. Days to have sex, every day, every other day, the days one must.
Weeks: the two-week wait, the longest fourteen days I have ever known, filled with hope and dread.
Days: days until I can take a pregnancy test. The hours and minutes I lie awake, unable to sleep, my heart pounding in my throat, waiting for morning to come.
Months: another whole one in front of me, and another, and another.
Weeks: pregnancy weeks, but also a jump cut to forty weeks ahead, due dates.
Seasons: seasons to be pregnant, imagined seasons to give birth, the best seasons to push a stroller around.
Weeks, again: eight-week scan, slow heartbeat. Ten-week scan, no heartbeat.
Starting all over a second time: days to measure, days to conceive, days to wait, days to despair. Testing, waiting, imagining new seasons to give birth, to hold a baby. Days to bleed, no more dreaming.
Spring now, restarting the clock every month, again and again. One last month, one last try. Days, waiting, counting. Counting pregnancy weeks, imagining yet another season for everything to come, a better one, the best one yet. Weeks between appointments, weeks of dread accumulating like water boiling too fast under a tight lid. No spillover, just dead quiet. Nothingness, the clock stops.
There was still cake, still candles to blow out, a dinner to get dressed for, birthday wishes to be thankful for. I put on my nice clothes and took pictures in which I am smiling. When it was time to blow out the candles, I wished only for a miracle, the kind of thing I don’t believe in. A year earlier, blowing out the same candles, I had wished for health and for the chance to enjoy the last months of being just me and my husband. I was certain that in a year’s time I would be celebrating with a newborn in my arms. My mother cried at the bad news. Emi took me in his arms and comforted me, said we would move to IVF as planned, that all would be well. I wanted, by turns, to punch everyone in the face, to run away, to give back the bracelet and the peonies, and to lock myself in a quiet room with no time to keep.
In the days that followed, between appointments where I was scanned again and again to look at my seemingly empty gestational sac, I binge-watched The Night Of and Black Bird and the Kylie Minogue documentary, as if a beautiful young woman getting breast cancer at thirty-six, my age, or fictional characters jailed for crimes they hadn’t committed, could make my own pain feel less consequential. I returned to some of my favorite Russians, too, and lingered over Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, underlining a single passage: “an awareness of life hopelessly slipping away but not yet gone.” I had not, until that point, come across a better description of how I had experienced every one of my losses.
Each time, I had to discover some new dimension of time, one that could be stretched to its furthest, most painful limit. Blood tests would come back inconclusive, and I would be summoned for ultrasounds that, in turn, were inconclusive too. “We can’t know for sure,” I would be told. I would be given a week, sometimes two, to find out whether there would be life or death at the end of the wait, or at least some sign, something I would strain to make out on the screen, something bigger, more formed, a flicker of movement I once took for the baby, before the doctor told me it was my own heartbeat. That room, where I had braced myself for bad news so many times, was my cell. I would go home after each appointment but never free of the fear, the counting. I would sit at home for an entire week, feeling pregnant but knowing I might not be any longer.
As I waited for the doctor, always the waiting, I would rearrange the blue sheet over me again and again. I would study the ultrasound machine, fixing each time on how dusty the buttons were. I took many photos too, hoping to look at them one day from the other side, souvenirs that would tell a different story. I have never been able to project myself into the future, to see, in my mind’s eye, something desired, or simply something yet to come. And in that quiet I would get stupid, nagging thoughts about not having wanted it enough, not having pictured it hard enough, grasping for consolation in the form of blame. A lie, of course, because the body does not work on wishes and prayers, but being guilty sometimes felt easier than being at the mercy of nothing, of no one in charge.
Before that final loss, I caught myself trading my usual means of making meaning, writing and thinking, for the magical arithmetic we reach for to lend sense to what lies outside our control. I began to say things like “third time’s the charm,” or to read significance into the fact that I was pregnant in May, my birthday, and due in February, my husband’s birthday, taking it as cosmic reassurance, a good omen, the kind of thing I would normally recoil at. And afterward, once life had proved again that chance and randomness prevailed, I said it was only natural that two people who love facts and science as much as we do would have a baby who preferred to be made in a lab rather than arrive the conventional way. If it weren’t for the stories we spin, the ways we hold what is falling apart somewhat together, all we would be left with is the cold truth: sometimes these things work and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes there is an explanation; more often there is none.
I only cried once. It wasn’t the physical pain of the at-home miscarriage, or what doctors call “expectant management,” as if there were anything expectant or managed about clutching my belly, every contraction a cold reminder that the body simply does its job, indifferent to whether the process ends in birth or in emptiness. It happened while I watched a stranger’s vlog on YouTube: how she had seen her positive test, how she had surprised her husband with it, how she was now telling her pregnancy story while cradling a five-month bump. At first it felt surreal, because I had seen so many positive tests and never once made it to the bump. And then I understood: the door had closed on a certain version of all this, the one where it arrives as a sequence of joyful surprises.
For the past year, every time I felt joy, it was taken back, the way you hand a child a toy and then take it away with no explanation. I have found pockets of normalcy, but never for long, existing only as a half-self, catching sight of someone familiar but not quite recognizable in the mirror. So much loss gives life a strange quality. I laugh, go about my day, even return to what feels like myself, putting words down, my mind dizzy with new ideas, and then catch myself flinching without being touched, at nothing but the memory of a pain lodged deep inside me.
When my husband reminded me of our plan, that we would move on to IVF and all would be well, he offered it as comfort. And he meant that it would work. I still can’t see the future; I can only hope the way someone hopes who has already hoped in vain. But I was comforted by something else, something he hadn’t promised: that I would no longer be the one keeping count. A new calendar now replaces the one I kept all year, its weeks and months filled with clear instructions kept by someone else. It is the only rest I have had in a long time.
No one sees life quite the way my precious, brave daughter does.