Be(A)ware.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan declared the month of October to be"Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month".  I didn't learn this from a history book or some weary tour guide, I learned of this declaration as I would learn so many things after that morning:  the hard way.  

After a textbook pregnancy in 2014,  I delivered a stillborn baby girl. A girl we'd lovingly named after her great-grandmother.  A girl who'd kicked and hiccupped and turned around inside me for nearly nine months.  A girl with a full head of dark, fuzzy hair.  A girl with her father's toes.  A girl whose lungs would never know the air. 

Eight months later I found myself in the bathroom, staring at two faded lines on a stick.  I remember showing the lines to my husband.   "Okay," he smiled.  "Okay."

"How is this okay?"  I'd asked. 

At our first ultrasound the technician made a face.  I remember the immediate validation, the all too familiar devastation rising up from my stomach.   "There's no heartbeat, right?" 

Her eyes widened, "I'm sorry, I thought I was going to sneeze.  There it is!  There's the heartbeat!"

On the way home he asked how I felt. 

Between the tears I told him the truth.  "I feel like we're either really brave or really fucking stupid."

He laughed and then he said,  "I think we're a lot of both."


There is something to be said for stupidity; for being reckless, for throwing (verified and experienced and extremely valid) concern to the wind.  To be certain, all parents are stupid in this regard, to some extent.   We look to the horrors of the world and demand invincibility.  We convince ourselves that we possess the controls.  We watch the news and we say the prayers and we insist that it could never happen to ours. 

But there is something more to be said for the bravery: for the re-entry into a world that has failed you in the most devastating way; to see every sharp edge and drop off from a place you never, ever wanted to know.  To hold the knowledge that it could happen, because it did happen, and to continue...walking, cooking, working, breathing.

I remember as we told people, it wasn't happy or even anticipatory.  The "telling" was something that grew to become a necessary task, in the literal sense, with each passing day.  To say the words "I'm pregnant" out loud was a betrayal:  a terrifying, dreadful feeling.  People would exclaim "Congratulations!" and it would confuse me, send me running into empty classrooms and restrooms and laundry rooms to cry or catch my breath.  All I could see was the enormity of the task before me, all of the uncertainty and the fear.  And her face, still and silent in my arms.

It is difficult to describe what "awareness" means to me now.  Of course there is the need to inform; to educate and share and comfort and warn.  What began as a sort of reluctant obligation, a willingness to move forward and speak her name, has evolved into more than that; more than buttons on a keyboard.  The awareness is a memory, and a skin, and a weight in my arms.  It has bred a love, and a psychosis, and a marrow all its own.   To be aware, for me, is to breathe anymore. 

And so it is difficult to be reckless.  To push the fear aside in a moment; to trust in a world that has left me on my knees with her ashes in my hands.  It's the bravery that becomes most familiar.  The pits in my stomach and the panic and the palpitations.   The putting one foot in front of the other with the knowledge and experience and memory of all you've lost.  The creeping around walls and counting rising chests at nap time.  And while every moment is a fear all-consuming, there is something in the ability to acknowledge the pain and to forge onward, anyway, towards what you still believe might be possible.  Even for you. 

I know there are some who consider him a band aid; that this unique, whole person independent of the tragedy that befell us serves as some sort of replacement.  It sounds absurd but I can see it, in their faces and through the holes in our conversations, as though one person could replace another.  As though his happy entrance into this world erases the trauma of hers.  As though you could discount the silence of that hospital room, or the absence of pink Legos in the carpet, with even the happiest of things.  

But he is not a band aid, because a band aid stops the bleeding. 

Today those two lines greet me at the door. They laugh and pool their nose in my neck and throw tantrums in the produce aisle.  They tap my shoulder in the middle of the night and leave backwash in my dinner glass.  Today those lines hold life in a pulse all their own, louder and more distracting that any fear I could hope to conjure.  Every day, they open wounds and limbs and parts of me I'd deemed closed long ago, which is more than one could say for any tourniquet.  And, as fleeting as time they achieve the impossible, again and again.

Because although I am very much aware, in these moments I am reckless again.