Thoughts on My Village

Thoughts on My Village by Laura Moulton
Illustration by Muriel Green

It takes a village to raise a child. So the saying goes. In my case, the village showed up as soon as I became pregnant, and it's hung around ever since. Family, my students, old ladies, the neighborhood can collector, and the occasional odd bird in the grocery store. All characters from my village. They stepped forward bearing gifts, patting my belly, clucking at its size. They gave me fresh vegetables, and bottles of vitamins, tiny baby blankets. And they gave advice. Unsolicited and occasionally unwelcome advice.

Advice on Pain:

"Get the epidural", said Rosario, one of my Mexican students. "The epidural is your friend," she said. "I'm a nurse. I know."

"Not true," said Tomoko, from Japan. "All you need is breathing," and she clasped her delicate white hands together over her belly and said "Like this: Hee Hee whoooo, Hee Hee whoooo."

Once a week I drove to the correctional facility outside Portland. The women prisoners in my writing class had their own advice. Deborah said, "When you feel the pains start to come on, eat a bag of those little Hershey bars. That's all you need." But Star said, "Chocolate's fine, but you also need a bar to hang from and a towel to chew on." I paled, and they must have seen my face. "It's no worse than a big trip to the toilet," Deborah said. "That's bullshit, " said O'Nesha. "Everyone knows it's like a train wreck through your privates." And thus began an argument about the true nature of labor pain.

Art, who has sickle cell anemia and collects bottles and cans in our neighborhood, admired my belly, and told me to keep my feet up, to take it easy. He warned my husband that during labor I would place terrible curses upon him, and that he should avoid getting too near me, as I would break the bones in his hand, squeezing.

Advice on the Sex of the Baby:

Another student, Gerardo, is an obstetrician in Mexico, but works at Carl's Junior here in the States. After class he often asked me questions -- how I was feeling, and was the baby kicking? I asked if he could tell the sex of the baby by the way I was carrying it. He studied my belly for a minute and then said, "In my village, if a woman's abdomen is bonita, is nice, we say she's having a girl. If it is so-so, ugly" (here he turned his hand side to side) "then we say it's boy. In your case ... "Maybe boy."

People had plenty of theories: If you carry it high, it's a girl. If you look "ugly" during your pregnancy, it's a girl, because girls steal your beauty. If your belly sticks out in a point, it's a boy. When I asked my high school students what they thought, boy or girl, Ryan from the Philippines said "Depends on your elbow" and I said "My elbow?" and looked at one. "It's a boy," Ryan said, "because you looked at your right elbow first."

Unhelpful Advice:

"You're strong," Gerardo said. "I think you should be able to do it." He showed me pictures of himself in green scrubs, delivering babies in Mexico. Photos of blood-covered babies, corkscrew umbilical cords, his front covered in slickness. I gripped the corner of my desk, and said "Thank you very much."

A woman straight out of a Flannery O'Connor short story limped up to me in a line at a Safeway, and planted her hands on my stomach. "When's it due?" she said, through a gap where her front teeth should have been. Her hair stood up in the back, as though she'd just climbed out of bed.

"A few days ago." I shifted away from her slightly.

"They gonna induce if it don't go?" she asked.

"It'll go.," I said, grimly. It's going to come in the next few days."
Then she rubbed my belly and observed that I wasn't all that big. Maybe it'd be another month. She cackled and limped away. I fled the store feeling like she'd placed a hex on me.

My husband and I went for a walk to a nearby park. A woman in a purple sweat suit trotted after us, and hollered "scuze me" (and I thought, Ah hell, because we'd been hit up for hand-outs so often the past days -- and so close to Christmas. I thought that being "great with child" should make me exempt from panhandlers). But the woman said she had a gift, that she could look at a pregnant woman and predict the sex of the baby, when it would be born, its weight and height, and so on.
"Okay," I said. "Shoot."

She put her hands on my giant stomach. "It's a boy, definitely. He'll be about 8 pounds..and 19 inches." She cocked her head. "I'd say you're about 8 months along."
What she didn't know was that I was five days overdue by then, feeling big as a house, and very cross about it. She didn't know that I'd go more than a week past my due date before I birthed my 9-pound baby boy.

There, in the park, with her hand on my stomach, she said "What a special thing, having a baby." We said yes. It was true.

And then she asked, "Could you kind folks spare some change?"

Before and After

Before and After
Laura Moulton

Before
November 2003

My first entry after a long dry spell. The last journal was populated with dreams of snakes and teaching ESL and careful notations on quirky pregnancy behavior (i.e. "Week 10: a new fascination with paper clips and with chasing down crisp dry leaves to stomp them") and it's painful to read the entry from last December, in which I'm sitting in a waiting room, there to have my blood drawn, so that they can make sure all is well – I write to the fetus: Please be okay, little fetus. Please don't have any wacky diseases or be retarded or that sort of thing. The painful part comes in turning the page. It's dated 3 days later and there's blood and red sketches of what came out of me – the miscarriage pages – and then the journal goes on. Ben and I take a 6 a.m. yoga class, biking each morning in the frosty dark, we fight about when to try and make a baby again, and I go see a free counselor who lives in the suburbs and who hands me tissue from his swivel chair and clucks sympathetically. By spring, we're pregnant again. I live in fear that one false step will dislodge this new creation, just like before, but this one sticks. My middle fills out and my breasts begin to resemble those of a Baywatch character. I feel rosy and lustrous-haired. Big and sexy.

My fetus accompanies me to protests against the war in Iraq, though I avoid the most crowded places, the skirmishes and potential tear gas. I maneuver this belly in and out of an ESL classroom, where students give me spinach and tomatoes from their gardens, and guess about the sex of my baby. I drive to a medium-security prison each week, where I teach writing to a class of women prisoners. We even go on a trip to England for six weeks, where we roam the countryside and live on a boat with friends.

Finally I dare to jot a note to the new fetus: Baby, you are 36 weeks old in there. You're a wonder, a mystery. I can't fathom the sex of you, your shape, your already partly-formed personality and eye color and nose. Some days I want you to be here in front of me so that we can play together, so I can get the hang of feeding you with my breast. But other times I wish we could just communicate by letters and postcards for a while first, to get to know each other, so that I might learn what your pet peeves are (I hate those diaper covers, you might say, or I can't stand adults who engage in that mewling baby talk). Then I could be prepared. And then you would know about me, too, that I am excited to be your mother but also afraid of some things: that I won't be able to adequately shield you from the world's harsh parts, that your coming will wreck my sense of self, that my stomach will be stretched and flaccid as an old balloon and that I'll grow sluggish and apathetic, eat potato chips for breakfast and watch court TV. That your father and I will fight because of you, because we're sleep-deprived or because we don't agree on whether you're sick, whether you're hungry, etc. But I have a hunch it's going to be okay. If you can just get here and get settled (I admit that even as I fold little clothes and blankets, organize a space for you here, I find myself trying to be practical – what if you die before I can dress you in a fuzzy pajama suit? I am gun-shy after the miscarriage. I can feel you, big and marvelous and kicking around in there, but occasionally I am faint of heart and doubt the universe will come through). So come through, baby. Come through.

After
June 2004

He came through. But he took his time. The war happened, despite our best efforts, and every day there is bad news from Iraq. My ESL students threw me a surprise shower, and my students at the prison had a reading and invited their friends and family to come. Nine days past the due date, my son, Coen Isaac Parzybok, was born.

It's incredible to me that six months has passed since then. We learned breast-feeding together (it was harder than I thought it'd be, but he took to it like a champ), and we figured out cloth diapers. Contrary to my fears, I didn't commence watching bad daytime television or fighting with my husband. I am stronger and fitter than I thought I'd be at six months postpartum. Coen is sitting up by himself, looking at (and chewing on) books, and starting to grow a tooth or two.

For months my journal has filled with pictures of Coen, with observations about how he chirrups like a little bird in the mornings, or how he studies a photo of himself and grins. But things have come full circle now – the part of me that was consumed by the pregnancy, the birth, and now the caring for my son has begun to step up and demand itself back. My fear that the arrival of a baby would alter my sense of self was not unjustified: I am a different person than I was before he came along. But what I didn't know then was how adaptable I could be, how I am many different things at once, and none of them needs to replace the original.

Miscarriage of Justice: How Losing a Baby Feels Like Real Rip-off

Miscarriage of Justice: How Losing a Baby Feels Like Real Rip-off
Laura Moulton
(A version of this article originally appeared on hipmama.com in April 2003)

I got pregnant on my 32nd birthday, after a clue in the scavenger hunt my husband Ben created for me led me to the bedroom, ("Go undercover," it said. I found a bottle of massage lotion under the bedspread). We met up there, and celebrated. A month later I peed on a stick and it was certain. How amazing to be pregnant. My breasts swelled up and were marvelous to behold. I ate up folic acid tablets and prenatal vitamins like I sensed an embargo around the corner, crunched dark leafy greens and made complete proteins my religion. A waitress at a vegan cafe showed me how to get my navel ring out. I felt vaguely queasy and more tired than usual, but life was grand. Everyone wanted to know: was I getting enough sleep? Enough iron? Was I having especially vivid dreams yet? It was a delicious club to have joined and I was ready to grow a baby.

Then I had a miscarriage at 11 weeks, and was thrust quite abruptly into a different club. There weren't any "How To" guides this round, nothing like "Your Miraculous Miscarriage," or "Miscarriage: A-Z." This is how it happened: On a Wednesday night, I noticed a faint, rust-colored bit of blood on a tissue. I tried not to freak out, but that's a joke. I phoned the midwife on call, and searched the Internet for information. Learned there's such a thing as "old blood." Everything is getting all set in there, shifting around a little, getting comfortable. So it makes sense to send a little old stuff out. Out with the old, in with the new, and so on. Plenty of women spotted through their whole pregnancy and delivered a perfect baby. But that was small comfort and I held my breath for about 12 hours, (taught my classes in the morning, came home and took a nap (calm, calm, don't panic), went to an orientation for a community college job, and then finally admitted to myself that I was having cramps. I went to a fluorescent-lit student bathroom strewn with toilet paper and cigarette butts, (please don't let me miscarry in this place) and discovered I was bleeding. In the car home, heading east on I-84, I doubled over the steering wheel and I raged and wept. As the night wore on, I had legendarily strong cramps, climbed in and out of the bathtub, cried my guts out, sent my husband to fetch a mason jar, into which I deposited something like a red gelatinous hockey puck and also a small creature that had neither head nor discernible tail and looked like a string of turkey gizzards. I was pregnant and then I wasn't. Presto.

Miscarriages are really awful and gruesome, and words fail, which is perhaps why they're not talked about in any kind of mainstream way. People don't know what to offer up by way of comfort, and perhaps women who've had the experience have trouble articulating it. I certainly did, in the beginning. In an old Webster's dictionary, I found miscarriage listed simply as "abortion." What a strange word miscarriage is. There are different ways to parse it up: to mis-carry something would seem to mean handling it carelessly or dropping it. Or there was to miss carrying something, which I did keenly. In my darkest, I scanned the dictionary for other words: mischance, miserable, misery, misfortune, mishap, mislay, misplace (as in, I've misplaced my fetus, can you give me a hand?), mislead, (as in, It seems my body mislead me from about week 7 on). Ben said miscarriage sounded like a term from the 1800s. Like some Elizabethan misfortune that happened to depressed wives in dark, empty houses. Not something that happened to women on a regular basis. Whatever the case, I found that as common as miscarriage supposedly is, there is not much out there, save a handful of support groups, books published by small presses, and some online chatting about it.

There's an element to miscarriage that is fascinating from a biological point of view, (if one has hindsight in their favor and is not still standing in a bathtub having one). The body is an efficient machine, and, recognizing bum material, boots it out. I read that most miscarriages resulted because there was information missing somewhere, so that at some point, the fetus stopped growing and eventually was expelled. Think of it as a novel that's missing the last 50 pages. It's impossible to continue, given what's missing. In my case, it took some time for my body to figure out that the thing inside me wasn't growing anymore. What a strange thing that my body produced the hormones that kept me convinced I was pregnant for up to 6 weeks beyond the time I was actually was. My husband suggested that having a miscarriage seemed not unlike an alien invasion. One day my personality began to change, my body was different, and then after three months, suddenly it was over. It was bloody like a scene from Aliens and afterward, the alien thing was gone and just like the movies, everyone was exhausted and empty. I even felt like groaning, "Kill me," like Sigourney Weaver did.

Miscarriages are so common. Some sources say one in every 6 women. The fact that they are so common makes it difficult to find very much information about why it happened. After all, it takes having two or three miscarriages to get the attention of doctors, and only then do they recommend tests to try and determine what's going wrong. In my case, I brought my rough draft of a fetus in to the midwives, they sent it to pathology, and I waited anxiously for the results. I think I imagined they'd be able to provide me with at least a few definitive details. Things like what the fetus had developed so far, the age when it stopped growing, and the reason it stopped. But I got a phone call from a chipper nurse who said, "Just wanted to let you know that your specimen was (insert drum roll) fetal tissue." Ah, the relief. I mean, I'd feared it was a part of my lower intestine coming out, or a batch of baby kittens. I don't mean to sound bitter. It's just that I wanted to know two things: Why it had happened to me and that it would never happen again. Neither of these comforts were available, save knowing that I'm young, I can try again, and there are plenty of women who have a miscarriage and go on to have perfectly healthy babies. In lieu of a satisfactory explanation from the lab report, we had to imagine our own. Ben suggested perhaps the baby had been called to be a Brahman holy cow in India. I thought that perhaps it had put its ear to my side and listened to news on the radio, heard the words terror and war on terror entirely too much, whereupon it had decided against a hostile country, opting instead to be born to French parents living in the countryside, or to a blind masseuse living at a temple in Bangkok.

Here's an imaginary excerpt from the book I wish I'd found when I was having a miscarriage. Let's call it, "What to Expect When You're Having a Miscarriage": A miscarriage means disruption. A hiccup and then cessation of a small lifeline. It means being stuck with dried figs and strange high-protein, high-iron pregnancy snacks that you would never ordinarily eat, the sight of which inspires weeping. If you've got excited friends and family, it means you've already received maternity hand-me-downs and cool baby clothes from Goodwill. It means also that you will have to buy menstrual pads for the first time since you were fourteen. And it means a trip back to the same waiting room you'd visited while pregnant, same cheerful receptionists, same beautiful big bellies attached to pregnant women reading magazines, waiting for their appointments. Meanwhile, you're carrying yours in a mason jar, in a brown paper bag. It means feeling psychotic, since you are at once filled with the hugeness of what you've lost, and riding out mood swings, courtesy of the surge of hormones running for the exit. You might have thoughts like, The last time I wore this skirt, I was going to have a baby. Your friend who has a perfect three-month-old, and is devastated for you, will ask if she should bring the baby when she visits. You'll make a wry comment that you promise not to choke him.

The plus side of miscarriage is that you can go to bed and nobody asks you when you're getting up. You can read Tintin comics and stare out the window for hours. Now you can eat cans of tuna without fear of poisoning your unborn with mercury. You can polish off a bottle of wine by yourself. You can get as many x-rays as you want and change the cat litter whenever you feel like it. And hey, now you don't have to worry about the potential effects of biological warfare on your vulnerable little newborn.
You will be amazed at yourself, at how open and guileless you were when pregnant, how you charted the baby's progress, marveled at the miracles, (today it had a spine, by next week its neurological workings would be finished). There was nothing in your experience to tell you to slow up, to be cautious, to guard your heart against over-expanding..."

But as I write this, I'm finding I don't want to write a guide on how to miscarry gracefully. I didn't want to read about it while I was pregnant, and I assume that women will avoid this article unless they are nursing a common grief, or know someone who is. I don't blame them. When I was pregnant, I steered away from any dark topics associated with pregnancy and birth, and focused only on all the things that could go right. I'm afraid that's this tendency to shy away, to avert the eyes, is the very thing that makes for a shortage of good writing on the topic, when women need it the most.

The whole experience has been a learning process and even if I feel less bold now, I am likewise not gun-shy at the prospect of trying again. One unexpected outcome is that instead of being left with a keen sense of what I've lost, I have a better idea of what I have. Here's what I mean: The night I thought I might miscarry but wasn't sure, I sat on the couch crying and I caught sight of a photo on the wall. It's a picture I took in Guatemala of a little girl dressed in colorful woven clothes, with her baby sister strapped to her back. I'd played with them when I lived in their town, Patzicia, a tiny village of cinderblock houses with dirt floors. As I studied the picture I thought for the first time of their mother, and realized that she would have given birth to them under pretty incredible circumstances, with no clean place to lie down, no hospital if there were complications, and suddenly my dilemma seemed pretty paltry. I had hot water for a bath if I suffered cramps. I had friends and family on hand, bearing hot soup and bouquets of flowers. As painful as my singular experience was, I felt, even as it was happening, that I was joining a veritable chorus line of others, a family of women who'd suffered much greater loss than I had.

I can feel myself trying to compose a nice, tidy conclusion, one that details what I've learned and how I'm a better person for it, (think Chicken Soup for the Miscarriage Soul ), But there are no neat endings. My pregnancy was a work-in-progress, suddenly interrupted. Miscarriage is unraveling, a coming undone, and though there is a point where things are finished from a biological perspective, there's no telling when the rest of the process ends, or if it ever does. If conceiving a child is a leap of faith, so too are the months that follow. Things can go wrong, but there is also a good chance that they'll go splendidly. In the end, we are left with little choice but to bless the one that got away, wish it safe passage to its next life, and forgive it for leaving us. Then we take a deep breath and start again.