By the next morning, it was over, and I spent the day sitting by the pool, drinking a grapefruit-flavored beer, wearing the thickest maxi pad Michael could find at the drugstore, while my children played. Everything was totally fine.
A theme that my pastor goes back to over and over is the idea of idols, that you can have a good thing—a job you love, a spouse you love, enough money, the ability to tap dance—that is enjoyable and harmless unless you make it your ultimate thing (which is, naturally, what God should be). When your job is a good thing, you do your best and hold it lightly, keep it in perspective. When it is your ultimate thing, when it is the sun around which everything else rotates, it is teetering precariously in a position it’s not meant to be in. You lose that job, or you even just have a royally atrocious week, and you sink into despair. When the love of your life is your ultimate thing, and he disappoints you, because he is human, your world comes crashing down. My favorite idols, the ones I love to water and prune and pet lovingly, up on their fragile pedestals, are control and capability. I relish control so much that I can never sign up for any sort of subscription box where they “surprise” me with products, and it took me a year (and a third child) to give in to grocery delivery and letting someone else pick out my avocados. I’m very skilled at taking care of things, tidying up messes, and organizing my circumstances without needing help. They are good qualities! Especially in a crisis. But, slowly, in certain circumstances, they will tip from good to ultimate, when I am handling things so well that I puff up and turn out like a prized daffodil, looking down my perky trumpet at needy people. I can rely on myself alone, I think, because look how fine I am. When I reach the tippy top of my well-ordered smugness is usually when my children start to act like hyenas, but worse, hyenas who are also being audited by the IRS, so they’re extra pissed off. God has realized, I think, that this is often the only way to communicate with me. When control and capability are good things, you look at those hyenas with exasperation, you separate them, you make someone take a nap. When control and capability are your ultimate thing, you scream or cry uncontrollably until your children quake with fear, and tell your husband you are moving to the Four Seasons in Midtown. So. God often uses my children to remind me that I can’t control everything, and I should ask for his help.
In the weeks following my first miscarriage, I learned that he also uses hormones.
I went back to work the day after we returned from Massachusetts. What, inconvenience my coworkers by taking a day or two off to rest and heal? Pffft. I was fine. I cried in the bathroom a couple of times, and I was a generally useless employee, because I spent most of my day googling how long it takes the pregnancy hormone hCG to exit your system, but overall I was fine. Well, I did go to Rite Aid to buy pregnancy tests, like a crazy person, to check if the hCG levels were low enough that they wouldn’t register. Little did I know that the levels are high enough to give you a positive result for weeks after a miscarriage, so then I cried in the bathroom again, looking at two blue lines on the stick. I was still fine, still handling everything, but maybe my grip was slipping a bit. Then I texted my sister. My unflappable sister, who is equally as capable and stoic. I wrote, “Just wanted you to know that I had a miscarriage this weekend, but I’m fine.” So when my sister did not text me back but called immediately and said, tenderly, before I could get anything else out, “It’s not fine at all. It’s awful. I’m so sorry,” I felt a faint thump in the top of my chest, like my heart reached up and knocked. It’s not fine at all.
Two weeks later, my hormones took a running dive off a cliff. Or they got together with some of my brain chemicals and did tequila shots. I believe they may have invited my two human children, if that’s possible, to the bacchanal. It was hormonal chaos. I felt depressed and pitiful—and mostly frustrated, because, of course, all I wanted was to be fine.
#2
In the two months after my first miscarriage, my hormones leveled off. The chaos calmed. But I still wasn’t fine. Every day, on the subway on my way to work, I would listen to Ellie Holcomb’s album Red Sea Road and sob. It was very unlike me. There was one song that I’d play on repeat, because it elicited the most satisfying weeping, called “He Will.” The lyrics talk about God binding up the brokenhearted, which comes from Psalm 147. He will keep his promises and bring peace to the restless, no matter our circumstances, she sings.
I once had a friend who had just gone through a miscarriage say to me that she knew God understood her pain and grieved with her, because he, too, had lost a child. That came back to me on those subway rides, the thought that he knew my heart was broken, and that he would bind it up. I pictured an old-fashioned muslin wrap, holding together loose and bruised pieces of my body, maybe how Jacob Marley’s chin is tied up in A Christmas Carol: tight, fortified, supported. Maybe it was like a full-coverage bra with wide straps and lots of padding.
There was another song, the title song on the album, “Red Sea Road,” that explained how we can experience loss and heartache and think there’s no way we can get up and keep going. Like the Israelites fleeing Pharaoh, we’re already tired and hungry, and now we’ve got basically an ocean in front of us and a murderous army behind us. But God will open up a way, a Red Sea road, and lead us through it. You have to keep hoping that if you can put one foot in front of the other, he’ll hold the waters back for you.
So, I listened to Ellie Holcomb on my commute, I imagined God tying my heart up in a soft bra, and I put one foot in front of the other, onto the subway, up the escalator, into my office.
. . .
On each floor of our building was a snack area with a machine that ground salted peanuts into peanut butter on demand. Every morning, around ten thirty, I would buy the most expensive variety of apple I could find at the very expensive French market on the ground floor, get a cup of freshly ground peanut butter from the snack bar, and hide in a “quiet room,” which were supposed to be for people needing to do interviews for stories, not hormonal basketcases needing to cry. Then I’d go one step further into Crazytown by repeating a trick that was floating around Facebook at the time, where you pull out a piece of your hair, hang your wedding ring on it, and then dangle it above your open hand, waiting for it to move, like a piece on a Ouija board. You’d first trace the outline of your fingertips, then let the ring settle, suspended, still as death, until it slowly began to sway, either in a circle or back and forth. A circle indicated a boy, back and forth indicated a girl, and the ring would become still in between each prediction, as you counted up your imaginary children. Every time I did it, I got the same results: back and forth, still, circle, still, back and forth, still. Then nothing. I already had the girl and the boy, and now the ring was telling me I was going to have another girl. Whew. Problem solved. It was going to happen, and the fact that I’d just pulled out several pieces of my hair to discover this great truth was not at all alarming to me.
But I didn’t get pregnant. Not in the following three months or the next three after that. I turned forty in December 2016, and Michael threw me a beautiful dinner with a few other couples at a restaurant that served us fancy fried chicken and coleslaw, family style. He gave everyone a quiz to see how well they knew me, and my friend Eleni got every answer right, including, “What is Elizabeth’s favorite white meat?” (Answer: Michael. He’s very pale.) We went home, and for the first time, I felt okay. I’d been holding up my fortieth birthday as a dead end, a psychological stop sign, where the Skee Balls would stop coming, so every month leading up to December felt frenzied. My capability screamed at me, “We will do this in a timely manner!” But we didn’t. My efforts didn’t pan out. The ovulation predictor strips didn’t help. And then, whoosh, I was coasting into a new decade, on what felt like a wide-open road to nowhere. It was freeing but also a little unsettling. Because when I didn’t have a deadline, how was I supposed to know when to stop trying to make this happen? I didn’t ask God that question. Not yet. The closest I could come to trusting him was
to stop swinging a ring around my hand like a psycho.
. . .
The last weekend in February, I went with my friends Blair, Hallie, and Murff to Austin, Texas. We went away for a weekend every year, usually somewhere within driving distance and cheap, but we splurged on a nice hotel in Austin, because it was the year of our fortieth birthdays. On the last day of the trip, we went to the rooftop pool, which was closed because it was cold out, and huddled on a chaise lounge to pray together before we all flew home. Even though I’ve known these friends since preschool, even though they know the ugliest sides of me and love me anyway, even though we have prayed with and for each other thousands of times over the course of our friendship, I was still glad there was no one on that rooftop. I’ve tried, as I’ve gotten older, to be more easygoing about demonstrative acts of faith in public, but I’m still skittish. One of my friends in New York, Patricia, will be on a group text of several (nonbelieving) parents at our school, and if someone shares a harrowing story or bad news, Patricia will text the whole group, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.” She will pray out loud over a crying child who falls at the playground, even if the child isn’t hers. I fall somewhere between that and wanting to crawl into a sewer grate when a friend suggests we bless the meal at a restaurant. Maybe a smidge closer to the sewer grate. But I prayed out loud on that rooftop in Austin, and my sweet friend Murff piped up and asked God to please give me a baby.
Turned out, I was already a couple of days pregnant.
Now, we all know that that is not how things work. God is not a vending machine, where you drop in your prayers like quarters, and you immediately get a Kit Kat. I had already prayed for a baby a hundred times. Women all over the world are praying for babies right now, and some of them may never have one. That wasn’t the baby that would become Sam anyway. It was a little girl that I would lose one month later. I think that answered prayer, timed in such a classic, topped-with-a-bow way, was just a reminder that God isn’t out to lunch, that he hears me. He would bind up my broken heart, but not with a baby, at least not yet. He would bind up my broken heart with something far better—himself. He said to me, “Go on, be confident in your capabilities. I gave you those, so use them. Just remember that you can’t control the outcome, and furthermore, you don’t have to. Trust me.”
That miscarriage took us by surprise. There was no cramping or spotting. But because of my history, I had an early ultrasound at eight weeks, and the images were eerily similar to what I’d seen eight months before. A fetus that wasn’t as big as she should be, with a heartbeat that was visible but slow. We had to wait a whole week to find out if things were improving or going south. That’s something that stories about miscarriage don’t tell you: how much waiting there is. Waiting for days to go back and see if there’s still a heartbeat. Waiting for your body to decide if it will let go of this baby naturally. Waiting for bleeding to start. Waiting for bleeding to stop. Waiting for your body to know that it’s not pregnant anymore.
One week later, Michael drove us to the doctor’s office, and before we walked in, we prayed in the car for a miracle. That was it. Just, “God, give us a miracle, and let this baby be strong and healthy.” I know there are people who think God must be cruel, listening to the pleas of desperate parents parked on the side of Fifth Avenue, letting that baby die. Suffering is complicated. There’s no easy answer for why God allows certain things to happen. My belief is that we live in a broken world, not the perfect one God originally envisioned, and he’s as sad about it as we are sometimes. But he sent us the Holy Spirit to offer comfort, and when the Holy Spirit feels far away, he works through our friends or families, who bring casseroles and cookies and margaritas.
In my case, he also worked through Dr. Levin and the nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital. When the ultrasound showed that there was no heartbeat, I knew right away that I wanted to have a D&C, a procedure to remove the fetus and tissue, rather than wait for everything to happen on its own, like the first time. We were leaving the next morning to visit my family at the beach in South Carolina for Easter, and I didn’t want to be anxious all weekend, or, heaven forbid, start bleeding on a plane.
“I want a D&C today. This morning,” I told Dr. Levin.
“Did you eat breakfast?” she asked.
I had bought myself a sympathy scone at the bakery next door to the hospital. Dr. Levin explained that the surgery center at Mount Sinai usually required general anesthesia for a D&C, and they couldn’t use that if I’d eaten in the past twelve hours. I almost lied about the scone—I didn’t even finish it—but then I thought about dying under anesthesia, due to currant remnants in my small intestine. So I told the truth. Dr. Levin sighed and said she wished there was a way around it, she was so sorry. Then she called a friend of hers who was in private practice nearby. He said he would perform the procedure, but he didn’t take insurance. We would have to pay for it out of pocket. There was a Planned Parenthood in the neighborhood who would also do it. But I trusted Dr. Levin. I wanted her with me. We left the office, resigned to waiting it out over vacation, and I walked to the subway to go to work. Just as I was about to take the stairs underground, my phone rang. It was Dr. Levin.
“Come to the office at 1:00 p.m. I’ll use local anesthesia. We’ll figure this out.”
I don’t want to glamorize having a D&C, but in the interest of finding the smallest upside in an otherwise hellfire of a day, mine was about three steps below a spa appointment. A nurse showed me to a changing area with handsome wooden lockers, where I put my clothes before changing into a robe and slippers. Another nurse handed me a card to check off what kinds of snacks I’d like in recovery: apple juice, latte, cookies, graham crackers. Then she asked if I had any music requests.
“For the operating room?” I said.
“Yes. What kind of music do you want to listen to?”
“I don’t know. Eighties?”
As I lay down on the table, Dr. Levin announced, “It’s an all-female crew!” The two nurses gave a soft cheer. Then Cyndi Lauper came through the speakers. Whitney Houston. Dr. Levin finished up to “Africa” by Toto. A nurse stroked my arm the entire time. And then I ate a lot of graham crackers.
I slept the rest of the afternoon, and the next morning, we flew to Charleston. That Sunday, Easter Sunday, my sister’s church held an outdoor service under a tent in a beautiful field overlooking the marsh. Kids were decorating a cross with fresh flowers, and we sang about light coming out of the darkness, about death not getting the final word.
SAM
Three months after my second miscarriage, I got pregnant with Sam. I did all the things I’d done the first two times, although I was a little less neurotic about it. Michael and I decided we’d keep trying until I turned forty-one, and then we’d let it go. But I didn’t feel anxious about an end date. I felt calm. I bought flimsy, cheap ovulation kits at Dollar Tree. I tried to let my competency be a good and useful thing and not the alpha gorilla it sometimes became. I talked about my miscarriages to a lot of people, because so many women don’t, and almost everyone I know who is my age has had one. I told friends to watch out for the two-week, post-miscarriage hormone cliff dive. I slept a lot, because being pregnant at forty (and then forty-one) is a lot harder than it is when you are thirty-three. In fact, everything about having a baby at forty-one is more stark; the highs are higher and the lows are lower. Because there are almost six years between James and Sam, all of the baby milestones felt new again. Sam’s first steps and first words were magic. But the recovery from his birth was harder. He wouldn’t nurse. My hormones went haywire again, and there was a week where I couldn’t get out of bed. I told Hallie that it felt like depression, and she said it definitely did, and I should probably do something, and so I quit pumping, which I knew from past experience would help, and it did. Hallie had a baby—her third—two months after I had Sam. Turns out we prayed a lot of babies into the world in Austin that weekend.
. . .
I am still brokenhea
rted for the first baby I lost. And the second (“female, abnormal” is what the test results from the D&C said). But I know I will see them in heaven, and until then, I let Michael, my friends, Ellie Holcomb, and whoever else wants to, bind me up in a cozy support bra. Because I’m capable, but I don’t have to do it alone.
I’m still deciding on the tattoo.
NINE
1,241 SQUARE FEET
WHEN I TOLD PEOPLE I WAS pregnant with my third child, the response I got most often had to do with real estate.
“Where will you put him?”
“Will you buy a bigger apartment?”
“So you’ll move out of the city, right?”
Most of the time the questions came from old friends or family members who had visited New York City plenty but still didn’t quite understand how or why I was continuing to live here in a two-bedroom apartment. They were curious. Some people were genuinely, supportively curious. Other people were curious like one might wonder how a dog manages to lick its own bottom—interested in the logistics but still harboring a sense that the whole affair is uncouth. With everyone, though, I tried to answer in the most openhearted and generous way possible. I explained the layout of our apartment and how we planned to rejigger things. “We don’t feel like we’re bursting at the seams just yet,” I’d say. Occasionally, if I was annoyed and prone to patronizing, I’d try to suss out what kind of preconceived notion the person was bringing to the table. That way, I could either heroically affirm an exciting part of city living they’d always wondered about or (gently, so gently) tear down a negative perception. Only rarely did I get full-blown defensive—usually with fellow New Yorkers who were looking for coconspirators to move to Montclair, New Jersey—and Michael would have to calm me down by reminding me that I grew up in suburban Memphis and who, exactly, did I think I was?
Good Apple Page 8
