MARCH 2018
Our three-week honeymoon in Mexico was a dream!
Finally free to be intimate whenever we desired, we made love at sunrise in beachside cabanas, by firelight under the moon, even beneath a midday sky of Monarch butterflies. By the end of our trip we had conceived! I repackaged the positive test, wrapped it, and presented the gift to my love at dinner. The following night we practically floated home, eventually learning we got pregnant a week before our vows—a transgression we preferred to keep private. After twenty-three days of waiting (so the mathematicians in our family wouldn’t discover our true gestation) we gathered our relatives and screamed it from the rooftops.
On a Sunday afternoon we celebrated it with friends at a cook-out. The morning after, I was on the toilet—guts twisting—cursing myself for having eaten the fruit salad Karla hand tossed with bacteria from beneath her two-inch, acrylic nails. I prayed my bowels would move so I could flush the pain away. Nothing came. My legs were almost numb when I hoisted myself from the seat, uncovering a bowl of crimson liquid.
There was something in the water. Like a baseball that had been peeled from its leather, a sinewy bundle of magenta, indigo, and mahogany hues floated just below the surface. With tears rippling the water, I stared helplessly into the bowl. What went wrong? What do I do?
Hours later my husband found me there, huddled in the bathroom. Lost. He surveyed the scene, gently probing just enough to determine what to do. I hardly said a word. But when he flushed the toilet, I wailed!
“Placenta,” the ER doctor surmised. "Your body likely absorbed the fetus.”
I like to think it did. Imagining my developing child being taken into my womb rather than the sewer stabilized me.
“It’s very common to miscarry in the first trimester. You're young and healthy. You'll have successful pregnancies in the future,” he tried to assure me.
Through quivering lips I uttered, “Why?”
He offered no explanation.
There were announcements to undo, a duty my husband volunteered to handle—though I had a few to undo on my own. It was dreadful. Encouraged to try again after six months, we used condoms in the meantime and agreed to welcome future pregnancies in silence.
I would carry our next child with humility. And a plan for what to do if we lost it.