FEBRUARY 2019
Conceiving a baby is easy. Holding onto it is hard.
“There’s something in the water” was the office joke as seemingly everyone was getting pregnant. I didn’t tell them I was expecting, though I desperately wanted to join their ritual of announcing it by strolling through the office sipping symbolically colored Kool-Aid.
“Congratulations! Why orange?” My coworkers would ask. I’ve been drawn to it since my “first flower.” Now I’m drawn to its influence on my sacral chakra, hoping it’ll dissolve what’s blocking me from sustaining life. “Orange can uplift, offering emotional endurance,” I’d say.
But having lost our “honeymoon child,” my husband and I no longer announce or celebrate conception. Disquietly I carried our third unborn for ten weeks and a day, a day shed with blood and tears. To nourish us I spread our child’s remains throughout our garden, reuniting it with the earth. My husband looked on in bewilderment. Disappointment creased his face as he offered condolences and carried out the chores so I could “rest and heal.”
Didn’t he need to heal too? I wished he would lie by my side, clinging to me like the shadows that stretched, shrank, vanished then reappeared on our walls. I longed to feel his breath on my neck, his nose nestled in my hair that stuck to his face while we wept and stumbled through darkness until reaching light together. Instead, he carried me because I was broken. Never mind the possibility something else could be wrong. Maybe the fault was in his seed, not my womb—something he refused to consider. Three weeks later I was back to work, though I never returned to the office of bulging bellies and poisonous water. I carried out my corporate duties from the sanctity of home while preparing my mind and body for another chance to bear a child.
Sunlight poured in through the east facing window of my home office—an eclectic space filled with curative agents: a Monarch butterfly mural, affirmations, orange flowering plants, and a goldfish my husband bought for luck. The longest-living fish in the aquarium trade, he says.
I named it Hope. It’s still alive . . . so far.