Wednesday Market

TW: miscarriage

“I don’t know that I will be a good mother,” I say to Matt as I sit on the porch, my legs splayed across his lap.

He hums to himself and strokes a hand up my leg. It is hairy, but he doesn’t seem to mind. His hand comes to rest on my belly, heavy with possibility, swollen and speckled with stretch marks. He doesn’t seem to mind this either, and his fingertips, calloused and spider-webbed with scars from guitar strings, explore over my thin shirt.

“Why do you say that?” he asks.

“I’m nothing like the mothers you see in catalogs,” I sigh, stretching my arms over my head, elongating my bump and lifting my breasts even if only for a moment.

He leans his head back against the chair he sits in, and his Adam’s apple vibrates as he swallows. I want to touch his neck, the warmth where the sun kisses the side of it, the golden brown skin and faint brown hairs.

He doesn’t say anything else, his eyelids shut against barely moving eyeballs, so I continue. “What if I don’t know how to take care of them? What if I don’t know how to make a nutritious meal or teach them about stranger danger?”

“You’ll be fine,” he says, but his Adam’s apple bobs again, and I know he’s trying not to let this conversation affect him. It’s the first time that I mention myself as a mother, and I know that that is significant, and I know that he knows it. Of course he knows it. My Matt, nothing slides past him. He has been excited for months. He has a shirt; World’s Best Dad, as if we have any way of knowing that he is going to be a good father, or as if we have any way of knowing what all the other dads are up to in the world for comparisons’ sake. I bought it for him once we entered the second trimester, once we finally felt safe telling our families.

None of our other babies made it that far, made it to the point when we felt like we could tell his family something other than we’re trying. The odd statement, discussion of how we are having sex, something we would normally never tell his family. We’re trying, we say, and perhaps it conjures up a more glamorous image, one of young attractive people with fertility tests and a queen size bed, petite legs crossed in the air like in movies. Does that even work?

We’re trying, we say through gritted teeth at Christmas, discussions of how this was our last Christmas as a childless couple ended abruptly with spotting in my underwear and negative tests weeks after positive tests. We’re trying, we say, trying to keep the growl out of our tones after a Valentine’s Day that has no romance as I lay in our bed in Matt’s sweatpants, fists balled into my stomach, tears from us both, a bathroom no one dares to enter until one of us feels brave enough to clear out the negative tests.

We come home late after the fireworks on the Fourth of July, watching families around us with their kids screaming, parents handing out Popsicles and wiping sticky chins. That could be us, Matt and I both think to ourselves, though neither of us will say it out loud. My shorts are conspicuously baggy on me, my arms empty, and Matt sits a foot away from me.

We need to stop this, Emily, he says when we arrive home, set our wallets on a side table in an empty house.

Need to stop what? I feign ignorance, brush my hair off my neck and hold it with one hand.

Maybe we’re just the couple it’ll never happen for, he says, maybe we need to resign ourselves to being the fun uncle and aunt. There’s a lot of things in life we can experience without children of our own.

My brow knits and he notices, of course he notices.

We can adopt! He says brightly. Lot’s of people adopt and they have really great kids. Think of the McAbees. They have Sarah and she’s so lovely.

They won’t have your eyes, I think, but I don’t dare speak it so I keep my head down, letting my hair fall until I can glimpse the strands in my peripheral vision.

He reaches out to brush my hair out of my eyes and I move away, not enough that it would be visible to anyone else, but enough that I know it hurts him.

I love you enough to want you to have my baby, he says, but I love you too much to be willing to see you in this much pain all of the time. He speaks of my pain, but I have heard him at night, tears running down his cheeks, soft sobs wracking his shoulders under our clean white sheets.

The funny thing is, I didn’t even know for sure if I wanted kids before I met Matt. My sweet Matt, four years ago, just another hipster in a hipster city, sitting at an orange metal table sipping an Americano, a pair of glasses perched on his nose, a pair of sunglasses perched on his head.

I passed a million people just like him and I had never looked twice. Me and my girlfriends might laugh as we stopped in for brunch, none of us any better than him, but that day was different somehow. I had sat down beside him, made a silly complaint about not being able to find an open seat anywhere in the city, and he had allowed me, hadn’t told me to get lost, find somewhere else to sit, and so I stayed. Less than a year had passed when I rolled up to his house in a rented car with all of my belongings, moving into a shared house, willing to sacrifice the comfort of my parents home for a spot in the bed of a man who lived with three other men.

I had thought about having kids, certainly. It was the thing to do, wasn’t it? The obvious next step, the thing that came after graduating college and getting married. I had thought about it, certainly, but I had never known that I wanted it until Matt.

The Fourth of July, I am so angry with him that I think I will never touch him again. I think that he could never possibly understand what it means to be unable to give that gift to the man that I love, and I am angry that he thinks we can be a fun uncle and aunt. But as I lay in bed in my nightgown, staring at the ceiling, at the water drip pattern that is shaped like a turtle, his words finally settle in to the place in my chest where the warmth that I feel after two glasses of red wine lives. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to have children with me, it’s that my well-being matters more to him. I roll over in the dark and press my hand to his chest, settle my face in his shoulder. When we wake up, everything is like it was the day before, except there are no more fertility tests, and when he touches me, there is no urgency. We are not the same people we were two years ago, when we decided that we wanted to have a family, but we are people that know how to get by, to make toast and give coffee breath kisses in the morning and see our friends without resenting them for their fertility. And then the morning before we go to his parents house for Thanksgiving, I feel the need to vomit as I wake up and I feel somewhere deep inside that it is not because I had two Moscow Mules at the restaurant the night before, and I creep out of bed without waking him, the frigid air ruffling my nightgown and hurting my neck, and I dig a plastic stick out of the back of the closet and lock the bathroom door and hold it under my body. I cannot tell him about this, I can’t let him think that I am still consumed by my body’s lack of ability to bear a child, and I hold my breath and try not to look until the clock in the bathroom ticks 6:57 and I see two lines but I refuse to let myself be happy and I pinch the bridge of my nose because I have done this dance before and I will not allow myself to count my chickens before they hatch. But Matt is my partner so I cannot keep myself from telling him and lunchtime hits and I say to him, as casually as I can muster, I’m pregnant again, and I can see himself steeling himself for the inevitable heartbreak that comes every time that I make that announcement to him. I am afraid he will call me a hopeless fool for getting pregnant again, an inevitable harbinger of doom, but he did not wear a condom either and really it is not my fault but he doesn’t say anything.

He takes a deep breath and he tells me that he loves me and will love me no matter what happens and he keeps his tone steady but I know Matt, and I know what he looks like excited and I know what he will look like when we lose this one too.

Only we don’t. We don’t lose this one. Once it doesn’t feel premature and silly we go to a doctor and he measures me and does the tests and wow, what a surprise this time a blood test comes up positive unlike all the negative blood tests after positive urine test from before.

At Christmas we sit at my families house because we spent Thanksgiving with his, and we do not tell anyone like we have not told anyone about the last six times, because we do not have to share the bad news after the good. But his hand floats around my waist and he shares secret looks from me at the dinner table as I tell them that I am on a diet and cannot drink any wine, even though I am still eating potatoes, and it is our secret, this tiny baby.

It is Valentine’s Day and he treats me like I am a jewel en route to the Smithsonian. There are flowers that he bought from the market on my bedside and his hand slides under my tank top and traces the skin under my belly button. His face is wet and he tells me that maybe we can tell my family soon, he tells me that I am the most beautiful woman alive. He takes me out for the evening and I see the way he is around me, his face gleaming with pride, his arm around my body, his free hand possessively over my belly even though I barely look bloated.

I soak it in, soak up this feeling that I never thought I would have, and I drink in this man of mine, the father of my child, I dare to think.

We tell my family a few weeks later and there is appropriate fanfare and my mother cries even though she doesn’t know about all the grand-babies she lost to make this one, and we make plans to tell his family the next weekend, and I buy him his World’s Best Dad shirt, which rapidly becomes his favorite.

We tell his family and they are more stoic than mine, just barely, but I am surrounded by hugs and encouragement and I wonder why it is not possible to encourage a woman who is not pregnant as if she is not whole as well.

Soon after we come home I feel the baby move for the first time and it is the first time that I think of it as a baby, because for once I am not scared to get attached. We sit in bed draped in blankets talking and touching each other, and once again, there are tears.

At every appointment I measure on target with where I am supposed to be, and not a single time does Matt miss an appointment.

I grow bigger, swelling under my sundresses, and he grows more joyous, rubbing my feet and presenting me to the world like I am a trophy. We plan a possible baby shower and add twelve cribs to our online shopping list and decide to make a decision later, and we clear out a corner of our room for when we make that decision. We do not pick out a name because that feels too real.

I go to the market on Wednesday after work. I work half days on Wednesdays, but Matt works full days, so every Wednesday I go to the market and I buy us fresh produce and sometimes I buy him flowers or I find a new vendor and bring him a postcard or a small tourist-y item and he always acts as if I have brought him the finest of all the gifts. It is one of my most cherished routines, a chance to be alone but also a chance to spoil the man that has given me everything. I weave my way through crowds, the heat pressing my bangs to my forehead. Women give me soft smiles as I walk past them, my stomach arriving in every space a full second and a half before the rest of my body. I walk until my feet hurt, which takes less and less time as months go by. I buy a bag of cherries and several cucumbers and potatoes that I will use for dinner tonight and lobster because it is a special occasion. I board the 62 bus and settle in for the long ride, my bag clenched between my knees, a book propped on top of my belly, and I am at peace.

And then I am bleeding. In this bus seat that I have occupied hundreds of times before, my green linen sundress becomes a horrifying shade of red as blood seeps from between my legs. I feel the moisture before I feel anything else, and for a moment, in my mind, it is sweat, trickling down, making me more grateful for the shower beside our bedroom. But sweat doesn’t feel like this, and I look down to see the ever-increasing stain, and then the pain sets in. I am screaming, then, and I am sobbing, my arms wrapped around my belly as if it will make any difference, and the bus is in motion and then it is not and then there is someone crouched beside me reaching for my hand.

I am in the hospital and my body is quaking, my stomach clenching and becoming painfully hard and I tell them to call my husband even though no one knows who my husband is. He is only my husband as of yesterday because we decided to do it in secret like a couple of lovesick fools, in the courthouse after work, my stomach between us making us look like a shotgun wedding and making us giggle as he kissed the bride, and we hadn’t even told our families yet. He said he wanted our baby to have the same last name as both of its parents even though we hadn’t even picked a first name yet.

The bleeding does not stop and I fade in and out of consciousness and they poke and prod at me and chance me into a gown and cold hands ensconced in latex make their way between my thighs and the bleeding does not stop.

I know now that it is over and that we had been counting chickens before they hatched, and Matt arrives just in time to watch the birth of his child, something we had been wishing for so long that I couldn’t remember not wishing for it, except we had counted on there being crying afterwards. There was no crying, only silence, and then I heard doctors announce that my kidneys were failing. I couldn’t see anything, only hear them, and I heard Matt by my ear more than I heard anything else. I love you, please don’t go, and then I was fading out.