Lost Along the Way(31)
“I promise I’ll tell you everything,” Meg said. “All the things that no one ever talks about. I swear I will tell you, as long as you guys reassure me that I look skinny even when I’ve gained thirty pounds. I’ll tell you the truth as long as you lie to me.”
“Seems fair,” Jane said as she looked at Cara.
“Totally,” Cara said.
Meg miscarried at the end of her first trimester. Women’s intuition is a powerful thing, and one morning she woke up and knew something was wrong. She waited two days before she made an appointment because she couldn’t bring herself to face it. Steve thought she was being crazy. They’d had their twelve-week ultrasound the week before and everything had been fine; there was no reason for her to worry that something had changed. But she knew. When her suspicions were confirmed there was stunned silence, then tears, then shock, then sadness, then anger, then acceptance. All the phases of the grieving process dutifully followed as she mourned the loss of the family she thought she had. Meg had dreamed of names and what the baby would look like, clothes she would buy from catalogs, and the rocking chair her mother had used when she was a baby, tucked away in the corner of the basement, patiently waiting until it could be refurbished so she could rock her own baby to sleep. What bothered Meg the most was that Cara and Jane tried to assuage her pain by promising that there would be other babies, that the best way to move on was to get pregnant again, to put the whole thing behind her. Look forward, they said to her one night while they sat on her couch together, as if a new baby would be a substitute for the one she’d lost, like it was as replaceable as a bracelet, or an earring, or a set of car keys. She knew they didn’t understand, and she didn’t blame them, at least not then. That was when she believed that things happened for a reason.
When she got pregnant again she was cautious, but once again the girls were there to help quiet her nerves.
June 2001
“I knew it would happen again, see?” Cara said. “Your angel was coming. You just had to wait a little while for it.”
“Don’t you guys think it’s ironic that you spend your whole adult life worrying that one day you’ll find out that you’re pregnant, and then when you want to be, you spend all of your time worrying that you won’t be? I mean, don’t you think that’s strange? Is God just f*cking with us or what?” Jane asked, smearing blue cheese on an apple wedge. Meg wasn’t even comfortable being in the presence of blue cheese, as it’s high on the list of foods a pregnant woman is supposed to avoid. She had already lost one pregnancy. She wasn’t about to risk losing another due to some bizarre incident involving cross-contamination with unpasteurized dairy products.
“I think I read somewhere that a woman can increase her chances of becoming pregnant if she eats broccoli rabe and shoves a pillow under her ass when she has sex. Is that what you guys did?” Jane joked.
“What the hell are you reading?” Cara asked. “It sounds like something your crazy Sicilian grandmother spewed out years ago that you somehow remembered. That’s ridiculous.”
“Entirely possible. Then again, my crazy Sicilian grandmother had seven kids, so maybe she was onto something,” Jane said.
“Just don’t stress out,” Cara ordered, trying to add some reasonable advice to the conversation. “You and Steve will get through this. Lord knows you aren’t the first couple to endure some bumps in the fertility road.”
“I know. You’re right,” Meg said. She believed it.
After the fourth miscarriage, Meg decided that she would embrace the very best the world had to offer in an East-meets-West attempt to conceive a healthy baby that she could carry to term. She endured countless blood tests, genetic tests, shots, and prenatal vitamins; acupuncture; diets that embraced gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, antibiotic-free, hormone-free, pesticide-free, preservative-free, and taste-free food; green tea, meditation, yoga, and decaf coffees. She had ultrasounds to check her ovaries, and her uterus, and her tubes, and anything else they could possibly check. She visited fertility specialists and tried Clomid, but even after all that, none of the doctors could explain why she couldn’t seem to carry a baby to term. Meg put herself through two rounds of IVF, hoping that if the doctors selected only the strongest embryos, her chances would increase. Both rounds failed before her heart was ready to accept what her body had been trying to tell her for the better part of ten years: she wasn’t meant to be a mother. The doctors weren’t optimistic that the results would be different if they tried the procedure again, or that surrogacy would offer a solution. She and Steve had dipped their toes into the adoption waters but quickly discovered the hard way that there were no guarantees there, either. She was too tired to fight anymore, and it was then that she decided that if she wasn’t going to be a mother, then she wasn’t meant to be a wife.
Having children was all that she wanted, and her body had failed her. It had failed both of them. Why bother with the lipstick and the blowouts and the heels and the lacy lingerie if she wasn’t a woman when it really mattered? She couldn’t apologize to Steve for tricking him when she hadn’t known. She couldn’t apologize for all the years she’d wasted. All Meg could do was let her husband go and pray that he was able to find someone who could give him the family he deserved. She’d allow someone else to resurrect his dreams of coaching Little League and drinking out of WORLD’S BEST DAD coffee mugs. She’d allow him to find someone else to love—the second-best gift she could give him. It was horrifying for her to accept, but there was no way to ignore it anymore.