Loss and Hope

            Earlier in the week I sat down to write a blog post to honor the tenth anniversary of 9/11. I started out by writing my memories of that day. Not surprisingly, I was a puddle of tears before I even got to the part about seeing the plane hit the second tower on live television. There are so many tiny memories about that day burned into my brain—walking past a woman in Boston wearing the exact same suit that morning, the flawless blue sky, trying to make a cell phone call, driving to Walgreen’s that night just to get away from the television that I couldn’t bring myself to shut off. But my memories of that day are pretty unremarkable compared with so many others. If I can’t get my commonplace recollections out of my head, what is stuck in the heads of the people who experienced 9/11 in a much more direct way?

            Instead I want to talk about a realization I came to a little later on that week. At the time, my husband’s parents owned a small piece of land on a pond in Maine. We drove up there the following weekend to camp. I can’t remember if we had planned on going before the attacks or if we just needed some fresh air and quiet after that week.

            I had turned thirty a couple of weeks before. Thirty was going to be just fine for me. I was going to spend the first six months pregnant and give birth to my first child in January. That didn’t happen. I miscarried at almost eleven weeks in July. When my thirtieth birthday came in August it was a little tougher because of that.

            Dan and I lay on the ground looking up at the star-filled September sky, we talked a little about the miscarriage. For the first time, our loss seemed smaller. “Do you still want to have children?” he asked me.

            I can understand people not wanting to bring a child into the world when terrible things happen. You can choose to despair or you can choose hope. My answer that night was an immediate and certain yes. There was so much sadness and fear and anger in the world that week, but there were glimmers of light as well. There were heroes born that day—first responders and ordinary folks who stood up to hijackers. There were also millions of people who did whatever they could to try to make some small difference. They wrote checks for relief efforts, donated blood, and held hands with strangers to pray.

            The people who stand up and do the right thing in their own way out number the bad guys. They don’t get their pictures on the front page of the papers. They won’t make the six o’clock news. But they make a difference. If we want to make the world a better place, if we want to out number the bad guys, a great place to start is by raising children who do the right thing.

            The following summer, I watched the Boston Pops Fourth of July concert from my hospital room with my new son. The maternity ward was packed that weekend. Apparently Dan and I weren’t the only one who chose hope over despair. Owen is nine years old now. He’s strong and healthy and knows right from wrong. He knows you don’t take something that doesn’t belong to you. He knows it isn’t okay to hurt someone. He knows if you do hurt someone you tell them you’re sorry. He knows to stand up for himself and his little brother. When we talk about the events of September 11^th 2001, I tell him about the heroes as well as the villains.

That Sucks

            I try to keep my blog posts funny—or at least light-hearted. This isn’t one of those posts. I got a call this afternoon from a good friend of mine. She was expecting her third grandchild this winter, but the baby died in utero after five months. Like a huge number of women, I’ve experience the loss of a miscarriage. Each time I hear a story of a stillborn child or a miscarriage it brings me back to the weekend in 2001 when I went to bed on a Friday night pregnant and by the time the sun had risen on Saturday I wasn’t anymore.

            I never met my friend’s daughter-in-law, but I know what the tip of the iceberg she’s standing on feels like. I know what it’s like when one day you’re wondering if you’re ready to be a mother and then you realize you won’t know the answer any time soon. I was eleven weeks along, not long enough to feel the baby move but long enough to really feel pregnant. I cannot even fathom the kind of pain a family goes through when they lose a child so late in the game.

I’m not one of those people to keeps many secrets about myself—the “wait 12 weeks to tell anyone rule” wasn’t for me. I remember a co-worker being shocked that I told people I was pregnant so early on (I was probably only 3 or 4 weeks along—I told family members when I was only a week or so late). Joyful news is to be shared—and did I ever share! Even the waitress at our usual Sunday breakfast haunt knew—actually she guessed. Why else would I ask for de-caf? But I have no regrets about telling people. Yes, there were one or two awkward moments months later when someone remarked that I “was hardly even showing”  (I eat when I’m sad—I wasn’t carrying a baby but I was carrying some extra pounds). But for the most part, it was better that people knew that I had been pregnant and that I wasn’t anymore. People gave me a little slack and a little space, which I desperately needed. If no one knew what was going on in my life, they probably would have just though I was moody and incompetent.

One of the most comforting words came from an unlikely source. One of the sales reps for the company I worked for stopped by my desk when I got back from leave. He wasn’t one of my favorite people—he tended to be a little rough around the edges. When I told him why I had been out, he looked me square in the face and said, “That really sucks.” And you know what? He was right. So many people had tried to comfort me with well intentioned platitudes like, “Everything happens for a reason.” But when you’re dealing with a loss, the last thing you need to hear is that there is a reason for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that everything happens for a reason. I just don’t think it’s a particularly comforting thought that your grief is part of some master plan. It was a conclusion I had to come to on my own—in my own time. Now that nine years have passed, I truly believe that this experience has made me a more grateful mother and a more compassionate person. But anyone who told me that back then risked me bursting into tears or punching them in the nose.

Exactly one year after I had my miscarriage, I had Owen. He was nine and a half pounds and had a full head of jet-black hair—he didn’t even look like a newborn. He was strong and healthy and nursed like a champ and could hold held his head up before we even left the hospital. Two years later James joined the family adding a new layer of mischief and joy to our house. I have two beautiful, healthy little boys. They make me laugh and teach me something every day. I am thankful for their existence every day. But every once in a while I think of the baby I never named and never held. I learned a lot from that child too. Everything does happen for a reason—and sometimes it sucks.