When Skies are Grey

I recently had my 7th and hopefully final miscarriage. According to Einstein, the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. But when there was such a one as Sam to be had, it’s hard not to try again and again and 5 more times. The fertility doctor had told me, given my reproductive limitations; Sam was “a miracle.”

I awoke to the signs and symptoms of miscarriage on our last day at the Adirondacks; after a long drive home, I went to the ER that night. They wheeled me up to the sonogram room to see what was what but then parked me outside. As Dave and I waited, a girl who could not have been older than 16, fully pregnant and accompanied by her hooligan baby daddy was wheeled from the room and parked in the hallway next to me. She and I waited with our wheelchairs back to back like the opposite sides of a fertility coin. She was young and fruitful while my fertility was ebbing away. She whined about getting fat and enforced bed rest; I didn't need the sonogram to tell me my pregnancy was over.

Often, I think of Sam’s life as if it were it were a biography in progress. Usually parents are given a few lines of exposition before the action of a life unfolds. I worry that my few lines will be this characterization: Lesa Marie nee Quale Ferguson was an insecure, creative, disorganized woman who allowed the disappointment of her many miscarriages to make her depressed and become an embittered shadow in Sam’s young life. He reached out to his father.

I try to banish these thoughts. After I wasted many years despairing that I would never marry or own a home or have babies, I promised myself that I wouldn't let present disappointments make me a pessimist. If I had known that my future held Dave and Sam, I would have enjoyed myself more or at least not holed away in bachelor apartments with endless movies from Rain City Video. Maybe there is a future for me in which all these damn miscarriages make sense. I'm supposed to trust that…not likely. I'm just disappointed.

I hate how cruel life can be. This time, life seemed to be foreshadowing a happy outcome. Throughout my short pregnancy, I kept bumping into this friend of the family who at age forty-four had a healthy baby. The weekend we were in the Adirondacks, Sam was fascinated with our friends’ new baby. He picked her flowers, asked to hold her, gently patted her head and gave her many kisses. He would be a loving brother.

Generally when Sam and I are together, he wants to be somewhere else—with the three girls next door or at Gramma Betty’s eating cookies or in his imaginary world where he and Conor are allowed to watch the new Transformers movie together.

Maybe he likes to be elsewhere because in our little family, I'm the bad cop—the one who enforces tooth brushing and napping and not letting him whack the neighbor girls. When Sam is overtired and hits a wall, he tells me that I'm ugly and stupid. I roll with it and continue to enforce, As Sgt. Joe Friday would say, “Just doing my job, Sir”.

As this miscarriage progressed, suddenly Sam wouldn't leave my side. He threw a tantrum when Uncle Scott came to pick him up. And, he snuck away from Jen my lovely, lovely neighbor who had so generously invited him over to play. Every night, he climbed in bed with me and Dave. He snuggled flush against me. As Groucho Marx once said, “If you were any closer, I'd be in back of you.”

Up to now, Sam has rarely been needy. But then, I've never been a shadow. I’m not sure I know how to put this miscarriage thing behind me. I am sure I can’t be a shadow in Sam’s life. I guess I could start by rewriting these few lines of exposition: Lesa Marie nee Quale Ferguson was an insecure, creative, disorganized mother, who because of her many miscarriages understood fully that she had been blessed.

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