Mars and Venus

I don't understand men.

I don't mean I don't love them, or deeply appreciate them and their differences from women - I do.

But sort of in the Venus/Mars tradition, I often feel their masculine viewpoints are so alien from my feminine ones that they're actually as unrecognizable to me as hearing someone speak another language. I just don't get it.

My husband told me last night how he looks at William's death, and I was left literally speechless.

"I've never been a believer in 'shit happens,'" he said. "To me, that's the coward's way out. To say that William's death was an accident... well, there are no accidents. I have to take responsibility for the worst possible scenario, and that would be the fact that I could have done something to prevent what happened. Not to take responsibility for that would make me a coward."

woppitywoppitywoppity < --- sound of my head shaking in disbelief

"So, you think you could have done something to prevent his death?"

"I know I could have," he said. "We all could have. You could have, the midwife could have, the doctor we saw for the ultrasounds could have. For example, you could have spent the entire nine months on a fetal monitor, and it could have prevented his death."

Okayyyy...

Any men out there who can explain this perspective to me? Because I go immediately to believing that a) I did something to kill my son (which is, as he says, the worst case scenario and a possibility) and b) my husband blames me for killing my son (which is an even worse case than the first, and a possibility...)

He obviously blames himself on some level - and believes he could have done something to prevent it. His "taking responsibility for that" probably does make him more courageous than I am. The thought that I could have prevented William's death leaves me shaking and paralyzed with regret.

His logic went on to say, all death is preventable, except for death by old age. Every death, he argued, could be prevented by a different choice. A differently lifestyle, a different diet, a different way to work. But of course, we can't always live our lives that way. We'd end up like the boy in the bubble. We can only make the best choices we can with the information we have, based on our own values and beliefs, right? And, he said, if those choices cause something bad to happen, then we have to take personal responsibility for that.

Not to do so would be cowardly. Like his mother, he said, telling herself "stories" about God taking angel-babies back to heaven before they're born. Or those people who have said, "It was meant to be" or "It was for the best." Denial. Coward's way out, he says.

Well, then, I guess I'm a coward. Granted, I'm not telling myself stories. I'm looking very closely at what happened, and wondering what I did, what I could have done. But how can I take responsibility for something I don't know could have effected the outcome? Hindsight is 20/20, and everything I could have done is just conjecture, isn't it? Just Monday morning quarterbacking, to use a masculine metaphor.

I do get that he's taking things to their absurd, logical conclusion - this was all, actually, in defense of having another home birth, if we decide to have another baby. In some weird way, this argument was meant to justify our choices, to say that we made the best ones we could, with the information we had, and we would have to do that again, if we chose to have another baby. And then take responsibility for those choices.

I sort of get it. But it comes through garbled, and feels like it needs translation. He asked this morning if what he'd said made sense, and I was honest when I told him no. It doesn't make sense to me. Nothing about the death of my son "makes sense." I've felt like people were talking Albanian around me since he died, and I just kind of look at them, hearing the sounds, the inflection, but not understanding the words.

He seems to be making some sense of it for himself, and I don't begrudge him that, and I'm not saying his perspective isn't valid. But wrapping my head around something so... huge... so all-at-once, it feels removed to me, and I think this is one of the ways the masculine and feminine differ in the way they grieve.

My grief is immediate - I had the personal experience of having William inside of me, and I knew him, on a level no one else did. My husband didn't have that. Aside from his knowledge that I was pregnant and carrying his son, and his own connection to him through me - feeling him kick from the outside, my talking about the baby's movements - M.'s experience was more removed. Fathers bond more with babies after they're born, and William never took a breath. My husband's dreams were born dead... mine died inside of me.

The difference is stark. I want my baby back - my loss is experienced on a "now" level - my breasts want to nurse the baby who was just kicking my ribs, my arms want to hold the weight of my tiny, perfect son. My husband, on the other hand, has lost the future - teaching our son how to read, how to fish, how to hit a baseball.

I think, from what I'm reading about other mother's (and father's) experiences, that women experience our child's death in the "now" forever. We might imagine what they would be like at one year, two, ten... but it isn't until those anniversaries come up that we experience the loss of our child at that age. Fathers, I think, have that loss all at once.

Don't ask me which is worse. They're both too awful to contemplate.

All I know is that I'm not really understanding him, and it makes me wonder if he's understanding me. Maybe we're both talking, but not hearing each other. At the very least, it feels like a lot is getting lost in the translation.