Time Limits

Some of the lessons I'm learning along this journey...

There is no end to suffering. Mine, yours, everyone's. There are no rules. Bad things don't happen in threes. Bad things do happen to good people. And they do keep happening, even if you think they shouldn't. Just because something bad happens to you, doesn't mean something else bad isn't going to happen in the near future. There are no limits on the amount of bad things that can happen to a person.

Two days before my baby was born still, another mother on one of my "due date clubs" announced that her baby was dead at birth. I told my midwife this story, actually, the day of my prenatal appointment, and how sad and horrified I was by it. How unimaginable. She nodded, sympathized, said, "It does happen sometimes, but it doesn't happen often." In the 500+ births she's attended, she'd only ever experienced six stillborn babies. It seemed like a small statistic as she put the Doppler to my belly and we listened for his heartbeat.

And then I became a statistic.

Two babies gone in the space of two days. It couldn't be true. Not possible, even, statistically. Could it? Later, my midwife would say, "When you told me that story, I thought the baby would be fine. It couldn't happen twice..."

Oh, yes it could. Because 12,000 babies are stillborn worldwide every day. Of the roughly 300,000 born that day, 12,000 of them will be born dead.

I never looked at the darker side of that particular stat before. In fact, one of my affirmations during my births was always, "I can do this. I am birthing with 300,000 other women today, and we can do it."

I did birth with them... but I didn't take my baby home afterward like the majority did.

In the U.S., the stillbirth statistic drops to about seventy babies a day. Which means that seventy other mothers lost their child on the day I lost mine. Seventy.

I wish I could be with those seventy women. I wish we had a wailing wall to rock and cry and scream our grief to. I wish we could hug each other, soak each other's clothes with tears and milk for our dead babies in our mourning. I don't want to be a statistic. But here I am, living with the fact that bad things happen, no one is protected or charmed. There is no circle I can draw around myself or my family to keep them from harm. There were seventy other women who birthed with me on the day I pushed out my son, seventy mothers who wanted all the things I wanted - to cradle their child as they took their first breath and came fully into our world - seventy other mothers who screamed or cried or sat stunned in numb and shocked silence as their dream was shattered.

And there was nothing any of us could do about it.

Kali will have her way. There is no fighting a storm. I can rail and rage, but it's a futile effort. I'm punching clouds. The goddess of death and destruction... is also the goddess of time and change. And the longer I live, the more I understand how woven together they are. Everything dies. Everything disappears, decays, degenerates, disintegrates. I can't keep it from happening, and I can't choose. It's not up to me.

Last night, M. drove my oldest son, B., home. B. lives about forty minutes away with his biological dad, and although I usually take him, I was too sore and full of milk to do it. M. left with the promise that he would stop at the store for cabbage (relief for my aching breasts) and call me and ask me what I wanted him to bring home for dinner, since neither of us was in any condition or mood to cook.

I lost myself again in reading stillbirth stories online - a recent, obsessive torture, like sticking your tongue into the place a pulled tooth used to be - and when I glanced at the clock, it had already been an hour and a half. Where was my husband? Why hadn't he called?

I picked up my cell phone and pressed redial. He didn't answer - it went to message. I left one. Even if he didn't have a signal, his phone should tell him I called. I waited fifteen minutes. Tried again. Still no answer. I called my son's phone. No answer. I texted him - "call me." He never ignores a text. No one called me back.

I started calling my husband on redial - over and over. And over. Always the same - message. I listened to his voice, and thought, "What if that's the last time I hear it?" And I knew it was possible. Thoughts of "the universe couldn't be that cruel" were just rationalizations. I knew it wasn't so - the universe could be as cruel as it wanted to. I could lose my baby, and five days later, lose my husband and son in a car accident. Because bad things happen. They happen over and over. Time marches on, and I can't stop it or control it or make everything okay.

Panicked now, I dialed and sobbed, sobbed and dialed, the rising fear that I would lose all of it, everything and everyone I cared about, closing my throat. My baby was dead. Who was next? My husband? My son? Me? What did Kali have in store for us today? Tomorrow? A year from now? Ten? Twenty?

It rang, and rang, and I knew, an empty, hollow silence was all the answer I would ever get. Kali doesn't tell her secrets, and only time would tell me anything. I hated time. I wanted to stop it, turn it back, make it fold in on itself, like a blanket, and put it in my closet for safekeeping. My heart doesn't know any time. My heart holds it all at once - every sweet, precious thing - and it knows no limits.

"Hello?" He finally answered. In the middle of the store picking up cabbage, he didn't get any reception. I could barely hear him through the static, but when we hung up, I collapsed on the bed and cried in relief. Not today, then. Not today.

But I couldn't stop. I cried for all that would be consumed in the course of time. Every mother, every child... I cried for all of us, for those seventy mothers who birthed a dead baby on the day my son was born, for the seventy who were giving birth to their dead baby this very day, already four days into my mourning, for every person who had ever lost a child, a mother, a father, brother, sister...

I screamed in the face of the stark, consuming aspect of our reality and its voracious appetites, and heard only the empty echo of my own choked tears. I cried for my sweet, lost baby boy, who was probably already ashes, his tiny rosebud mouth, soft fat cheeks, and long, delicate fingers just a memory in his mother's mind, captured now for anyone else only on a fragile piece of paper for however many generations it might last.

One of the things I keep hearing, in a long list my head keeps making of things never to say to a grieving mother, is "Time heals all wounds."

No it doesn't. Time is unbelievably cruel. Time is Kali, all dark skin and wild eyes, knife drawn and ready to take away another minute, another hour, another day, another year. Time erases.

But my heart, as long as it's beating, knows no time.