This is a piece that
John, from Smoke Rings and Matterings, graciously helped me to expand. I really like the results.
When You Cannot Feel The PainIt was almost ridiculous, how jaded she felt. The stares of others continued to jar her, to shove and poke at her. She tried not to let it bother her, she understood how inadequate words were, how no one would be able to say anything that made sense.
Perhaps what she wished was for someone to care, oh she knew that people cared, but in everyday situations people sometimes forget that extraordinary happenings are going on. They talked of life, about work, and vacations, television programs. Why couldn’t they look at her?
Every time she came into this office, she could feel the embarrassment of the nurses, the sudden break in conversation, the pity. She could sense their guilt at not knowing what to say. Yet she kept coming back - with each new pregnancy, a fresh chance, a niggling hope.
She refused to let her emotions rise. She could not, would not allow herself to hope.
She sat at the nurses' station, alone as usual. Avoided, as usual, though that was how she preferred it. They had let her use the phone to call the hospital: "The hcg levels are rising, but they haven't doubled."
She doodled aimlessly during this conversation, to avoid thinking. She had desperately searched for a distraction when she had heard the tone of voice the technician had used.
The nearest thing was a pad of paper that they used to write reminders on, some pharmaceutical company had left it, she thought of how ridiculous the medical community seemed to her, how helpless they were to help her.
She knew what the technician meant – she had heard it before though he couldn’t have known. It was their way of giving out false hope, of avoiding the truth. She had gotten used to it, they had handed her platitudes ever since she had run up against this nightmare. What a cowardly ploy.
There was nothing more for her here, she gathered her things as she felt the pressure rising behind her eyes. She couldn’t cry here, she didn’t know if she could cry anywhere.
The world had grown so foreign all of a sudden, nothing made sense any more. So she put her kids in the car and drove herself home again. Again, she felt so empty about it all, it felt like déjà vu driving out of the same parking lot, down the same road. Driving with the same questions, again, how she had come to despise that word.
Her kids couldn’t possibly know why she drove with white knuckled precision, why her voice held a note of unshed tears when they asked how long it was going to be until the baby came. “It takes a long time sweeties, be patient.” The words had almost stuck in her throat, she couldn’t say more than that, it was all too much.
She wished again that her kids had not been there at the first fateful appointment, the one where she had come up against a reality that she hadn’t known existed.
They had seen the first little one on the screen, they couldn’t have known that the heart was not beating. They had no idea what mommy was going through, their little brother or sister was just taking a long time getting here.
The blood had drained from her face, when the words coming from the doctors mouth were words of consolation, consolation for what? He hadn’t even explained what was going on and she had been too daft or naive to grasp what was happening before he started telling her that “you’re young, you can have another one.”
“Why!! she had thought, why is he saying this?” and then she knew, then she had nodded her head as if she understood, and said things to make the situation less awkward, to ease the others discomfort. He never came right out to give her an explanation, he only told her that she could have a D&C, whatever that was.
Then he had given her a number, and she had gone through an experience so foreign and alien to the naïve young girl that she had been. Since then nothing had gone right, the pregnancies had been coming and going and she had grown numb.
The cycle started the next day, again - first a little pink, then more. Gradually, the hope was drained out of her. The hope - who was it that said she should not hope? Oh yeah, she thought, that was me. Don't hope, she had told herself. Don't hope, too bad she couldn’t control what her heart felt.
It was all too much to take in - too great a loss to process. There had been too many times, it had gotten old to everyone else. They were awkward around her like the doctor and the nurses so she said things to comfort them, to ease the awkwardness and to mask the rawness of her pain.
She lay there, weakened by the cramping and the bleeding. Staring blankly at the wall, vaguely recalling that her children were playing in the other room. She lay on the couch at her mothers. It was more comfortable there, it was familiar and held normal every day sounds that she vaguely recalled.
She didn’t feel capable of dealing with her kids, they still had needs and she was tired, especially of explanations or the lack of them. At least at her moms there was someone who could watch over the kids. She lay curled around a heating pad, wrapped in a blanket. Locked into a space and time all her own, where no others could venture, intruding upon her fleshy raw emotions.
She felt alone, disconnected with the world. She had been abandoned, left to deal with the wreckage of everyone’s failure, of her body’s failure, though she didn’t blame herself. With each piece of evidence that this one would not last, she wished, at least, that she could cry.
She could not, not there, but she thought longingly of a place where she could. A place out in the wildness where no explanations were needed - the one place she could cry - and she could hear it calling to her. Her one private place, where no one would glance pityingly at her.
She wrapped up a piece of her heart and walked out into the familiar woods. As she walked, her heart cried out to the wild, to the trees and little birds and she recalled the ghost of her former self – innocent, happy, youthful, untouched by disillusionment - as she walked, she started to cry.
Deep, deep into the woods, she found a spot. She knelt on the fresh damp earth and buried her hope, her sacred heart. She sobbed until the tears dried on her face, leaving her with the odd, bittersweet relief of having cried at last.
Then she went back home, to face them - to face those who didn't understand. She found that she could face them, because she had found her peace.
