Waiting
What a long process healing is! It’s been sixteen and a half years, much of them happy, since these things happened, and still when I read my journal and write my story, the tears and the grief and the confusion return. It’s not that I haven’t healed - I have healed a lot. And I am still healing.
Many women would feel differently, but I knew immediately what I wanted: to wait for this baby to come naturally, to give her the dignity of a birth.To be perfectly frank, I liked giving birth to my children. Don’t get me wrong - it hurt like nothing has ever hurt before or since, I moaned and wailed and complained, I was scared before and slightly traumatized after each baby - but it was a joyful experience too. Those labors are precious memories for me, gifts to my children. Like I would eventually realize a name could be, a birth was a gift I could give to this child.
I was lucky to have a doctor with a hand-off philosophy who agreed to let me try. She warned me of danger signs to watch for and gave me a phone number I could call to book a D&E* if the waiting became too much for me. And so the wait began.
We shared the bad news with the children that afternoon. Their reactions were varied, in line with their ages and their personalities. I called my parents; I shared the news with my friends from church. So many people gave me support in so many ways. They brought meals; they gave me hugs; they visited and walked with me and listened and listened and listened.
Waiting for labor to begin is a hard enough thing: waiting for a labor that was going to culminate in a loss was excruciating. I wrote in my journal, “Each day feels like a mountain to be climbed.” My nightmares gave some clue to my subconscious state:
Eleven days into the wait, with occasional cramps and spotting, but nothing concrete happening, I just lost it. I spent most of the day curled up on my bed crying. I so badly didn’t want to go in for the D&E, but it was beginning to feel like I had no choice. This was a devastating spiritual crisis for me, too: I had been sure that God would help me to lose this baby in my own way. Now it felt like he had abandoned me.
The next afternoon, a Sunday, with my cramps feeling more like contractions and getting more regular, we farmed out all our kids to relatives so that we could have some privacy. And sure enough, as soon as the kids were gone, everything stopped. I went to bed, and when I woke up, it was Monday morning and I was still waiting. Bitterly, I called the number my doctor had given me and booked a D&E for the next day.
* D&E means Dilation and Evacuation - basically the second-trimester version of a D&C.
