CW: pregnancy loss
Do not be fooled by stupid, optimistic proverbs about the weather.
It never rains; but it pours.
And if you insist on going out … buy a damned umbrella.
*
It started as a quintessential New Zealand love story. I met my husband at eighteen, kissed him at the University of Canterbury’s O-Week Toga Party, and married him at twenty-four. We both came from broken, complicated families. During those first years of midnight conversations, we determined that when we were ready to start a family of our own, we would have to do it Better. Our combined goal became to ‘become great parents’ – a sentiment my husband wrote out on a whiteboard in black vivid five years before we even considered starting to conceive.
I spent most of my twenties in therapy, learning what the fuck ‘Better’ meant. It was clear that it wasn’t enough to simply not do the things that had so hurt us – we needed alternatives: techniques, strategies and phrases to use to build children up rather than tear them down. At twenty-eight, I finally felt emotionally ready. Physically, however, I was far from it. In single-minded pursual of our goal, my husband and I poured every last cent we had into gastric bypass surgery. I lost almost twenty kilos in preparation for surgery, and shed over half of my body weight in a little under a year. Through surgery and self-discipline, I regained two things that, throughout my twenties, had been elusive: regular periods and a belief in my own self-worth.
We waited the recommended twenty-four months post-surgery to try to conceive. As the time neared, I read. The New Zealand Pregnancy Book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Dance with me in the Heart and You Simply Can’t Spoil a Newborn. Most of my reading covered the early child-rearing period. After all, the women in my family tended to stumble into motherhood. I knew plenty of ‘mistake’ babies, but not a single woman who’d had trouble conceiving – at least not closely. Those women were far off; held at arm’s length, examined and pitied.
And then they were me.
*
Hello, Tiger-chan!
This morning, your dada & I found out for sure that you are on your way! You’ve
been driving your mama a bit crazy the past few days – she thought you were
coming, but didn’t know for sure until this morning.
Your dad and I have been waiting a long time for you.
Excerpt from a pregnancy journal. 19th July, 2021
I knew I was pregnant. The problem was, no one else seemed entirely convinced. I’d started spotting earlier than my expected period, and although the test came back a weak positive, the internet assured me that this was implantation bleeding – a common type of bleeding that happened in about fifteen to twenty-five per cent of pregnancies. My husband squinted at the faint blue line, and even the nurse at my doctor’s office was hesitant to declare me pregnant. I completed four HCG blood tests in eight days, ending on the day I entered into my fifth week of pregnancy. The numbers rose slowly: 36, 100, 160, 340. Low-ish. Not always doubling. Throughout that long week, I felt the world was against us, my little bean and me. We went out for hot chocolate, cuddled on the couch with our cat and watched the New Zealand rowing team dominate the Tokyo Olympic Games. I booked my first ultrasound as soon as I was able.
There were five of us in the room: the sonographer, the receptionist (for his safety), my husband (for mine), the baby and me.
There were five of us in the room … until there weren’t.
‘There’s nothing there.’ The sonographer’s gaze slid from the screen to meet my husband’s.
I bristled. There wasn’t nothing there. My uterus was there – visible on the screen in a grainy black and white. So was a corpus luteum in my right ovary, a cystic structure of some kind attached to the left, and a few millimetres of uterine lining – although I would only learn those things later, when I read through a copy of his report.
But in the absence of an embryo, my body had become nothing. I had become invisible.
My husband’s gaze shifted to mine. Silence spoke.
‘What does that mean, there’s nothing there?’
‘Well. Either you’re too early, or it’s ectopic.’
I didn’t even register ectopic. After all, I had read The New Zealand Pregnancy Book in its hefty 432-page entirety. Two and a half paragraphs are devoted to ectopic pregnancies. Two and a half paragraphs, and a list of six risk factors – none of which I had.
‘How early is too early?’
The sonographer shrugged. ‘Under five weeks.’
My mind rushed through the calculations. We should have been six weeks, two days. I visualised the app on my phone – the one that documented every symptom, every instance of unprotected sex, and every period I’d had for the past two years.
‘There’s no way we could be under five weeks,’ I stated, ‘… logistically speaking.’
The sonographer sighed and probed none too gently toward the corpus luteum hanging out in my right ovary.
‘Does that hurt?’ he asked.
It’s a weird question, does that hurt. Did it hurt to feel unseen? Did it hurt to see the future I’d been envisioning slipping from my fingers, all the while feeling more and more powerless? Sure.
But physical pain?
I shook my head.
‘Well, there’s nothing else I can say. Do a blood test and come back in two weeks.’
I didn’t come back in two weeks. Two weeks for a sonographer is over in the blink of an eye. Two weeks for an expectant mother who knows something is wrong is a long and excruciating eternity. Instead, I switched doctors’ offices, met with my new GP a week later, and had a second ultrasound the same day.
‘I’m afraid it is ectopic.’ The sonographer at my second ultrasound appointment confirmed my worst fears. As she measured – crown to rump – the little bean in my fallopian tube, her mouth turned down at the corners.
‘Oh, look at that. It even has a little heartbeat.’
*
We were supposed to be going on holiday today. I was looking forward to being
somewhere else for a while.
Instead, we’re here. Stuck at home.
There is nowhere to go, and nothing to do.
Nothing to do but think, and bleed, and cancel the subscription e-mails I’d signed up
to that happily proclaimed that I would be eight weeks pregnant today.
Facebook post. 18th August, 2021
Five days after my emergency surgery, Auckland was plunged into lockdown. My husband never got to see our child, and I wished desperately for a photo – something to cling to that would make it real as I lay in bed and watched him play Outer Wilds. Instead, I had cuts – three small incisions that reminded me not just of our loss, but of what had been taken from me.
Hospital staff like to keep things optimistic. ‘Only a twenty per cent drop in fertility,’ they had said, as a result of losing a fallopian tube. To me, every step felt backwards, every inch a mile farther from the path we both so desperately wanted to travel.
That’s why, when I fell pregnant a month later, it was a miracle. It was an outcome so inconceivable, I didn’t quite know how to hope. In that aspect, Sera truly was her daddy’s girl. He led the charge, violently optimistic through those first weeks of uncertainty – even more so when he was gifted the sight of the first flicker of her heartbeat on the morning of his thirty-fourth birthday. And while that little flicker ignited an echo of hope in me, I was still hesitant – unsure of the spotting that continued to plague me. With her daddy’s encouragement, we took Sera for her NIPT tests at ten weeks, on the 31st of December, 2021.
Her results came back on the 5th of January. She passed. Ironic, I guess, to pass your first tests when your heart has already stopped beating; winning a battle when you’ve already lost the war.
In my twelfth week of pregnancy, the bleeding worsened – clots instead of spots, that required pads instead of liners. I held out through the weekend, and googled things like ‘when to worry about first trimester bleeding’ and ‘placenta previa successful pregnancy outcomes’.
On Monday, 17th of January 2022, a sonographer again confirmed what my body already knew. Not only had Sera’s heart stopped beating, it had done so at eight weeks – only a week after we’d seen it. We went home. We cried. And that night, I miscarried her onto the floor of an emergency department bathroom.
*
In the aftermath of Sera’s loss, a friend sent me a link to an essay published in The New York Times titled ‘The Japanese Art of Grieving a Miscarriage’. I avoided reading it for five days. When I finally did, I was struck with a sense of being seen.
In early 2023, my husband and I embarked on our first-ever overseas trip. I shepherded him and a friend of ours to Okunoin Cemetery – the largest cemetery in all of Japan.
There, nestled in thick blankets of snow, I found hundreds of Jizo babies. Some were old and worn; others wore bright red hats and scarves. I scampered around in the snow, offering coins and helping tiny Jizos to stack rocks. For the first time since losing Sera, I found lightness.
We returned to the cemetery again that night, guided toward Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum by the soft light of hundreds of lanterns and a very friendly Buddhist monk. Before we left, I offered every last coin in my pockets to a statue of Jizo. It wasn’t just an offering for Fergus, and for Sera … but for our future, too.
Two days later, in Kyoto, we found a Jizo shop. We were walking back to Gion from Kiyomizu-dera Temple, where my husband and I had visited the Koyasu Pagoda – a three-level structure built in 1633 that is said to bless its visitors with easy and safe childbirth.
The bells suspended above the door of the Jizo shop jingled merrily as we entered. An elderly lady fussed at the counter, welcoming us in and handing us chocolates as we browsed her collection of clay and porcelain Jizo statues.
‘All handmade by my son-in-law,’ she proudly proclaimed, as she eagerly pushed more chocolate into our hands.
We bought four Jizo statues in all – two for my husband, one for me and one for a friend of mine. At the counter, the lady looked over each Jizo, considering each one with stern diligence. After much thought, she paired my husband’s two with tiny, handmade mats, nodding to us both in acknowledgement of a choice well made.
I clenched my jaw to hold back my tears. From behind the wooden door that led out to the back of the shop, big, clomping footsteps signified the presence of a small child. The Jizo lady grinned, offering a half-hearted apology as she wrapped our little Jizos carefully in tissue paper.
We left the shop, and my tears began to fall onto the Gion pavement.
I love my Jizo. She has little whiskers, and a red scarf and hat. She sits on my desk alongside two Daruma and a The Legend of Zelda Korok notepad I use to leave tiny notes for my husband in unexpected places. There’s a lightness now, that I feel when I look into her inky black-dot eyes. A hope that wasn’t there before.
But I’m angry, too – dejected, exhausted and fucking furious – that I travelled halfway around the world to find a moments’ validation. That where I’m from, miscarriages are punch lines or plot twists; women like me, held at arm’s length, examined and pitied.
For me, there is no alternate path.
And although I’m statistically predisposed to stumbling – practically
guaranteed, now, to slip and fall along the way –
for as long as I’m able, I’ll search the skies for another rainbow.
And offer up every last coin I have to Jizo.