Authors: Carolyn Savage
I am just so scared. I am scared that you think I am nothing and that I am undeserving of your sensitivity and respect. I am afraid that you will hurt me, take this child, and leave me with nothing. I am scared of losing this baby. I already love him. I will always love him. I hope you understand that.
I know I will never send this letter. I know you don’t deserve my anger, my ugliness, or my hatred. So it is better right now for me to say nothing, and pray for strength, patience, and love, because the only way I think I can survive this is to learn to like you. I need to be happy for you and your family. I truly don’t know if I have that in me and a lot of this will depend on you. I guess time will tell.
Carolyn
I finished writing, reviewed what I wrote, and was ashamed. I knew I was being irrational and harsh, but as I reread my letter, over and over again, I knew it captured my anguish. And I felt better just getting it down on paper.
I flipped my laptop closed and prayed to God for help.
Please, God, help me be stronger. Help me find the strength I need to accept this situation. Help me endure this suffering with grace, and help me understand why this happened. Please, God, help me. Please.
Keeping the Secret
CAROLYN
T
HE NIGHT WE GOT HOME
from Florida, I did something dumb. I read Shannon’s letter again. I don’t know why I felt I needed to do it. I was in bed thinking about the letter and the baby, and I started to cry. Was she that insensitive to the suffering we were enduring? If she was, how would she behave at the dreaded delivery? I imagined her jumping up and down when my baby was handed to her. She would celebrate our grief, our tragedy, our sadness, as her joy, her triumph, her miracle. Even though I knew we would have taken our baby from her if the situation had been reversed, I resented her as if she were the one who had done this to us.
I tried to cry quietly so Sean wouldn’t hear. I didn’t want to upset him. He couldn’t help me anyway. Despite my efforts, he woke up to my tears.
“What’s wrong?”
I didn’t want to answer.
“What’s wrong?” he persisted.
His questions made my tears come quicker. I really wanted my bed to open up and swallow me. I finally answered.
“How am I going to do this? I think God screwed up.”
I turned to face him, but his back was to me. I waited for him to turn around, but he didn’t.
“How can God think that I can do this?”
Still no response.
My body shook with sobs, yet he hadn’t rolled over. As I waited, I began to feel that, by keeping his back turned to me, he was scolding me for being upset. This made it worse.
“I want this baby. He feels like mine. I can’t give him away.”
Sean’s silence only upset me further.
I finally went into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. I leaned my back against the wall and slid down to the floor, burying my head in my knees. If I couldn’t speak to Sean about this, where would I turn? I was struggling with the insinuation that this was all part of God’s plan. The few people who knew of my pregnancy had said that when they heard the news. Really? God planned this? Not the gentle, loving, and constant God I worshiped. The idea that all of this had happened because of God made me angrier than I had ever been. It also made me feel helpless and out of control. I prayed to God.
Where the hell are you in this? This is your plan? What did I do to deserve this? I have been a good woman. I have sacrificed for you. I dedicated my career to you. This is how you repay me? You force suffering on me that I cannot bear? I don’t think I can be pregnant and deliver a baby to another woman. How will I withstand watching her celebrate my sorrow? You chose the wrong woman. I am not strong enough.
I begged God for strength and for courage, but both eluded me. I felt like I was such a wreck all the time. My world, once so open and alive with many friends and all of my commitments to the boys and to the community, had shrunk to the square footage of our bedroom. My mood was terrible too. I am the kind of person who tries to think the best of others and always give them the benefit of the doubt, but this event had changed that. I imagined that Sean was disappointed in me for saying such hateful things and that he was
annoyed with me for being sick, having no energy, being so crabby, and having to struggle to stay positive even in the happy moments.
Please make me stronger. Please make me a better person. If you can’t, then just let me die.
This thought immediately conjured guilt in my heart. I would never want to leave my kids. I would never wish that kind of tragedy into their lives.
I was so upset by my mind lurching between such extreme feelings that I felt nauseous. I steadied myself against the bathroom door, hoping that having something firm against my back would keep my stomach from spinning. It didn’t. I bent over the toilet, throwing up, trying like hell to stop the retching because I feared it might hurt the baby. Finally it subsided, and I rested my head on the toilet seat and tried to catch my breath.
Calm down, Carolyn. Calm down.
I shuffled over to the sink to brush my teeth and wash my face. What I saw in the mirror was pitiful. I was pale, my eyes were again bloodshot from crying, and my neck and face were covered in splotches. I knew I needed to get some sleep, but I wondered what the heck Sean was doing in turning his back to me. Wasn’t he worried about me? Didn’t he care?
I finally turned out the light and went into the bedroom. I couldn’t see anything, but I knew Sean had not moved. I turned my back to him, stared at the window hoping for sleep to come. I apologized to God and closed my eyes, feeling alone and ashamed.
SEAN
I woke up Monday morning feeling guilty for having abandoned Carolyn the night before. I knew she was hurting, but I was hurting as well, and so exhausted. Sunday I had woken early to take the kids to mass while Carolyn rested. There I prayed for peace and the strength to keep going. I kept the kids busy all day as I did household chores. When my head hit the pillow Sunday night,
my service-to-others gas tank was empty. I drifted to sleep while Carolyn was crying. No excuse.
I missed the easy way we used to be with each other, our private jokes and that hour I treasured just before we fell asleep at night. We hadn’t been intimate in more than two months because of her medical status, and it seemed that as each day passed things got worse at home and between us. As the distance grew, my natural reaction was to shut down. Tunnel vision helped me avoid escalating the tension between us. We didn’t need to fight. Fighting would only make things worse, and I did not want to add more trouble to our life. In the meantime, I had to slough off the pain of it and just get through.
The boys were starting to get suspicious. Sunday afternoon I was in my chair in the family room jotting down my weekly list of tasks: those for the next day and longer goals for the rest of that week. The house was serene. Carolyn was napping, and so was Mary Kate. Drew entered the family room and stood next to my chair. I looked up into his serious young face.
“Dad, Mom is always in bed lately. What’s wrong with her?”
His question broke my heart.
“Mom hasn’t been feeling well, but it’s not serious, and she’s going to be just fine.”
Drew nodded his head and left the room.
I hope I comforted him. Were we really shielding the children from this trauma by keeping the secret? The tentacles of the problem seemed to grasp at every corner of our lives.
Right before walking out of our bedroom Monday morning to go to work, I stroked Carolyn’s hair while she was waking up. “I am sorry for ignoring you last night. It was wrong, and I should have been there to help you. I have no excuse. I’ll pick you up for the ultrasound today if you would rather not drive.”
She smiled sleepily. “I’ll call the doctor’s office to schedule a time and call you. I love you very much. Have a good day at work,” she said.
“I love you and will see you later.”
The week after that ultrasound we were officially in week ten of the pregnancy, and we celebrated Carolyn’s fortieth birthday with friends. While Carolyn didn’t feel much like celebrating, all of her girlfriends had huge blowouts on their big day. If she didn’t have one they might think something was wrong at home. I was happy she agreed to allow me to treat her and her girlfriends to dinner in a private room of a nice restaurant, while the guys watched NCAA basketball games at our house, awaiting the women’s return for cake and cocktails.
On the Friday of the party, I left work early and stopped at a party supply store to buy doom-and-gloom black decorations, appropriate for someone hitting this milestone birthday. I swung by our local bakery to pick up a cake I had ordered. Our friendly baker Bonnie chided me about the cake, which read
OVER THE HILL
in black frosting.
With the cake in one hand and a handful of decorations in the other, I walked through the doors of our home in an upbeat mood. When I entered the kitchen, I could not believe the mess: dishes stacked up in the sink, food all over the center island. I turned to the living room and saw MK’s toys all over the floor and a heap of laundry on the sofa. It was only ninety minutes before the guests arrived. Carolyn came downstairs looking a little out of it. Maybe she’d just had a nap?
I decided to be a smart ass.
“Carolyn, I was so busy at work today that I missed the news about the tornado ripping though Sylvania. Are the kids and the rest of the family okay? Were you able to get everyone in the basement before it blew through the family room and the kitchen?”
Carolyn did not look amused in the least bit. “I didn’t have time today to pick anything up,” she snapped.
“Did you forget that we are having thirty people over in a couple hours?”
“I’ve been pretty sick today and haven’t had the energy to pick up. If you’re so worried about the way things look around here, you should have gotten home earlier.”
“Forget it. I will do it all now. You should have called me to give me a heads-up that our home was declared a natural disaster area. I would have come home earlier.”
I dove into cleaning and getting the house in good order and then moved on to decorating. Moments before the first guests were scheduled to arrive, I was on a kitchen chair trying to hook a big
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
onto the ceiling.
“Sean, you’re not doing that right.”
“Leave me alone. I’m doing my best.”
“You are going to destroy the paint if you use duct tape to stick that sign up there.”
“I’ve worked hard trying to give you a good birthday, and I don’t remember asking for your opinion on how I should decorate.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
We began the evening not speaking to each other.
Luckily, the dinner with her girlfriends changed her mood. While the women were at the restaurant, I wrapped the porch and the front door in black ribbon thick enough to make it difficult for them to get through. I enjoyed watching Carolyn’s friends, many of whom had had several drinks, try to break through the barrier. They were laughing and seemed to enjoy the challenge.
Carolyn sat in the living room, overcome by all the presents: gift certificates for a bookstore, beautiful jewelry, and clothes. As she opened her gifts, her girlfriends discussed how turning forty made them question whether they had accomplished everything they thought they should by that age.
“I only have a few years left to be discovered,” said Carolyn’s friend Melanie, who wasn’t forty yet. “The first time a Hollywood movie producer sees me, he will know instantly that my
wit and smashing good looks are wasted as a labor and delivery nurse.”
“Melanie, I think you still have a chance at fame,” Carolyn said.
“Please!” said Melanie. “At this age, I’m more likely to get famous for something that would put me in the pages of some low-rent tabloid.”
They all laughed, but I caught Carolyn’s eye. Melanie was making us cringe. They might be seeing us in one of those later this year.
After our last guest had left, we breathed a sigh of relief. Carolyn embraced me and said, “We still have our secret.”
Maybe, Maybe Not
March 24, 2009
At this time my clients are able to provide your clients with the following information.
Attached, please find an ultrasound picture taken on Monday, March 23, 2009. The baby was measuring 9 weeks 1 day at the time of the ultrasound, which is indicative of healthy fetal development. The heartbeat at the time of the ultrasound was 180 beats per minute, which is very healthy as well. It should also be noted that the ultrasound picture shows the disappearance of the subchorionic hematoma that was visible in prior ultrasound pictures. This is also promising progress.
Their next prenatal appointment is scheduled for Tuesday, March 31, 2009. It is scheduled for late in the afternoon, so communication regarding the results of that appointment will not occur until Wednesday, April 1, 2009.
CAROLYN
O
NCE THE PREGNANCY REACHED
ten weeks, I felt more confident that this baby would live, and I started to worry all the time about our embryos. I had an unsettling feeling that they were already lost. If they weren’t gone, I imagined they had been damaged in the mistake.
I didn’t know whether any of what I imagined was true, but the vision I had seemed so plausible. I pictured the embryologist discovering his error and rushing to the cryopreservation tanks to find out if what he feared was true. I imagined him unscrewing the tank, like one would unscrew the top of a thermos. As liquid nitrogen wafted up, he would have searched frantically for my embryos.