Never Meant To Be
Marley Cash Never Meant To Be 6/1/16
I was at school and had gotten my clothes dirty, so I needed to change. I changed into a cute outfit. I was wearing a skirt, which I don’t prefer, but I felt confident about myself, nonetheless.
I was sitting on the stairs with a group of people, not really involved in the conversation, when a massive stomach cramp came over me. With my left arm across my stomach and my right arm between my legs, I winced and felt a huge clot drop into my right hand.
No one had noticed, so I quickly and discretely excused myself to the bathroom. The bathroom was crowded, with eight or ten stalls. All were full except one in the middle without a door. Standing in front of it, hoping another would open up soon, the clot in my hand twitched.
It was so unexpected, it startled me. I looked down into to my hand, and the clot twitched again. Then another cramp hit me hard. I sat down on the toilet in the open stall without even pausing to pull down my underwear. They obviously were no barrier for what was coming out.
As I gathered some toilet paper to clean my right hand, the clot opened its eyes. Big, beautiful, blue eyes. Then it dawned on me. It wasn’t a blood clot. It was a miscarriage. I had a little perfect, incomplete life in my hand. As I cleaned it up, my heart broke. It was no bigger than a pear, cupped in the small of my hand.
All I wanted was to get to Bobby. I left the stall and everything became a blur, as if time and space and everything in it stuck to itself and everything else every step of the way. I cupped my precious right hand to me as I pushed past the throng of people in the bathroom and the hallway.
I was stopped by a classmate named Crystal who had the kindest of smiles and we apparently interacted over a slip of paper, though I couldn’t tell you the importance of the paper or context of the conversation. She dropped the paper and being right-handed, I almost reached for it with my right hand, but grabbed it with my left hand instead and returned it to her with a nervous half-smile.
The baby still moved. More frantically now, it seemed, and it felt different in my hand. As I walked away, I peered into my hand and the fetus had swelled ever so slightly. Somehow I knew this meant that it struggled for air.
A deep-chocolate-skinned lady in a tailored white business suit and heels fell in front of me. As an administrator rushed over to her, she extended her hand to him in introduction, even from the ground she had tact. I rushed past. I rushed past the classmates on the stairs, past the different cars in the parking lot, to the Mercury. I just wanted to get to Bobby.
As I sat down in the car, I opened my hand and cherished the fetus that I knew couldn’t make it. It blinked it’s big, beautiful eyes at me and I caressed its head. I knew it was in pain, the pain of suffocation.
With its last moment past, I cupped it to my chest and I awoke to dark reality, myself gasping for air. Disoriented, trying to grasp and process the images in my mind, I went to the restroom. I sorted the images, but those eyes haunted my waking mind and I could still feel the weight of my baby in the palm of my hand.
“Just a dream.” I reminded myself, but I still decided that I wanted to sit up awhile, as if my shock was so profound, that I might slip straight back into that dream.
I went to the living room, but before I turned on the light, I noticed that Zoe, my seven-year-old, was stretched across the carpeted floor. She’s the strangest little thing, too good for her own bed in her very own room; the largest of the bedrooms for the smallest of the kids, I might add.
I had no private place to go. I went back to my room, but resisted the bed, instead smoking a cigarette sitting on the floor. Once I stubbed the cigarette out into the ashtray, I just wanted to be held. I climbed into bed next to Bobby, who is to be my husband in just ten days, and snuggled close to his left arm, my chin barely resting on his shoulder.
No sooner had I settled against the touch of his skin had the tears began to fall. I strained and trembled against myself in an attempt to contain the sounds, but Bobby still woke.
“Are you okay?” He asked groggily, as he shifted his arm to allow me to lay my head in the nook of his shoulder, my nook.
“Just a bad dream.” I said as cooly as I could.
“Just a bad dream.” He repeated, “it’s okay.” He said as he sleepily petted my shoulder with his arm that was resting my head. As if a sleep mantra, he repeated it again and again, until he became inaudible.
Then my heart hurt deep within my soul and the tears came again. I turned away from him and cried so quietly, yet so intensely that he stirred again, not quite sure what had risen him. I sucked it all in.
He got up to go to the bathroom as I held my breath and held my tears, but the second I heard the bathroom door close across the hall, the wailing began. It was a soft, quiet wailing, but deafening to my ears.
When he came back, he snuggled into a spoon with me, holding me tight.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” He asked again.
I just nodded.
“You want to tell me about it? Your bad dream?” He added.
I nodded again. So he waited as I cleared my throat and cleared my tears and this story began again. The second I said miscarriage, the audible wails began. He held me tightly, pulling me around to face him, caressing my shoulders and back, kissing my forehead.
“They were your eyes!” I wailed as he pulled me tighter, “I felt our baby die in my hands!”
“It was just a dream.” He whispered, stroking my hair with his coarse hand.
“I know.” I cried.
“I know, I know, I know.” I repeated, barely audible to myself over the sound of his sandpaper fingertips grazing my ear.
I cried hard for my never baby, my baby never meant to be. While I’m not one who believes dreams are premonitions, this one symbolically is. You see, after I had little Zoe seven years ago in my first marriage, I got my tubes tied. Three is plenty enough children to be responsible for. I never realized then that someday I might remarry and have a hurt in my heart to not be able to provide my husband a child carrying his genes, with his quirks and personality. The doctors mentioned the possibility, but “three is plenty” was my mantra until I met this man.
Three is still plenty and he loves them as his own. I’m not even sure how we’d make four work. Just the simple finality of the prospect, not being able to carry on his family name, no possibility of ever having that son that I always wanted, stabs straight to my heart, at times. Especially now, ten days before our wedding, my subconscious hurts with this knowledge. The research says that after seven years, 5% of women who had their tubes tied while in their early 20s will have their tubal passageways reform and can become pregnant, but those few pregnancies that do occur will almost undoubtedly end in tubal pregnancy… miscarriage.
My subconscious is my dream and I am stuck with these words now that I am waking: Another never baby, sent to never land, never meant to be, never meant for him, at least, never with me.
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