Would be but

Dot would be 4 but I still remember driving to my midwives' office. That awful combination of dread, and stupid hope, and incredulous intuition. Was I stupid to have doubts, or stupid to hope? Stats were on my side that the baby was fine. 11+6. Healthy ultrasound at 8. "Perfect heartbeat," my midwife said only a week before.

But I knew what the back cramps meant. I had the same ones 5 months earlier. I remember making that last turn into the parking lot and thought, "this is the last time I can pretend my baby is alive."

Dot would be 4 but I remember the nurse making small talk as she took my vitals, commenting on how she felt like she just saw me. I told her that I just wanted to hear the baby's heartbeat before the weekend-- that I had a bad feeling. She joked that I should buy a doppler to use at home so I wouldn't need to come back every week. 

God, she must have felt awful when I passed her with red eyes on my way out. She's taken my blood pressure and weighed me, and handed me cups to pee in for two full term pregnancies since then. I always wonder if she remembers that day.. and her words.. and my face.

Dot would be 4 but I remember when my midwife's chipper, "hop on up here and let's listen to your baby" turned into the deafening sound of the doppler. It was so loud. But maybe it wasn't? Maybe it just *felt* like a fog horn blaring that my swollen belly was nothing more than a tomb.

I remember the viability ultrasound. Why do they have to call it such an awful name? Dot was so still. The ultrasound tech didn't need to say anything. She hastily took the measurements she needed, sensitive to the fact that I was staring at a baby that I would never get to hold. Like it was too painful for both of us. But I didn't want it to end. I wanted my midwife to sew my cervix shut so I could keep my dead baby forever. 

Dot would be 4, but I still have this recurring dream from time to time, that I died before I miscarried, which, as macabre as that sounds, the dream is a comfort-- to keep her tucked away with me. I wish the tech asked if I wanted to take the last grainy pictures of my baby, but instead she asked if I wanted to take the box of Kleenex's across the hall to my midwife's room.

Even still, I ended up soaking my midwife's shoulder in tears and snot. She told me how sorry she was and I remember saying, "it's ok." And she said, "it's ok not to be ok."

Dot would be 4, but the cramps gave way to contractions that evening. I remember sprinting to the bathroom unable to keep the baby inside any longer. I pushed. There was so much tissue. So much blood. It was the middle of the night and I could hardly see. I turned on the light, realizing what I had just done. In a moment of insanity I almost stuck my hand in the toilet to try and pull out my baby. I flushed the toilet instead and closed the bathroom door.

Dot would be 4 and it's still raw. I hold on to the details because it's what I have to hold, like the blood-stained skirt that hung in my closet for years after my first miscarriage. The screen shot of my NFP chart with it's perfect triphasic thermal shift, the ultrasound picture where her heart was beating, the picture I snapped of Mary Allison the next day at the library when, as fate would have it, the first book she pulled off the shelf was called, "What's inside your tummy, Mommy?"

Nothing, I remember thinking. A twice-empty tomb. 

Dot is not 4 today and I even though I have more kids than I can possibly wrangle at the moment, I still feel Dot's absence. But just like the macabre dream, I'm grateful to feel her absence-- a reminder that she lived, and she lived within me.

Art by Samantha J. Hahn