Letting the waves carry my grief

My wife, Beth, and I can’t just roll over amorously in bed and try to make a baby. No lesbian conception process is that simple. Ours is further complicated by my age—almost 40, that magical age traditionally celebrated by identity crisis, at which fertility charts take a dramatic nosedive. Not that we planned it this way. I didn’t come out of the closet until my 30s, I didn’t marry the person I wanted a family with until I was 37, and although eight years my junior, Beth has no interest in carrying. So, here we are.

We scheduled our first intrauterine insemination (IUI) in February of 2020. Or more accurately, we scheduled 12 potential appointments which we either cancelled or confirmed based on the results of that morning’s ovulation test. Unlike IVF, IUI can be done with no hormone treatments and very little monitoring. Our IUIs were simply a thawed vial of donor sperm injected into my uterus by a long, thin, flexible bit of tubing. To Beth’s delight, they even let her push the plunger.

But it was early March. COVID-19 was creeping into every corner of our lives, making it harder and harder to stay rooted in such a forward-looking process.

The first insemination was easy but ultimately unsuccessful. In March, the day after my birthday, we tried again. I lay on the examination table, my feet in the stirrups, in abdominal pain. Beth stood beside me, holding my hand, reminding me to breathe, while my body reacted to painful memories of unwanted-but-obligatory penetrative sex with my ex-husband. I gripped her hand a little tighter and reminded myself to stay in the room—looking at posters on the wall or into my love’s eyes trying to smile back. I didn’t want to dissociate at the moment of conception. But it was early March. COVID-19 was creeping into every corner of our lives, making it harder and harder to stay rooted in such a forward-looking process.

For two weeks we waited. Then I started to bleed. We’d been told to expect some spotting, but this seemed too heavy, too persistent. We told each other it was for the best. We wanted this baby, but probably being pregnant in the middle of a pandemic wasn’t ideal. We grieved. We adjusted. Soon the state would start to shut down, and with it all non-emergency medical procedures. To aid insemination we’d stopped drinking in January, but when friends bought us beer and left it on our doorstep, we decided we might as well enjoy a drink with dinner.

Days turned to weeks. And we were as stressed as everyone else processing new work situations, worries for our elderly parents, and the ever-climbing death toll. I barely noticed my April period was late. We made jokes about me being pregnant. Beth teased me about immaculate conception. I rolled my eyes. And when I started bleeding in May, I said “There you are!” with audible relief. At least I could cross menopause off my growing list of hypochondriac concerns.

But after several days of increasingly heavy bleeding, I was awakened from a dead sleep by intense cramp pain. I walked, half-hunched to the bathroom and, after swallowing a few pills, noticed a spot on the floor. My cup was once again overflowing with blood. I emptied it and left my clothes to soak until the morning. Back in bed, the searing abdominal pain continued. I got up and paced, tethered to the heating pad, breathing raggedly. Grimly, I wondered if this is what it was like to hemorrhage to death.

The next morning I thought Maybe I should take a sick day . . . I feel like I got hit by a truck, as I slid out of bed. “Oh honey…” Beth said and my eyes followed hers to the huge blood spot on the bed. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of the bed,” she offered. Back in the bathroom, I once again removed my soiled clothing, as the blood pooled in a gorey mess on the floor. Once again I removed the cup, but something in it was different this time. Something more solid and a bit purple. I gently pinched to pull the mass out. There in a small sac I could make out the faint outlines of the impossible.

We looked at each other frozen in the simultaneous realization that we had been pregnant after all—and that we no longer were.

Too calmly, I called Beth into the bathroom. She walked into something like a slasher film, my blood everywhere. She stared at me, delicately holding a small veiny mass. “Is this what I think it is?” my voice said. We looked at each other frozen in the simultaneous realization that we had been pregnant after all—and that we no longer were.

An hour later and still in shock, we could hear noise from our usually quiet street. Car horns. Shouting. The occasional whoop of a siren. “What’s going on out there?” Beth went to the window to investigate. She smiled and motioned me to join her, to watch a socially distanced parade of school buses and cars full of school staff, decorated with streamers and signs that read We miss you! The children in the neighborhood stood out on the steps waving back with their whole bodies. Beth ran downstairs to take a picture of the procession; I stood looking out the window, crying.

We called out of work and then I called my mom. Both of us cried into the phone. My need for touch, specifically a hug from my mom, made me physically nauseous. I hung up and said, “I need to go to the ocean.” I had been in the same two-bedroom apartment for two months, but now the walls seemed to be closing in. I needed to get out.

It was warm for May but too chilly for a beach day. We were almost as alone on the three-mile-stretch of beach as we had been in the apartment. I dug my toes into the damp sand and looked across the water as far as I could. But even on a crystal-clear day, I couldn’t name any of the blurry outlines ahead of me. I thought of the poet Mary Oliver, taking her problems to the ocean. We lost so much this morning, I silently told the waves. We’d lost the family we’d been hoping for. And at the same time, we’d lost the chance to be excited about having one before it had been lost. I pulled the salty air into my lungs, holding it as long as I could before I let go. So much, I repeated as the waves busily carried on, pulled by the invisible moon. Will you carry it? I’m so tired. And the waves didn’t say no, so I left what grief I could bare with the stranded jellyfish and desiccated seaweed.

Soon I would throw myself back into work, quarantined in an apartment with a new ghost. Monday morning, I stripped the bed and traced the outline of the blood stain. “You basically labored on your own at home without knowing what was happening. You’re incredibly strong,” my OB had told me. But I didn’t feel strong. I felt like a failure. A failure that needed desperately to find a reason for failing. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe if I hadn’t started drinking with dinner again when the pandemic hit. Maybe it’s because I’m gay. Old wounds threatened to reopen alongside the new.

And the waves didn’t say no, so I left what grief I could bare with the stranded jellyfish and desiccated seaweed.

And soon, I would tell family and friends what had happened. And I would hear their stories in return. We would hear the same response, over and over again: “Me too.” They’d tell us their story as if it were a secret:  “You’re the only ones I’ve ever told about this.” Or they’d pull up their sleeve and point to a tattoo—a flower garden with bees. “That’s why there are four bees and only three kids,” she explained, tears in her eyes. So many of them. So many people we were close to who’d never mentioned miscarriage before we told them about ours.

So many, I think as I broodily watch the birds rebuilding their nest in the gap of my neighbor’s house siding. They’d hatched a few chicks in late spring, but some invisible force left their little bodies lifeless in our backyard not terribly long after. “As soon as you’ve had one regular period and you’re ready, you can start inseminating again,” the OB had said. I watch as the birds fly out and back in, laboriously rebuilding.

A few weeks after my first postpartum period, the clinic reopened for inseminations. The new COVID-19 restrictions mean only one person can be in the room. I know, especially now, I can’t do this alone. We’ll wait until restrictions lift a bit. When the time is right, I still hope to carry our child. In the meantime I will try to learn how to let others—Beth, my family, my friends, the waves—carry me.

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