I made sure my phone’s ringer was on, turned the volume up and checked my service bars. Then I opened and shut my email. Three times.
Finally, the phone rang. I jumped.
Dr. C, my OB-GYN, was calling to tell me whether my pregnancy hormones were rising, which would mean the embryo growing inside me might stand a chance at surviving. Otherwise, it could be a sign that I was miscarrying.
Miscarriage happened to be something right in my wheelhouse. In the past two years, I had had four positive pregnancy tests, and still I didn’t have any children.
At my last doctor’s appointment, my pregnancy hormones had measured nearly 200. By the time of the call, the number should have doubled.
“Please let it be 400,” I repeated in my head, every muscle in my face tightening as Dr. C tortured me with pleasantries.
Then finally, he said the number: “432.”
My jaw muscles relaxed just a little bit.
Over the next week, the number continued to climb. After that, a smudge of cells appeared on the ultrasound screen, and a few days later, the rhythmic whoosh of a heartbeat filled the exam room. Soon two gummy bear arms waved to us from inside my uterus.
Still, I refused to celebrate.
After all, while I was growing up in 1990s suburban New Jersey, my mum, a transplant from the Motherland (Queens, New York), had a list of things she claimed us Jews don’t do: We don’t own power tools. We don’t drink milk with dinner. We definitely don’t have baby showers.
As a people who has had a number of things go wrong over the generations, this prohibition against baby showers felt prudent. Our misfortunes had taught us an important lesson: never celebrate an event before it’s happened. It’s begging the universe for something horrible to ensue.
This understanding that the evil spirits were waiting to steal your joy went back generations. I knew it, my mum knew it, my Grandma Mutzie and my Grandma Fannie knew it, my Great-Grandma Dora knew it, and thousands of years of ancestors before them knew it too.
My husband, Andrew, also a Jew, had somehow escaped this shtetl superstition. So after a doctor’s appointment, Andrew gave the baby a name: Watermelon Head, for the giant striped noggin that appeared on the screen at our ultrasound. The name felt so playful, so cheery. I flinched every time he said it.
Then as my stomach started to grow rounder, I had to actually start telling people I was pregnant. I was sure that saying the words out loud would cause an on-the-spot miscarriage, but it didn’t, and Watermelon Head continued to grow.
Then one night, I was lounging on the couch with one hand resting on my rapidly expanding midsection when Andrew walked into the living room holding a whiteboard and grinning. On the board he had drawn a giant watermelon in pink and green marker, and in the neatest version of his scrawly handwriting was “Countdown: 147 days.”
Courtesy of Lindsey Lange-Abramowitz
A celebratory countdown for a baby we could lose at any moment? I could hear the collective gasp of my ancestors.
Andrew leaned the white board against the wall, cocking his head to the side as he admired his work ― Andrew, who had held me as I cried on the subway home after we learned our first baby no longer had a heartbeat, who had sat in silence with me on a park bench for hours after my hormones had stopped rising a week into our second pregnancy, who had dialled 911 when I passed out from the bleeding as our third pregnancy tore open my left fallopian tube — he turned to me now with a smile bigger than any I had seen in the last two years.
I forced myself to smile back.
After that, every evening before bed, Andrew erased the old number and wrote the new one. The first few nights, I hoped he would forget. A week later, though, as Andrew was putting the cap back on the marker, I wrapped my arms around his waist, smiling at the whiteboard for just a second before hurrying out of the room. By the time we were two weeks into the countdown, I was the one scrambling to get the markers after brushing our teeth.
And then the evil spirits found us.
Andrew and I were in the exam room, laughing and texting ultrasound photos to our families, when Dr. C gently knocked on the door. Slipping into the room, he pulled a small rolling stool from the corner and sat down. The smile slid off my face as Andrew and I locked eyes. It was never a good sign when the doctor sat down.
Dr. C cleared his throat, and softly said, “Lindsey, you have started to dilate.”
I was barely more than halfway to my due date.
My ancestors all screamed, “Told you so!”
I’d celebrated — and now I was being punished.
In medical terms, I had an incompetent cervix. The phrase would have been funny had it not meant that my body might release my baby into the world long before he was ready, when he weighed barely more than a pound and had lungs too new, too tiny to even keep him alive.
Three days later, my doctor sewed my cervix shut in an effort to keep Watermelon Head in long enough to survive. For weeks after, I refused to go into the room with that stupid, celebratory countdown, and so the whiteboard sat untouched, frozen at 121 days. Knowing that my body might not hold my baby in long enough for him to live, it was like that countdown was mocking me.
But the days passed, and still I was pregnant. Then more days went by. Still pregnant.
Then one night, I was squinting at my computer screen as I partook in my grim new evening ritual, entering my pregnancy statistics into a website about extreme prematurity in babies. The website had a calculator that, in its morbid wizardry, would then inform me of my tiny foetus’ outlook if born that day: the probability of hearing impairment, heart defects, intellectual disability, or death.
Just then Andrew wandered in from the kitchen, and, seeing my nightly statistics of doom, sighed. Unable to look at his face, I stared at his hands in silence as he sat down next to me on the couch. My misery was crushing both of us.
Finally, I stood up and gestured for Andrew to follow me to the room with the whiteboard. I took a deep breath and handed him the marker. He looked at me, eyes narrowing. I nodded, and allowing himself the smallest of smiles, Andrew erased the number, frozen at 121 days. Then taking out his phone to calculate, he kneeled down and wrote, “99.”
Courtesy of Lindsey Lange-Abramowitz
I was terrified. And my ancestors were terrified for me. But I assured them that our family’s superstitions weren’t there to protect the baby. They were there to protect me — a generations-old attempt to inoculate against heartache. It was years too late for that.
Two years earlier, I’d lost twins — the innocent, whole-hearted joy of a first pregnancy crushed by the devastating shock of miscarriage. A few months later, the next loss. And then, in the grand finale of my reproductive farce, a quadruplet (yes, quadruplet) ectopic pregnancy ended with an ambulance ride, emergency surgery, and a stranger’s blood pumped into my veins to save my life.
When I couldn’t fall asleep at night, I would count on my fingers in the dark: seven babies I never sang to or rocked, whose soft skin I never got to stroke.
The past two years loomed over every second of Watermelon Head’s pregnancy. But now, more than feeling protected by my family’s traditions, I needed to feel hopeful. This was the furthest into a pregnancy that I had ever made it — the closest I had gotten to holding a baby of my own.
So our countdown continued from 99 days, to 74, to 51.
Then with just 28 days left on the whiteboard, Andrew and I walked into our favourite neighbourhood restaurant for lunch, and my eyes darted around the room in confusion from what I saw — in front of me stood my family with a pile of pastel-wrapped presents and safety pin-shaped balloons. I laughed when I realised what was happening: a baby shower, organised by my mum, who beamed at me from the centre of the room.
Then with 19 days left on the whiteboard, our countdown stopped.
Watermelon Head — we call him Arthur now — was born screaming and healthy. The day we brought him home from the hospital, I carried him into the room with the whiteboard. The room was his nursery now. The last number on the board — 19 — had been erased. In its place, Andrew had written “0.” Our baby was home now.
Courtesy of Lindsey Lange-Abramowitz
A year-and-half after Arthur was born, I was standing at the bathroom sink squinting at a little strip of cardboard. I laughed when a second pink line appeared.
Later that morning in the kitchen, Arthur was banging on pots at my feet as I spread some peanut butter on toast for his breakfast. Our old whiteboard was against the kitchen wall, the green and pink watermelon smudged by curious fingers and the countdown replaced by scribbled reminders.
I leaned down close and whispered in Arthur’s ear, “Mama has a baby in her belly.” Holding a metal lid midair, he squealed and kissed my tummy. He might not have quite understood yet what it meant to have a baby sister, but Arthur wasn’t scared of evil spirits. That’s because we have a new family tradition now: we celebrate.
Courtesy of Lindsey Lange-Abramowitz
Lindsey Lange-Abramowitz is a teacher of English, a teller of stories and a chaser of two small humans who call her Mama. When not teaching, telling or chasing, she’s likely eating cheese. Lindsey is a three-time Moth StorySLAM winner and a resident of the best borough in all of New York City (Queens). To read more of her work, visit lindseylangeabramowitz.com.
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#Pregnancy #Miscarriages #Terrifying #Countdown
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