Reproduction

When the clinician inserted the tent of seaweed into my cervix, a practice as outdated as Japan’s abortion laws, the tiny stab caused an involuntary jerk and gasp. She firmly pressed one of my knees with her free hand, saying, “Deep breath.”

As I exited the room, I nodded, a slight bow to answer hers, and acknowledged with wide eyes every woman in the lobby, the pinch and burn needling with each step.

With several hours before the rest of the procedure, I lay on a lichen-covered bench in a nearby garden, looking up into the trees, my mind emptied and my heart void.

When the lines appeared, there’d been a moment of joy before the dread set in. With the kind of whim that had led my partner and me through our twenties, the same whim that brought us to Japan to teach for the year, I almost thought, “Let’s do it!”

I let us have that moment, tried not to rush to any conclusions, then recoiled to the couch, breaking into a sob. He held my hand so tenderly—the same tenderness with which he’d always treated my hesitations; the same tenderness I knew could define him as a father.

Despite my perfectly rational arguments, my decision wasn’t from a place of reason at all but born of a terror I didn’t yet understand, an urgent repulsion to my body making a body. It would take me the next ten years to unravel it.

We spooned in bed, my hands tingling, the muscles of my chest pulled tighter by each repeated, shallow breath.

The next day I searched the internet for a doctor who spoke English. Not knowing how to make an appointment, I just took the train to her office and walked in.

A nurse led me into an examination room. Embarrassed by the tall, lean fact of my western body, she bowed profusely as she handed me a robe, far too small to ensure my privacy, then exited. When the doctor arrived, she echoed the same phrase I’d heard everywhere—sumimasen—what seemed an apology for existing. Eyes downcast as she found the precise English words, she explained this would be my confirmation appointment, and that, if I would like to, I could see her throughout my pregnancy. There was an excitement in her voice, one I wondered if she had for all her patients or if, perhaps, mine would’ve been her first American baby. She motioned me into the stirrups, squeezed gel onto a transvaginal wand, and inserted it.

Shifting to get the angle at which she could catch the tiny embryo, she finally said, “Here it is.” Before I could look away, she turned the screen toward me, a white bubble on a shifting black background, what so many wanted to see but exactly what I didn’t.

“What do you think?” she asked, smiling.

I told her I already knew I wanted an abortion.

Her smile vanished, and she looked into my bright green eyes open in precisely the way local plastic surgeons tried to mimic for their patients, her stare lingering far longer than was culturally acceptable. She pointed at the embryo. “See, see,” she said, “it is your baby,” as if I didn’t understand.

“We’ve already decided,” I repeated, because she didn’t.

Medical abortions are not legal in Japan, so I’d have to wait until a surgical option would be available—a minimum, she told me, of three more weeks. Before she left the room, she stood next to the examination table, her fingertips gently brushing against my arm.

“Go home,” she said, looking down. “Talk to your husband. It is a healthy baby.”

In the fall of my eighth-grade year I won “Best of Show” at the county fair, not for my husbandry skills but for a drawing I’d done of a man’s face contorted in pain or rage, so large it loomed over the other entries, innocent drawings of pets and flowers. People shuffled by, staring as if it were a cow giving birth to a calf, equal parts fascination and confusion. I’d felt the same way working it out, square by square, classmates peering over my shoulder and asking, “Where’d you learn to draw like that?” I shrugged my shoulders, smiling.

The drawings were exhibited on pegboard displays along the edge of a large pole barn, the rural equivalent of the industrial artist collectives in the nearby liberal bubble. At the center were long rows of tables through which the spectators dutifully filed, paying their respects to the county’s best canned jams, heirloom vegetables, and crocheted scarves. Placed strategically throughout were sponsor tables, your local HVAC experts, plumbers, and window specialists, and a few political and religious organizations.

Opposite my drawing was a pro-life club from a local church, signs with cherubic babies asleep in white blankets, which asked, “Are you afraid?” On the corner of the table was a box of Lions Club mints with a slot in which to drop two quarters. Intending to do so undetected, I approached, but the girl manning the table said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said, removing my roll of peppermints.

She shifted in her seat, a rounded belly under a Nirvana T-shirt that barely contained her, and peered up with disconcerted eyes as if she knew I was judging her.

My dad appeared beside me and started asking about the club with an honest interest in the cause, one I’d learned to adopt in name before I knew what it meant. She sat erect, answering in stilted sentences, her eyes turned up as she remembered each thing she was supposed to say. At the end, he pulled out his wallet and handed her two of his last three twenties. “One for your club, and one for you,” he said. “I admire what you’re doing.”

I smiled and said, “I do too,” repeating the ignorance of a man who’d never been there himself.

Turning back to my drawing, I was eager to show him my ribbon, but he was already down the line, leaning close to examine an heirloom tomato. “Now that’s a specimen,” he said, as I passed by.

On the quiet ride home I pried the last peppermint out of its foil packaging and wondered if she was afraid. Had she been in school, and if so, what had all her classmates said to her? I felt hackles rise along my spine, imagining the kids’ cruelty.

Later that year I was in the kitchen when I heard my dad and brother yelling their way upstairs from the basement.

“My house, my rules.”

“I’m a man now, asshole.”

The basement was my oldest brother’s teenage refuge, a concrete lounge in which he entertained girls and a bedroom with an egress window. When my dad said, “I saw her climb out,” it was enough for me to put two and two together.

By the time they got to the kitchen, they were throwing punches. I’d seen my brothers fight many times but never with my dad. I slipped out the side door and grabbed a basketball, pretending I’d been shooting hoops. I tried to block it out, but our house, a prefabricated model I’d watched come wide-load down the street, didn’t have good insulation. When the shouting stopped, replaced by the thud and screech of furniture, I started to cry.

Back then I was just beginning to recognize the contradictions in my body. Desire was something I didn’t yet admit to but that I knew full well existed. I knew that sex could lead to pregnancy, and pregnancy to shame. But I wasn’t ready for the anger I felt listening to their power struggle play out.

I thought of her again, the pregnant girl my dad had given money to, the one he lauded for having done the right thing. Sex was wrong but keeping the baby was right? I couldn’t tell you what it was, but I felt the contradiction in the situation. Even then, I didn’t quite believe that ponying up to one’s responsibilities could encompass the complexity of what she was facing, the absolute terror of having little choice. How could my dad not see that?

After my brother left (a several-days absence to follow), I let my tears dry before I went in. When twilight settled, I had no excuse to stay outside. Dad was standing at the stove, pouring a packet of spice into ground meat. Out of what felt like a deep well I was only just discovering, I suddenly started crying again.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, eyes on the pan.

A few months later my brother died suddenly in his sleep, a jagged end on which this memory was caught for many years, divorced from context, unhinged from time.

I sometimes wonder if my father thinks of that day as I do my abortion, if he longs to unravel it from his past, a tattered edge, then gone.

Waiting due to the Japanese government and their arbitrary timeline, I spent the three weeks following my confirmation appointment in a special kind of purgatory, one in which I plan to never be again. When the word purgatory was mentioned in my childhood church, there was a hushed mystery to it that intrigued me. Who were the people sent there, and what, exactly, were they trying to purge? My questions, though honestly asked, were brushed aside with assurances that it wouldn’t be my fate, as if that’s all I was worried about.

In my first days of purgatory, I had a Pollyannaish impulse to turn my personal tragedy into an opportunity for self-development, something I’d later learn I had in common with the Japanese. Their ubiquitous idiom ganbatte means persevering through adversity, often alone. I wondered if the American tenet of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” had the same cultural root as this attitude acquired in Japan’s rehabilitation after WWII. I hoped, as perhaps the Japanese did, that this theoretical abstraction could do what I needed it to: cancel my personal pain by considering the long history of human suffering.

As the shell of theories fell away, the purging began. First to go was feeling. Numbness seemed my only line of defense against the hormones. A refusal to engage. After my husband closed the heavy metal door and left for work, I’d turn to the window, studying the lines: the thin strips etched into the glass so in an earthquake they’d shatter into fragments, not shards; the sagging clothesline, a collection of pins sunk at the center spinning aimlessly in the wind; the gathering of wires on long, thin poles, powering the corner vending machines, never out of sight. Each was what she’d never see, a cruel thought I caught in midair and released.

I repeated this same routine: Walk to the store and buy lunch. An onigiri, an octopus salad, pickled cucumbers, and a can of what I thought was soda but may just as well have been hard seltzer, a big shiny peach on its side. The clerk apologized as she scanned each item, then placed them, two-handed, into a bag, as if each were an egg she didn’t want to break. This being the only interaction of my day, my bow lingered longer than was socially expected, causing her to blush.

When I got home, I’d unlace my shoes and place them to the left of my slippers, which I’d slip on methodically as I’d seen women do at the onsen. I’d take each item out of its container, arrange them on a plate, then rinse the single-use plastic to add to the corresponding pile in the recycling bin, engineered to slide perfectly together, like tight-fit nesting dolls. I’d eat slowly, saliva breaking down each bite into its subsequent nutrients, the body doing what it needed to keep us both alive.

By the third week my ascetic practice was breaking me down too. Bouts of tears would come—which I tried to explain away with the mysteries of my body, the ones I’d heard could make me feel a million ways—but I couldn’t stop them. On the day before the procedure, as I stood in line at the store to buy lunch, the cheery ding of the next aisle’s register sent me into a tailspin. My tears swelled up so suddenly that I abandoned my little basket on the conveyor belt, the clerk apologizing for whatever was upsetting me. When I got home, I didn’t bother taking off my shoes but went straight to the bath, ran the hottest water, and stripped everything off, throwing it all out the bathroom door. I winced at my face in the mirror, covered in the red patches that had always given me away, even when I cried in silence.

I spent far too much time in the water, draining cold out, running hot in, for what could’ve been hours. I hadn’t been given a pamphlet of dos and don’ts at the clinic. I didn’t know that my blood had already increased in volume, causing an elevated heart rate, nor that if my body temperature rose too high, my blood pressure could drop, causing me to faint. I didn’t have a notification to wake to each morning telling me the day-by-day miracle happening inside. I was just trying to pass the time. Meet an arbitrary limit. Follow the rules.

When I stood up, I fell toward the toilet, and when I awoke, I was squeezed between the bowl and wall, a tight crevice in which I barely fit. My arm was throbbing, and I looked up for what I’d hit, the toilet paper holder protruding several inches from the wall. The tissue in my arm was so deeply damaged that years later, a doctor discovered a lipoma she ordered removed for biopsy. The surgeon asked if at any point I’d experienced blunt trauma to that arm, something that, at first, I blankly denied. But then it came rushing back to me.

I spent the remainder of that afternoon curled on the floor, a dysphoric state in which I no longer recognized myself. Every feeling and thought I’d tried to repress was suddenly upon me. The guilt I felt for what I was going to do and the shame that silences so many who’d done it were indistinguishable. What was I feeling, guilt or shame? The despair of choosing to stop a process in which, perhaps, the most important person to me might be born; the terror of going through with a process in which, perhaps, the most important part of me might be destroyed. Who would it be, her or me? I couldn’t escape this line of thinking, perhaps because that’s all I’d ever been taught to think about abortion: it’s right or it’s wrong, there is no in-between.

As I lay there, the sun beginning to set on my final day in purgatory, my mind went eerily quiet, the quiet I’ve learned to fear the most. I was lying on the floor, sobbing, completely taken, and yet I knew I was lying on the floor sobbing. The terrifying detachment I had learned through years of trauma, that constant sanity, was what almost drove me over the edge.

I returned to the clinic the next day, my husband with me to sign the papers as required by law but not allowed in the operating room. Some part of me would never leave that clinic, the best part of me, I was sure.

After the insertion of the laminaria, there’d be no turning back.

“You are sure?” she asked, and I nodded.

I made the decision I had to make—it wasn’t wrong or right. For me, it was from a place of terror, though any reason behind a decision like this is fine. When her would-be birthday passes on my calendar, there’s a pang of sadness but not of guilt. When I think of her, she’s always a girl, though that hadn’t been determined. A girl is what I feared most having, a girl who might someday suffer this same pain. When I see one at the age she’d be, twelve this year, she’s always a little bit mine, and when I hear of another woman who’s lost a child, she’s always a little bit me.

In the months following, I’d walk to a local shrine, a narrow passage through the pines that led from one gate to the next. The country was reeling from their own national tragedy, the great Tōhoku earthquake that hit a month after my abortion, so the path was never empty, even at dawn. The first time I went, I wondered if my little grief, so inconsequential in the face of twenty thousand dead, would have a place there. I skirted the crowds at the main platform and found a quiet corner. Nestled under moss and stones was a statue of whom I’d later learn was Jizo, guardian of children. Each time I went, there was a new red shawl, crudely crocheted, around his shoulders and a pile of tiny trinkets laid at his feet. Tied to a wire above were slips of bright red paper, each with an urgent message written in black ink, difficult to read. Never having seen a person hang one, I wondered who’d written them and why they’d done it so quickly. Were they prayers for the dead and drowned? I learned they were women like me who’d lost a child, women who wanted to write a message but didn’t want to be seen. When I passed back under the gates, soft needles underfoot to deaden my footfalls, I no longer felt so alone.

In 1973 my mom gave birth to my sister at eighteen. She’d often tell us that the choice to keep her, despite her own parents urging adoption, was a core part of her identity. She’d risked everything—her future dreams, her autonomy, and her relationship with her parents—so how could she not lose an essential part of herself to that choice? How could that not be the pivotal moment of her life?

From a young age, then, I learned that being a mother was a form of martyrdom and that parenthood was the pinnacle experience of human life. My mom, who once dreamed of becoming a doctor, went on to work a line, and my dad, so inspired by her choice to keep the baby that he helped raise a daughter that wasn’t his and drove a truck for the rest of his life. Their hard work kept us alive and fed, as they would proudly claim, but as their marriage fell apart, as they turned on each other and themselves, we children took on a dangerously greater importance. In her darkest moments my mom would tell me that we were the only reason she chose to live.

My older siblings followed the typical course after marriage, and as my niece and nephews grew older, I detected a growing desperation from my parents. My husband and I had been married more than ten years, traveling the world to teach and study. During that time, my mom asked, “I have some tubs of toys up in the attic. Should I keep them?”

“Think you might ever move back?” Dad asked, with an unassuming, “You know, if you decide to settle down?”

As more of our conversations centered on children, it only reinforced the fear that kept me from seriously considering them.

My parents did seem to become resigned to the fact that their dream was not my dream, that each new experience brought me further away. As my mother’s world shrank with depression, it felt like mine was the life she never got to live, and when I talked to Dad, there were longer silences punctuated by declarations that what I was doing was “neat.” I avoided the topic, worried they thought my not wanting children was a reflection of their wounded parenting—exactly what I feared too.

It wasn’t with annoyance that I heard those quiet or unspoken pleas for more grandchildren but with a deepening sadness. As my politics took on greater opposition to theirs, as my work got more abstract and obscure, having children was one of the only shared experiences not tinged with loss that we might still have left in common.

Did I want to be a mother? This seemed like a trick question, as if it were trying to measure a very specific kind of intelligence: one that could detect deceptions. I was never good at standardized tests because I liked finding ways for every answer to be right.

I told my new therapist at my intake appointment that I was there to find out if I was ready to be a mother. It had been five years since we’d moved back stateside; five years still wondering where our lives might take us next. I ran through my worn list of childhood adverse experiences and the raw facts of my abortion, then smirked and said, “Guess that’s why I’m not sure?”

He smirked back, then crossed his arms. “Well, do you want to be a mother?”

My husband hadn’t even asked me that, afraid, perhaps, that it would give me such an easy out. Nope. Thank you for asking. But nope wasn’t quite the answer either.

“I don’t know,” I finally said, crossing my arms too.

We spent the next year unpacking the barriers to this question: the initial anxiety, a reflex from the pain I hadn’t yet processed from the abortion; the underlying fear of engulfment, a byproduct of years of enmeshed relationships with my parents; the unprocessed terror of what they’d done to each other, a coping mechanism that often left me coldly detached; the near certainty that everyone would leave me in the end, an end I was pretty sure I deserved. What work we did in that time together!

But I still didn’t know what I wanted.

I thought compartmentalizing each emotion would make me invulnerable to whatever having a child might do to me. I spent all my time studying what I saw as the enemy, the emotions themselves, instead of acknowledging my pain.

The real truth is that I was afraid if I became a parent, I’d take on what I saw as my parents’ fate. My identity would shift to being more a mother than anything else, which would infiltrate every layer of my being, especially the ones I’d worked so hard to protect. My marriage would fracture and split, first just a growing resentment in our daily interactions until one of us did something the other could exploit. And the best years of my life would suddenly hinge on the pendulum of noncustodial visits—for one weekend every two weeks I’d have my shot at joy. My children would grow up, lives ever more alien to mine, and there’d be an emptiness to our interactions, one that I’d always wonder if I’d caused.

It was hard to admit that my parents had chosen that path, harder still to believe that I wouldn’t.

On the last day my mother lived with us, the day her oldest daughter went away to college, I came home to a surprise. The room in which I had been just an annoying roommate for the last ten years had finally been made mine. It was a ten-year-old’s dream, chock-full of the design trends of the early 1990s: the walls were covered in new matte-vinyl sheets of floral wallpaper down which I ran my fingers; my bed had a cloud-white canopy between four posts of honey-stained wood, matching the new dresser, mirror, and nightstand. It was all lit by the soft light of a lamp with a mauve-colored shade, the base in the shape of a rocking horse, hand-painted and complete with a curly, thick-textured tail. It was the most beautiful room I’d ever seen, and somehow it was mine. In the wide, shiny mirror, hung low enough now that I could see my whole body, I stared at the soft light reflecting on my face, awash in mauve, and wondered how I’d gotten so lucky.

Years later, when I found out why my mom had left, all I could think about was her standing on a ladder, painting the adhesive on the wall, and sticking out her tongue in concentration as she placed each panel perfectly. I wondered what it must’ve felt like to create a space for a child you knew would feel she’d been left behind, and to know there was nothing, anymore, that you could do about it.

That first night without her, I lay in bed, staring at the lamp and studying the canopy, not knowing why my mom had left. There was an echo of her in those objects, but I wanted her voice down the hall, as I’d always heard falling asleep. Two weeks later, we visited her new apartment, a space that seemed like a cover, too, for some unbearable truth. I caught her watching us closely, taking it all in, aware of the limited time she had with us.

In the weeks following their separation I’d come home to my dad crying. Though he’d always apologize afterward, he’d divulge his bitter losses, the ones that if they’d stayed inside probably would’ve destroyed him. They were fragments of his story, disconnected images of his pain. They formed what seemed a throwaway portrait, the peripheral in focus but the central subject blurred. At heart, I didn’t understand why we’d lost any of it. When one of his friends scolded me for sobbing, I took it to mean Dad’s pain was so unbearable, he couldn’t bear mine too. So, I became a lightness in his days, obscuring all my sorrow with a Pollyannaish joy. And when I heard the sadness in my mom’s voice at the end of a visitation, I waited in silence for an exchange between us that never came. Each was trying to protect the other, and therefore, each of us was shouldering it all alone.

In 2018, seven years after my abortion and two weeks into yet another new city, I got pregnant. I wasn’t expecting it, but I wasn’t closed to it either. The netherworld of indecision was the compromise we’d come to.

We decided not to tell anyone for a while, a means—at least for me—of possible escape, a way to fend off the panic that I knew would come soon enough. I sat and waited on my new front porch under the towering hundred-year trees letting loose a torrent of bright leaves. But as the little zygote in my app took recognizably human form, the old fears pussyfooted around me, unsure now of their power. While my HCG level climbed to a nauseating peak and the days grew dry and cold, I spent an increasing number of hours on the couch, the dread curled up next to me like an old dog. It was a suspension in time, yes, but one in which I found an unexpected ease.

As week seven passed, I openly wept for the baby I hadn’t been ready for, the one that would’ve turned seven that month. The shame I’d once felt had begun to subside, leaving only my sorrow.

Week twelve brought the first snow, a trace outlining the windows. It was the statistician’s benchmark for likely viability, the one in which we’d tell the world, we’d decided, the one my first baby never saw. As I stamped the announcements and dropped them in the big blue belly of the postbox on the corner, I’d made my peace with her, whatever she may have become and whatever I may have become beside her.

Their hopes of more grandchildren had dwindled to almost nothing, so when I told my parents I was pregnant, it was as if they’d seen the most unlikely Hail Mary ever thrown. I’ve honestly never heard them so excited. For Dad, it was a hallelujah to the god he’d been praying to since my brother died. For Mom, the speechless shock of someone you love finally getting what you’ve always wanted for them. They were much surer than I was that it’d be the greatest thing to ever happen to me.

Over the next few months I was closer to them than I’d been in years. It made me see how little I’d sought their advice in the previous decades, how much I’d clung to being their protector, not ever really letting them in. It was painful to realize that our newfound connection might ultimately be conditional. I wondered what would happen if it was akin to times before: an intense period of connection followed by years of very little contact.

I decided to have my baby at home, and I was worried what my parents would think. They’d followed the right-wing shift from Tea Party ethos to an even greater extreme, one I thought would dismiss home birth as a liberal choice. But they were strangely supportive. When I said it was illegal where I lived, exclaiming, “How poetic it would be to get arrested for the thing society wanted me to do for so damn long!” they conflated it with their libertarian sensibilities—a rare moment when our politics seemed aligned.

I was immediately drawn to my midwife’s infectious declarations, not of the miracle growing passively inside me but of the power within my body to get a body out. She assured me that my body would know what to do. It was the mind that needed work, then, as usual.

On a Saturday morning we sat with several other home-birth couples to learn the logistics, the pungent smell of patchouli in the air. Unlike the hospital tour we’d taken, there were no bright white sheets and room-service menus but instead a list of items we might actually need: plastic-backed sheets—make that two—and a tub of lubricating jelly; umbilical-cord clamps and perineal cold packs; straws for drinking through clenched teeth and the best bone broth we could find. It was the kind of information to quell your fears, a powerful reminder that if you want something done, give it to a group of women.

But as the end grew near, I was terrified, like every woman before me. What seemed a physical impossibility could begin at any moment, and what felt almost parasitic, coercing all my body systems to its needs, would soon be crying out for comfort.

It’s hard to describe what it’s like to give birth because of the natural anesthesia of shock. The pain is so overwhelming, at least to some bodies, that short-term memory is favored over long. I made it through the repeated rise into the pain and the often literal fall into someone’s arms not as an hours-long ordeal but contraction by contraction. And so the body did know what to do—incapacitate the mind. Those moments of the worst pain live now on dead-end streets, cut off from the whole and from each other, as trauma often is.

Having decades of experience with clients who had trauma histories, my midwife listened with her whole body when I told her what hurt. She was one of a string of women I’d met, from when my mom moved out to when I became a mom myself, who served as surrogates for the needs I’d stopped looking for at home, a counterpoint to the argument that a woman could never make it through trauma whole.

I’d spent years building my body’s power—lifting weights to failure, surrendering in extended yin postures, leaping from hold to hold in dynamic bouldering moves—but childbirth was a new beast. It was deeply uncomfortable to be present with that pain, but there was something of awe in it too, a need, perhaps, to be in awe of my body at the most fundamental level.

As the contractions became more frequent, I moved around the house like the wounded animal I was, trying to shuffle away from the pain. The blood, so stark red in its first appearance in months, became an afterthought in labor, soaked through towels, blotted onto sheets, smeared on the toilet seat and in the bath, dripped on the tile and the wood and the plastic-backed tablecloth we’d put under the birthing pool. If something was hunting me, it would find me soon. My involuntary groan, repeated at intervals, ever closer in time, felt almost certainly a tick on some early predator’s clock.

But at this edge, leaning ever more weight into the women around me, I felt an odd comfort too, an elemental calm. It was the first time I’d ever been in complete surrender, and it wasn’t to some abstraction. It was to these people in this room, including my unborn daughter—even including me. It was the frightening trust I’d run from that I’d finally let myself feel.

When the time came, I was resigned to a permanent squat, a little head crowning at my fingertips. My midwife, her focus between my legs, declared, “This is it.”

The contraction peaked, and I flexed the deep muscles she’d taught me to engage, letting out another groan at which no one flinched.

As the head crowned farther out, the chin passing the cervix, my husband let loose an involuntary “Oh god.”

“One more,” my midwife said, lowering to her knees.

I sat in the deep discomfort of a body partly out of my body, the searing burn of a stretch in that same ring into which a rolled shaft of dried seaweed had once been slipped, expanded now to its full diameter.

In that moment, of all moments, my midwife squared her shoulders and said, “It’s going to feel like you’re ripping open,” and she was exactly right.

As the baby plunged into her hands, my grunt became a wheeze, and when they placed her on my chest, her first cry was an answer to all the groans she’d heard inside. My husband wrapped his arms around us, and I was suddenly emptied of all feeling, save one—relief.

I’d feared engulfment above all else, yet being engulfed in that first week wasn’t the terror I’d dreaded. What I remember now is the tenderness. The late-night suckling at my breast, the soft billow of her belly on mine, the plates of cheese and meat my husband brought to replenish my energy. The weight of her on my chest and the tiny squeeze of her fingers. The love-locked eyes that believed “You are me, and I am you.” There is a reason for these clichés, as old as human time. There was a reason, maybe, that I lost myself completely.

On day seven, in the midst of the precipitous fall of hormones, my husband urged me to take a family selfie.

Beyond all vanity, I simply said, “Okay.”

I’m lying on my side, breasts veiled by a cheap tank top, milk wetting through in a messy splotch around one of my nipples. My daughter is pressed against the other, suckling. The bloated middle that I hadn’t yet braved myself to touch is in the foreground, the least flattering angle, and my face is red with the blotchy tears I’d always tried to hide, green eyes narrowed with exhaustion. My husband’s head lies on mine, his cheek against my temple. That same tender smile in celebration, as he’d said before he took the picture, of my “beauty in the raw.”

He was right to take it. It’s one of the most beautiful depictions I’ve seen of motherhood.

My mother came to help for the first two weeks, the longest stretch of time we’d spent under the same roof in twenty-five years. She was there for the most volatile mood swings I’ve ever experienced, and her wide-eyed presence was an eerie mirror to the few honest exchanges we’d had over my lifetime. It reminded me that she’d seen me through the first years of my life—the day-to-day transparency of infant emotions and needs; the moment-to-moment regulation of toddler frustrations and tantrums. In seeing me with my daughter, it seemed she saw herself in me for the first time in years.

It was never in these heightened moments that I felt estranged from her but in the quiet in-between, the years gone by of surface conversation, the waiting, ever waiting, for moments like this.

When my daughter was ten months old, I got pregnant again.

As ever, I didn’t know what I wanted.

There were pros to getting it over with, should I want two children, but there were also blaring cons. It was February 2020, a time of shifting lives on a global scale. No plans were being made. Perhaps that’s why I decided not to intervene; the worst of times is the best of times for indecision.

Just as the nausea should’ve started, the world shut down. In the last week of March, scrolling through the news, I read what we all read between the lines, and the already difficult task of being pregnant in the information age was now accentuated by an entire world in doubt. I could find anything to corroborate my anxiety about a symptom, but no one had an answer for this: Was I selfish in deciding to have a child now?

Sometime that week my baby stopped developing. Week seven, when the nausea would usually be taking hold. I told myself I just didn’t notice, distracted as I was by everything happening. But as the world got stranger and stranger for everyone else, I was feeling more and more normal. I told my midwives it felt like I was no longer pregnant, but they assured me that without blood, all was probably fine. I scoured the internet for signs of what my body was already telling me, none of them conclusive.

When I did start bleeding, they let me come in, and when I got to the ultrasound office, no patients were waiting. The tech treated me as if I were her only patient that month. She squeezed the cold blue gel onto a wand as I lifted my robe.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, her free hand on my arm.

“Pretty good,” I said, “but I’m trying not to read into it.”

She nodded, eyes on her screen, a mask blocking me from reading anything into her expression.

When the fetus appeared, I knew precisely what its stillness meant. There was no muffled sound of a beat far faster than the one I heard in my own ears, and I knew what that meant too.

She hurriedly did her measurements, clicking on the edges of the sac, lines bisecting it at each axis, then shut her computer. She leaned in, paused for a moment, and said what I already knew. “It’s not going to be good news, dear.”

After my abortion in Japan, I’d told my mom we’d lost a baby, and she told me about her miscarriage, assuming that’s what I had had. I wanted so desperately to talk about it, the pain of my loss, that I lied, afraid our tenuous connection would be severed by the blunt blade of politics. Why is this line drawn between pregnancy losses? Can’t we all grieve together? Does it always have to be us vs. them?

Before I had one, I resented women who had miscarriages, envious of what I thought was a societal embrace of their pain, but when I lost my third baby, I realized both experiences are shrouded by the shame that has isolated women for years.

I share my pain, even if it means some won’t understand it, even if it means some will spew their hatred in logical fallacies, say this cruelty: that my miscarriage was a comeuppance for my abortion, a penalty handed out by God. I share my pain to stare down picketers who think they know what’s best for me, to challenge the long black robes who have a vision for our country but no vision for the women who inhabit it.

I share my pain for all the women whose experiences I once, too, didn’t understand.

The nurse told me that if I needed it, she’d order me a pill that could start the process, the same pill used for women wanting to end their pregnancies, the same pill I was denied all those years before in Japan, but I decided to wait it out. Missed miscarriages—a passage of several weeks between when the fetus stops developing and when the body finally lets it go—are somewhat rare, she’d said, but usually progress quickly.

So, there I was again in a little purgatory, yet another suspension in time.

During those languid days, my thoughts returned to my mom. When I was in college, the new millennium still green with promise, she’d finally told me why she’d left all those years before. It was the first time she’d come to visit me, though I was well into my junior year. We were sitting in a basement restaurant eating tortilla chips—the kind of place that no longer exists in Ann Arbor, which is now a mecca for foodies—the kind of place that has harsh lighting, vinyl seats, and throwback ads for Tecate. Not the kind of place for a heart-to-heart.

When it sunk in that her mental illness was used against her in court—it being, perhaps, the most efficient means by which the judge could choose between them—when she told me the only way she could see us was to grin and bear it, I was completely stunned. It was the first time I’d seen the life under the surface; it was the first time I’d been made privy to her pain.

I was upset then, but now that I was a mother—and one who was faced, again, with another loss—it finally hit me with a numbing blow. The cruelty of what the judge decided and the pain of her not being with us; the despair of those weeks between visits. Her identity of being a mother shattered and replaced with the most insidious kind of shame. And my dad? Something broke in him too. When the final order was granted, I imagine for him it was an equal sentence of guilt in what he’d taken from her and shame in that it still felt good to win.

On the day I miscarried, hormones crashing, I wept on the front porch, those hundred-year trees bright green with new leaves. By nightfall my body had finally begun to let go.

That night was a series of calculated decisions. Should we call 911 or should we wait and see? How much blood is too much blood? Was that the whole fetus or could there be more? Am I soaking through a pad in an hour?

The lovely EMS woman, who folded the towel back to look at the fetus, so dark and contained in its small sac, thought, against her male counterpart’s judgment, that I’d probably be fine. When he was out of the room, she pulled the chair close and placed her hand on mine, saying, “I understand what you’re going through. I miscarried at home too.” She tucked the remains into a plastic bag and kindly asked, “Would you like me to dispose of this or would you like to keep it?”

Several hours later, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop, I decided to go to the one place no one wanted to go in April 2020. Clutching my flimsy cloth mask, the vaccine still months from being made, I walked into the sliding glass doors of the hospital, alone. My husband, who’d driven me there, was barred from entry. By the time they checked me in, I was in a panic, my heart rate so elevated that my limbs were tingling and my vision blurred, symptoms I was certain meant I was hemorrhaging.

In triage they urged me to relax, then drew blood. Leaving me alone as they ran their tests, they returned to assure me my counts were depleted but stable, repeating that I needed to breathe, deep breaths, and calm down.

I was sure they’d send me away, more important things to attend to, but they had me strip off my clothes and get in a gown, then rolled me back into observation. While moving onto a gurney, legs unsteady, I felt another mass of clots fall onto the floor.

The nurse scooped it up in a starched-white towel and dropped it in a biohazard can on her way out the door. I waited for the doctor, attending to patients I heard moaning in other rooms.

When he finally came in, I thanked him for his service over those first months of the pandemic, and his eyes, bright blue diminished by dark bags below, half-smiled for a moment as he said, “We’re doing our best.”

He told me his wife had suffered a missed miscarriage and that she too had to go to the ER when it didn’t complete at home. “I think I know what the issue might be,” he said. He took a moment to wheel his chair close, touch my arm, and say, “I’ll take care of you.”

With a pair of forceps, he removed the last piece of fetal tissue from my cervix, a sudden relief from the stinging pain I hadn’t noticed was there.

I look at my daughter now, three years old, too young to think anything of her body beyond its physicality, the thing that gets her from here to there. She already has a natural curiosity for the blood she sees in my underwear. She grabs a pad and runs away, the thud of feet and then the tearing plastic, the sound I’d tried to hide for years in public restrooms echoing down the hallway. She looks back at me and beams, peeling the pad from its liner with joy. Where will the “sticker” go today? On the back of a dining-room chair, on a bowl of dough for pizza, in the middle of the floor—there’s no place yet to be ashamed of.

But can I sign my name to this, can I call it mine? This is my story, but it’s one I might not tell you if you knew my name. It’s a chasm into which I fear too many relationships could fall. It wasn’t me who wrote that. That isn’t my story. I hope more than anything for my daughter that if she tells her story, she’ll sign her name in cold black ink, unafraid and unashamed of who she is.

Read more from Issue 21.2.