the eighth of august
I don’t know what people thought when I seemingly dropped off from the face of the earth. I don’t know what they told each other when I announced I was leaving America, and that my husband and I had separated, and I was moving to god-knows-where. I remember the anxiety in my mother’s eyes, when I came home. The planes of my face were more visible than they had ever been. I looked like I had aged ten years.
They asked, of course, and I gave them my answers - answers that were pulled out of the air, snippets of truth so disjointed nobody could guess at the puzzle they should have formed.
I had probably broken down because of the separation, they said. My childhood neuroses were probably catching up with me. She’s burnt out, and spent. She’s lost and broken-hearted. All these whispers and thoughts wafting in the air I breathed, floating from mouth to ear and back again.
And well, I let them. There are some things you really just can’t explain, because even when you try, the words always come out garbled and wrong. And you start to choke on your tears.
It’s been two years. I think, maybe, I’m ready now.
I was pregnant before we broke up. She may have been concieved in anger.
I still don’t know what upset me more: the fact that he didn’t want my child, or the fact that I couldn’t blame him.
But maybe that wasn’t all true, now that I think about it.
He never said he didn’t want it, after all. All he said, was that it was MY body, and MY choice to make, effectively tearing himself loose from all responsibility. After our years together, after the years of striving towards “us”, that cut to the core.
It was then that I knew, that though he may still love me, that love had shifted course somehow. He didn’t see me as the mother of his children.
I thought about that child. I was too Catholic to consider abortion lightly; my childhood too entrenched in dogma to to be cavalier about all this. Besides, I had money, a good job, a tenable support system. And my husband, whatever he may have thought, would have helped, eventually.
I vacillated from one end of the spectrum to the other. He promised not to tell anyone, until he knew what I wanted to do.
I vacationed in Manila for about a month, ostensibly to be with my family, and tell them, and figure out how to proceed.
But I never did tell them. I realized that telling them was tantamount to carrying this whisper of a fetus to term. They would never let me terminate a pregnancy. I would be willed away to hell. I left for Vegas without having having made up my mind either way.
It took me the whole first trimester to decide that I could be a mother. It took me thirteen weeks of pregnancy before I decided I could bear a child.
After making that choice, I moved out of the apartment I shared with my husband. I taped an ultrasound image on my new bedroom wall. I still had not told anyone what my plans were. Possibly because I had no idea what they were to begin with.
John drove by my place some nights. And we would sit quietly from across each other, each one of us lost in thought.
On August 1st, I landed in Manila. I had quit my job. I would not be able to raise a child in America on my own. My parents knew I was coming, but they had no idea why, or for how long.
I was thin, with none of the glow pregancy was supposed to give. My face was gaunt, and the tiny swell of my belly was lost in the loose tunic that I wore. My mother thought I was sick. Perhaps I was.
The Monday following, I took a flight to Cebu, in the south. I wanted a clean break from everyone, from the whole, entire world. I needed space to figure out how to proceed. I stayed at a tiny cottage by the coast, taking my vitamins and eating fish freshly caught.
Everything seemed to make sense there.
By then, I was a little over 17 weeks pregnant.
At seventeen weeks, a fetus is about five and a half inches long when it’s curled up, and about 9 inches long, if it could stretch itself out. The fetus looks like a person, almost fully formed. At seventeen weeks, fat starts to accumulate, and fingerprints start to develop. At seventeen weeks, sometimes your gums will start to swell and bleed because of increased blood volume in your body. At seventeen weeks, you can feel her move.
By seventeen weeks, it has long since dawned on you that you are the mother of this child.
On August 8, my body exploded in cramps that threatened to tear me apart from the inside. It was a Friday night. I was alone, sitting in hut, without anyone to call. I didn’t know what to do. When I started bleeding, I grabbed my cellphone and called the information hotline. I asked for the number of the nearest hospital, and then asked for a cab company I could call. This was the third world, after all. An ambulance would take forever. The cab came in fifteen minutes. I brought a towel to sit on, just in case the bleeding got any worse. We drove for over half an hour.
An orderly escorted me to reception. I didn’t have Philippine insurance, so I simply gave them my credit card.
I don’t remember the exact time I lost her.
The next day, my doctor scheduled a D&E. They scraped every trace of her away. And she was gone, like she had never been.
I spent the rest of my time in Cebu in tears. There was nothing to tell anyone now, was there? I called my husband and told him he wasn’t going to be a father anymore. I think he was sad, but also very much relieved.
I don’t know why I insist on keeping this to myself. Then again, I have always been selfish with my pain. I don’t know how to let myself be seen that way. I’ve forgotten how to cry when someone’s watching.
A little over a month ago, I found out that I may never actually be able to bear a child.
I scribbled this down:
There are things I can’t drown in bottles of beer, or glasses of wine. There are things that refused to be diluted by even my most potent poisons. Or even by the comfort of the conversations that accompany them.
There are things we can’t bury, because we’re not even sure they were ever alive. So they lurk like shadows that have nowehere to go.
Things like you.
I like to think that with my hand holding yours, you would have seen the world a little like I do - beautiful, strange, and worth your while.
I like to think that although I never asked for you, I would have loved you completely nonetheless. With everything I had in me.
I like to think that although you may sometimes find me wanting, and uncertain, and confused, you would have understood, in time. And that you would have loved me back.
I like to think these things, because really, there’s nothing left for me to do anymore.
It is the only thing, apart, perhaps for this, that I’ve written for her.
And now I will tuck this back in the corner of me, mine and only mine.
Originally published on Tumblr, August 2010.