The first time I miscarried was right after my father died of lung cancer, and my only consolation at the time was that when I asked my father on his hospice bed if he was excited to be a grandfather again, he had replied, “I’ll be more excited when I hold it in my hands.” I never got to hold my baby in my hands; but my father, having passed away the month before the miscarriage, surely did.
But during all the time that he was holding my hand and caring for me, I didn’t realize how much he was hurting.
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As I sat in the little ultrasound room, waiting for the radiologist to tell me what my heart knew, my husband held tightly to my hand and knew enough to say nothing. We cried quietly together when the radiologist, and then the nurse practitioner, and then the doctor, told us it was a miscarriage. It was “normal.” It was “for the best.” We sat together in the waiting room with happily pregnant women who still had babies inside.
He held my hand in the surgical room where they performed the D&E. He told me I could have ten babies if I wanted. He said and did all the right things for a mother who lost the feeling of her baby inside her.
But during all the time that he was holding my hand and caring for me, I didn’t realize how much he was hurting. I was going through the physical symptoms–pain, bleeding, hormones. But his heart was just as broken as mine.
A few weeks after the miscarriage we went to a Flower and Garden Expo at the World Trade Center in Boston because the world expects you to move on–there’s no funeral for a miscarriage, no wake, no announcement in the paper. We wandered through ferns and flowers until finally, we landed in a little section that housed a group of bonsai plants. Roffey (as I call my husband) was intrigued by them if a little obsessively in my opinion. I have a “brown thumb”—every plant I touch withers, so I had no interest in a mini tree that takes an extraordinary amount of care to thrive.
I don’t know when I started resenting the tree. I looked at it and saw it as a substitute for a baby.
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But Roffey kept coming back to this same little bonsai, and by the end of the expo he had bought it. We were the new owners of a miniature bonsai tree, in a green and black glass pot, its twisted trunk and tiny green leaves shaped like something out of a fantasy. Still in a hormonal state of misery, I paid it little attention.
But Roffey paid it attention. Every day he cared for it, carefully pruning and watering as needed, sometimes clipping it so carefully that it took his attention for what seemed like hours.
I don’t know when I started resenting the tree. I looked at it and saw it as a substitute for a baby, and thought to myself often, “that stupid tree isn’t even a real tree. And it’s not a baby, but he’s giving it more attention than one.”
But it was like a baby. In my own grief and misery, I had failed to see his and failed to see his need to nurture. He didn’t have a baby to cradle in his arms, but that oddly shaped shrubbery was soothing, and made him feel, to someone who had never had children, like a father. He poured all of his grief, all of his attention, all of his love into that little green tree, helping it grow and survive the way he couldn’t help our baby. Years later, he would tell me how helpless he felt during all three of the miscarriages we had throughout our marriage. He held my hand through each. He sat by my side as I received chemotherapy after a molar pregnancy turned to cancer.
Somewhere in there, we had three children, who are now 15, 13, and three. After the first was born, we were so focused on learning how to care for our precious new life that my husband briefly forgot about the bonsai. It withered quickly, much to my husband’s heartfelt dismay. He was devastated that the little tree he had nurtured so carefully had withered away. At that moment I felt like he understood exactly what I had felt at the loss of our baby.
Throughout the past fifteen years, I’ve thought often of that little bonsai, who, like three babies, didn’t quite make it. In the short time that it was part of our family, it was loved.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
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