I’ve been contemplating how much to write about what happened next, when I returned to LA from NY at the end of my 1st trimester.
I think of times I’ve said something disparaging about a family member to a close friend, perhaps revealed a family secret, and how when that friend repeats back to me something in that exact same context, how infuriated it has made me, as I am loyal to and protective of my family.
And then I think about all of the reasons I am writing this blog, including trying to help someone else. I think of how alone I felt after Finley died; how alone I continue to feel on random days when the roller coaster of grief hits me; on holidays which highlight the hyper reality of the fact that my husband and I are parents, without a child to love on a daily basis; how painfully exhausting it is to still be going through fertility efforts. I think about how as I have searched for answers as to why things happen and how to get through this, I have continuously felt alone, and how every now and then I’ve come across a phrase in a book or a person who maybe has said the right things to me on any particular occasion, whether it was after Finley died, or if it was sending me a text on Mother’s Day just last year to say I’m being thought of; I think of a woman I didn’t know very well being brave and generous enough to tell me how her family had failed her after she had to have a 2nd term abortion.
And for those reasons I will now share the truth about how my parents reacted when I told them I was pregnant, summer of ’09.
It was great to be reunited with Craig that late August after being in NY for one month for work. Our relationship was far from perfect, but he and I had such a strong connection and such deep love, that returning to a hug from him grounded me in a place of peace and love. Even as I re-read this, I can close my eyes and take a breath and know that foundation is built to last. I was home.
And on top of that, I could now go check on our little growing baby by going to see the doctor! I had my end of first trimester screening with my Israeli OBGYN, who took blood to make sure my levels were good and showed me how much our little baby had grown. I cherished that picture even more than the earlier ones, and stopped the irrational though perhaps common fear that the baby was no longer inside me. I had proof!
I talked to my Dad and told him I had some news to tell him and my Mother; that I wanted to do so in person, and gave him a couple of dates that could work. In a normal family, I’ll theorize that when a daughter who has wanted to get pregnant for so long, who is healthy, committed for 10-years with a great man, and employed, that her parents are happy. That they jump at the good fortune. But I don’t come from what I perceive as a normal family (uncommon as normal likely is), so for me, the drive to my parents’ home that Sunday morning to tell them I was over 12-weeks pregnant was one full of dread. I don’t think I had any actual shame that I was pregnant (I have definitely spent time contemplating this in retrospect), but I felt emotionally pulled into the dysfunction of my family by anticipating what they would say. Knowing from my eldest sister that my mother had guessed the news, and having not received a congratulatory call was only one indication that this was not going to go to well. Another clue was the fact that my eldest sister had offered to go with me, to sort of buffer the situation.
And still other clues existed in my history of memories throughout my life with how my Mother, specifically, responded to situations.
I am sharing what happened next with great trepidation. I have a relationship with my mother now, a woman I have come to accept entirely; who I love very much. I don’t want to be disrespectful and air the family secrets, and I will censor this a bit so as to respect them, but at the same time, I am writing this honest memoir of my experience with my struggle to get pregnant, my pregnancy, my loss, and my current fertility struggles to help another; to form a sense of camaraderie in a community of women / parents / people who have had similar struggles. I hope the risks I am taking, the vulnerability I am showing, will help someone else out there, and so I have made a choice to tell this part of my truth.
Just to give you a sense of my Mother: When I was around 8 she yanked me out of a school mid-year because she didn’t like my teacher. This was done to protect me, but when properly analyzed, I realize that she didn’t think of the disruption that caused me at the time. When I was 14, she told me that she was planning a trip to Tunisia or Egypt or some other far away place, before she communicated this news to my father, with a copy of her itinerary on his breakfast placemat, the very morning she was leaving. She once wore a very bright colorful outfit to my close friend’s funeral, while the other mothers wore navy or black suits (which horrified me at the time, and later that I think my friend Nicole would have loved). And that’s just a paragraph’s worth of memories; the rest may eventually fill a different book.
So I walked in to their home, where I’d grown up, having not seen them in many weeks, ready to show them the latest commercial I produced, an incredibly powerful Public Service Announcement touting the importance of breaking the stigmatism attached to mentally ill people, and ready to tell them news that made my heart soar with happiness. And I was leading up to my big news (again, I don’t think there was shame at being pregnant, but I was in a lot of fear obviously, in that I didn’t lead with the great news).
I told them about shooting with an Academy Award winning director and an Academy Award nominated actress at Grand Central. We sat in their living room, the place where lavish gifts were stored at Christmas time for my mother to give out to her daughters, her 2 grandchildren, and any stranger that was in her life at the moment; my mother was notorious for buying people gifts, as that was the way she best knew how to communicate love.
My parents were sitting opposite each other, and so I had to volley back and forth to make the small talk. I noticed my mother had a crazy look I’d seen on her face before: the one when I can see her tongue clicking at her dental bridge, nervous, upset, distracted. And she asked if I was pregnant. And I smiled, and answered, “Yes,” and her eyes seemed to squint, while I volleyed over to my father’s first response, “Are you clean?” It’s certainly not the response I would have dreamed of, and anyone who knew me, actually knew anything about me, knew that I was off cocaine, alcohol, cigarettes, sodas, and even coffee, lox, and sushi nowadays. But, it was a reasonable question from my father who had once driven me to drug rehab so I could get help, over 3 years before, so I didn’t get upset, and I assured him that yes, I was sober.
My mother said, “Don’t expect any money from us,” a truly outrageous sentence to utter, as I made good money, and hadn’t asked them for any money in years. But that was her way of controlling things, and also her way of removing her love; she had grown up poor, and daily spent my father’s means; she had married a father figure 12-years her senior; she herself grew up without a father. I didn’t think of all of this then; I felt really stunned, but for obvious reasons yearned so desperately for their approval and proceeded to tell them about the pregnancy.
In retrospect, of course I should have gotten up, walked out, and returned home to the family I was creating, the one centered in love. But having been raised under such dysfunction, like a dog doing tricks for some sort of approval, I continued to tell them details, like that I had initially been pregnant with twins but that I’d miscarried one early on, and that the baby inside of me was growing along well….
“You’ll probably lose this one, too,” I heard from my mother.
My head turned and my mouth dropped and I’m sure I had tears in my eyes but they were angry tears; tears of dismay that any human being, specifically my own Mother, would utter that thought. At one point in her campaign to stop me from having a baby, she had said that she prayed I wouldn’t get pregnant. I should have stopped speaking to her then and there, but I didn’t have enough strength and knowledge to break away at the time.
But when she said those words, “You’ll probably lose this one, too,” I first threw my plastic bottle of water at her, and then my father, typically timid to her tyranny, stood up and called her names and told her to leave the room…. And there was much more nastiness and far more emotion and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit how appalled and hurt I was by that 6 word sentence.
Today, years later, and on good terms with her, I think of that sentence and the power it had over me.
I know whether or not she prayed for me to get pregnant was irrelevant. But was it? Abraham Lincoln once wrote: “I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.” Did her prayers have any influence?
I know that her saying that sentence is not how or why my son eventually did die. She was not G-d, but as William Makepeace Thackeray wrote: “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.”
On a side note, there are many things I take issue with in how poorly equipped we Americans are when it comes to grief, and the common phrase of a person has ‘lost’ someone she loves is one that is outrageous to me. I sometimes lose my keys. I often lose my remote control. But I most certainly did not lose my son; I denote loss with a sense of carelessness, and if you know me at all personally, or have been reading along, it is obvious that I am not a careless person. I didn’t lose my son, he was stolen from me by an act beyond my control; perhaps his fate; perhaps a pure product of him not being strong enough since he was so very little when he was born; whatever the case:
I had never heard a meaner sentence uttered.
My Dad tried to assuage the situation, and brought out a photo album of his side of the family. He is a nostalgic man, my father, and his nostalgia often feels like a history lesson. I was in shock but appreciated that he was trying to distract me emotionally from the vicious, insensitive, and insane reaction of my mother.
As the days wore on, through conversations with my Craig and close friends and my sisters, I made a decision not to accept her behavior and violently rejected her premonition. This incident began to allow me to change personal boundaries, something I remain confident will only help me be a better mother.
There is more to it, but this is not a story about the family from which I come, it is a story about the family that Craig and I were building, as our own family was well under-way, me being at this time now over 12-weeks pregnant and out of the woods from all of the fears associated with the 1st trimester.
Again: or so I thought.