Lori Vogt Rosone

In June, my husband and I found out we were pregnant. It would become the third baby we would lose in the last two years. I call her a baby although I know she was an embryo, her heartbeat stilled at six weeks and two days. I call her a baby because I can feel her weight on my chest and see her eyelashes in my mind. I call her a baby to honor the grief of those who have lost babies that existed only in our bodies and minds. Our babies that existed as dreams and then as memories.

At night, I closed my eyes and worried I would miscarry again. I fell asleep by imagining that I could make my baby comfortable enough to stay. I hung a string of firefly lights from hip bone to hip bone. Realizing I didn't need to be limited by space in this first nursery, I added Paul standing at the grill, firing up chicken coated in cayenne and brown sugar.

Here is your dad, baby. Look at his eyelashes. Look at his kindness. Stay.

I struggle with the weight of my despair compared with their tiny gestational ages. Five weeks, six weeks, seven weeks. Due July 26, 2022. Due Nov. 21, 2022. A year of working nights and trying. Then due! March 17, 2024. Never, as it turns out, due at all.

As a midwife, I have found each of these gestational ages beneath an ultrasound probe, delighting with parents over the jump in development between six and nine weeks. The spine develops first, accounting for the shrimplike curve from head to tail. Then the arms and legs bud out like willow catkins and the spine begins to straighten. Nature repeats her designs — blood vessels reach toward their destinations like rivers toward oceans, like plants toward the sun. I reach from this experience toward meaning.

I don't claim to know when other people's embryos become babies or whether an unwanted pregnancy ever does. Story after sacred story from clients seeking abortion care helped me articulate one of my core beliefs as a provider. My responsibility is not to understand every person's experience; my responsibility is to remember that I can never understand any person's experience better than they do.

I was pregnant in my 20s with an embryo I didn't keep. I imagined the child it could become. But the relationship I was in then wasn't safe for me or him, much less for a baby. I imagined this child trying to get the love that I was trying to get. I imagined her chasing me, chasing him.

The love Paul and I have is the steadiest I have ever encountered. We bought a house with a yard for a baby that hasn't arrived. My job in health care didn't offer fertility coverage, so I found a job working the cash register at a hardware store that did. Though the initial idea was to work at both places, I decided to take a break from midwifery after a failed egg retrieval and our third miscarriage.

Sometimes, I stare at the quietness of life after these choices and wonder what I am doing. Every moment that I am not ovulating or hoping I am pregnant can feel like time to just get through.

Paul knows about these doubts and the depression that accompanies them. He knows that I have questioned every decision I've made but that I never have doubts about him.

Five weeks plus six weeks plus seven weeks equals 18 weeks. Does that describe what we lost?

After our third miscarriage, I cared for a woman whose baby died 18 weeks into the pregnancy. Late one night, I was charting the heartbeat of a baby whose mother was laboring when wails cut through the air outside. I hurried to the parking lot of the health care facility, where the woman was bent forward between the open door of her van and its frame.

She looked up at me, her face twisted with grief, and said, “I go here. I went here.” I did not need to know her story to tell her, “It's OK. You can stay here.”

It was 22 weeks after she had lost her boy. It was the night her baby was “due.”

I told her to stay as long as she needed, but I did not ask her inside. I worried that she would hear the laboring woman birthing. I worried the laboring woman would hear her crying. I asked her if she needed anything. She said she didn't.

Back inside, I wondered if I should return to her. I shifted weight on my feet with the discomfort of existing between their different pains. I felt my own. I imagined how small it would be to say outside, “I also lost a baby.” Mine was so small. I stayed inside. She soon left. The woman inside birthed her baby into her husband's hands.

Our baby who was not born on July 26 would now be 20 months old. The baby that pulled these words out of me should be born this month. The baby I do not have is as old as my longing for a baby.

I know that this grief math is cruel — a tyrannical demand to justify my despair to myself. There is no accountant on the other end of these equations. I would not subject anyone else's sadness to math. Yet, I notice it outside of me as well. People who love me ask, “How far along were you?” What does this question mean if not: “How can I calculate your pain?”

In our driveway, despite the hammering December rain, Paul built a cabinet out of reclaimed barn poplar and oak. It was the first piece of furniture he had built since I'd met him. Over the next two years, as we lost pregnancy after pregnancy, Paul built table after table — curly maple, spalted maple, ambrosia maple. He traced his fingers over patterns skated in the wood, explaining that burrowing beetles had left them there while the tree yet lived.

About one in four pregnancies end in loss. As a culture, our concession is not to share about pregnancy before 12 to 20 weeks. So early pregnancy loss becomes largely invisible, the hope and expectation alive only inside us. What has helped me most is to render my losses visible: Paul's furniture, this piece of writing, stones that Paul and I picked out and sent down a river when we felt ready. We gave them names we would never give our children because we still hope to need those names.

Recurrent miscarriage is not common. It can just be bad luck but is more likely because of an underlying health condition. In some cases, like ours, all the available testing is normal and the diagnosis is “unexplained infertility.”

Well-meaning people have said, “You know you are going to have a baby, right?”

No. I do not know. It is immensely painful to not know. But I don't.

If I ask myself if we are “fertile” like the deep, dark ground, then I know that we are. I look at the life Paul and I are building, imperfectly and despite doubt, sure signs that things are squirming with aliveness.

The refusal of new life to bend to our calculations and planning may be the most alive thing about it. Already, our child escapes every perimeter we create. When does nature bend to numbers? Miscarriage is largely invisible. Fertility is invisible. Many griefs are invisible. Invisible is not zero. Invisible is innumerable. Soft wood breaks open, revealing beetles burrowing — too quick to count. The weight of loss. The length of waiting.

My child is on her way to me but slowly. I imagine her as a 3-year-old, walking a winding path of packed dirt — cool beneath her feet. Have you ever tried to hurry a 3-year-old? There is so much to notice. She watches the wind shake the leaves out of the trees. She watches one leaf fall for all the time it takes. The trees are her favorite rattle, the best mobile.

She'll take another few steps toward me soon. But not too many because she wants to know what's under this rock. And when she lifts it up, there is so much to see.

I cannot interrupt her. Or hurry her along. But she is peaceful. The earth is still her mother. And when I stop to notice the wind in the trees or the bugs beneath the rock, she is close to me. For a moment, I know that the same mother who keeps her now, keeps me. I sense it in the sun on the back of my head as I bend over what is in front of me.