This past week was the LA Times Festival of Books, which has become an annual tradition for my writer girlfriends and me.
It was my second time attending the festival — and it’s the second time I’ve been pregnant at the festival. However, the baby I carried last year died in the first trimester.
I thought I would be over it by now, because that’s what you’re supposed to think. That’s what people tell you: Time heals all wounds and all that. Besides, I have a new baby to look forward to, a new life to fill the space inside me.
So I was surprised by how the grief came back so forcefully this weekend, how fully formed it still is. It hasn’t dissipated. It hasn’t shifted into something else. It’s still this annoying, recognizable presence — a purple gorilla, as poet Matthew Dickman put it.
I did my best to lose myself in other people’s stories so that I wouldn’t be consumed by my own. I went to panels and had books signed by some of my new favorite authors. I swooned over the delightful Pico Iyer and went all fangirl on Laini Taylor in the bathroom. I met LeVar Burton.
READING EFFING RAINBOW.
But still the grief remained.
It’s something I’ll have to live with, I suppose. In a way it’s a relief to know that my other baby didn’t disappear completely. She’s still there somewhere, in that part of me that feels like a wooden splinter. But it doesn’t do much to lessen the loss.
This week I also had one of those 4D ultrasounds, the kind that makes the baby look like a lump of clay or some kind of sculpture-in-progress. I’ve always hated those things. They’re creepy. The photos always make the baby look like a criminal with pantyhose pulled over its head, someone about to knock over a convenience store.
But when it came time, I couldn’t resist. My pregnancy is still at the point where my child exists in an ultrasound monitor, not yet in real life, and I just wanted to look at him. I’m still scared he won’t be real.
It is remarkable what you can see on those ultrasounds. Not just the baby’s face, which was thrilling, even though he looks like a sack of mushy oranges.
My boy has a face!
For some reason, I also have a head of cabbage in there.
But it was amazing to see the heart too. Four chambers with valves that know exactly how to open and close.
I actually have a video of the heart pumping, but I couldn’t figure out how to upload it. So just imagine it.
And bones. I was mesmerized by the spine — the perfect, intricate pieces of a puzzle that somehow solved itself — and I couldn’t get over the fact that my body formed those bones. My god. No wonder I’ve been so tired. I made bones!
In my free time, I make spines.
Pregnancy is such a strange dichotomy. I’ve never felt so powerful, and I’ve never felt so weak.
On the one hand, I am making life. It’s a rush to acknowledge that. I’ve created this thing that will someday be a person with his own abilities, goals, and unique personality. That’s insane.
But it’s also unnerving to realize how random it is — how many forks exist in this road. There’s no reason why this baby might live and why the other did not. I didn’t do anything to make this pregnancy more viable than the last. I didn’t love the babies any differently. In fact, other than subletting my uterus, I really had no part in this at all.
That’s just how it is. One baby is almost here, one is not, and I’m still learning how to accept that some wounds never heal.
