Incompatible with Life

A social media acquaintance who communicates with frequency and intensity about the awesome abilities of her children, recently launched a boast (no, that’s not a Freudian slip for post) to trumpet her eldest’s latest accomplishments. Allow me to add a disclaimer right now: I have nothing against other people’s lovely children. I have nothing against their children’s success. In fact, I’d like nothing more than to have everyone in the world be proud of their children’s accomplishments. But…do we really need to glorify them? Do we need to make every good grade, every high test score, every sports performance, every volunteer act public knowledge?  I’ve promised myself that this will not turn into a rant, though I suspect that it will take every last ounce of my self-control to contain my indignation at the audacity of parents who inflate their self-worth by proclaiming their children’s achievements as if they were their own. In my experience, these parents are unawa...

When I began chemo five years ago, my oncologist told me that her goal was that I would get through treatment and say, "That wasn't as bad as I expected it to be." Chemotherapy is a systemic treatment meant to kill cancer cells, but it does not discriminate between cancer cells and other fast-growing cells, which is why it changes blood counts, disrupts hair and nail growth, and causes mouth sores.  My chemo regimen began with four rounds of dose-dense Adriamycin (also known as the “red devil” because of its coloring) and Cytoxan, administered at two week intervals. The Cytoxan was infused by IV, but the vial of Adriamycin was shot directly into a vein. Each infusion lasted about two hours. Adriamycin causes hair loss within two or three weeks of the first dose. My oncologist cautioned that hair loss was imminent, and like clockwork, the first tufts came out in my hand the day before my second dose. It was the strangest thing—one day my hair felt like hair, the nex...

Go with my gut. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the past decade, it’s that. It’s harder than it sounds. When experts tell you something that conflicts with what your gut is saying, your first inclination is to dismiss your intuition. I mean, they’re experts. Their opinion must be better informed than yours, right? Wrong. I have learned (the hard way—is there really any other?) that in the big issues of my life, my gut feelings are usually spot-on, and if only I would trust them, I would make a lot fewer mistakes. Case in point: Schubert vs. Squirrel. When, several Augusts ago, a flying squirrel appeared in my bedroom at 6 AM, I figured that it was a fluke, a misguided squirrel trying to make his way home from a late night out. However, when I began hearing scratching over my head at night, I deduced that we had a more serious problem. The expert I called out to investigate insisted that I was hearing mice, despite my eyewitness account of a visiting squirrel. He recommende...

A good many people view the world through an either-or, black-and-white lens. This is particularly true on polarizing issues like late-term abortion. My decision to carry my broken unborn daughter to term probably paints me as a staunch pro-lifer—which I am, I guess, in the small realm that is my own body. However, when asked where I stand on the issue of abortion, my answer is not so simple. I firmly believe that human life is sacred. I also recognize our societal tendency to marginalize the elderly and the infirm, the physically and cognitively disabled, the poor and the homeless—and pretty much anyone else whose appearance makes us uncomfortable. I find it curious (and repulsive) that the overeager lawmakers who are so zealous in their protection of the rights of the unborn are able to cut their commitment to those babies as soon as they exit the birth canal. Their legislative concern for the health and welfare of the permanently and profoundly disabled child dries up a...

I set up this blog years ago and let it sit, unsure of how to proceed or what to write. I’d written a memoir of the time spent carrying and mourning my little girl, an attempt to distill my experience into a readable, relatable form. I thought that the blog would somehow go hand-in-hand with the book, maybe even promote it. But I found myself curiously stymied. It wasn’t just that I was unsure of my ability to navigate the technology and commit the time to posting—I had plenty of tech-savvy, would-be advisors and had blocked out daily writing time on my calendar. I was stumped by both a lack of direction and an inability to create content. I had no idea of what to write. It went beyond writer’s block. Paralyzed by self-doubt, I was linguistically frozen, unable to articulate the thoughts and emotions that churned in my brain. My circumstances had placed me on the outermost edge of the realm of moms’ groups, well beyond the normative experiential bands of the social circles...

I first heard the words “incompatible with life” in a doctor’s office, when my ob’s partner broke the news that my twenty-week ultrasound had revealed multiple and severe defects in my unborn daughter.  Incompatible with life . It reverberated in my mind as a most accurate description of the reality of a mother’s existence in the parallel universe of infant loss. Nobody ever talks about it. The death of a baby is a taboo subject, prohibited in polite conversation. When we hear about it, we shudder and wince, and never speak of it again. That is, unless—or until—it happens to us. My baby died. It pains me, still, to say it, to write it. I ache for her even now, eight years after her death. To be denied your child’s life is one of the greatest sorrows a parent can ever know. She was precious to us. We knew early on that she had too many problems in her little body to make life possible. We prepared ourselves for the inevitable.  I look back now on those diff...