Incompatible with Life

Silent night Holy night All is calm All is bright Hospital bed Middle of night Doctors and nurses Witness the plight Round yon virgin Mother and child Holy infant So tender and mild Tiny blue babe Fights for each breath Mother and father Await her death Sleep in heavenly peace Sleep in heavenly peace.

Family portrait by six-year-old Sammy. Note that I take center stage in a larger-than-life role. Mothers are biologically hard-wired to ensure the survival of the species. They are charged with preparing their offspring to leave the nest by teaching them the skills they’ll need to navigate the world independently.      With reality television shows and women's magazines glorifying the exploits of pushy and meddlesome moms, controlling moms who demand that their children live up to unreasonably high standards, one gets the sense that modern mothers grade themselves on their children’s achievements. From the women who trundle their pre-schoolers from one resume-building activity to another, to those who spend the equivalent of college tuition on their kids’ elite sports leagues and dance teams, many moms seem to believe that it is their level of devotion that determines their child’s destiny. There was a brief spell, very early on in my parenting lif...

I used to love September. The shift from sultry summer to crisp autumn was a welcome one. I enjoyed the back to school vibe. I marveled at the brightly colored leaves drifting from the trees, and savored the sounds of apple orchards and pumpkin farms. Heck, I even got married in September. It was Anna who obliterated my adoration of autumn. She was due in November—11/11 to be exact—although she ultimately arrived on 10/10. I’d learned in June that she carried a fatal chromosome defect, and by the time we reached September, she’d already outlived her life expectancy by two months. That September was a month of waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was filled to the gills with excess amniotic fluid and having contractions almost constantly. I knew that the end was near. I lived under a steady drumbeat of impending doom that none of the pleasures of autumn—not even the first pumpkin spice latte and slice of caramel apple pie—could mute. Every September since has resurrected t...

“Everything happens for a reason.” It’s one of the most common rote responses we have when we hear of someone else’s tragedy. I’ve been on the receiving end of this comment more times than I care to count…and I hate it. Seriously, I’d love to see it eradicated from the English language. When people tell me that there’s a reason I got cancer, it implies that there’s a reason why they didn’t. When they tell me that there’s a reason I lost my baby, the unspoken message is—well, you know. Those words, strung together in an overture of sympathy, provide comfort only to the person speaking them. They represent a very convenient and human reaction to tragedy—seeking meaning in a way that enables us to distance ourselves from the possibility that such a thing could happen to us. Interestingly, I’ve never heard this phrase uttered by a parent who’s buried a child, or a widow who lost her beloved spouse. I’ve never heard someone with a life-threatening medical condition suggest ...

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...