Daily Doses

February 15, 2007 at 6:04 pm · Filed under Deanna\'s Story, Miscarriage, Recurrent Miscarriage

Most every day I will receive two to five emails from women who have lost a baby. I try to always respond.

Many just want to share their story–to tell anyone and let it pour out. I always imagine it is like poison, or snake venom, and you simply have to purge it from your body in order to survive. I’ve heard most every situation that can be told after eight years, and I can handle anything laid in my inbox.

The beta readers who are going over Baby Dust right now also email me, mentioning moments in various characters that they feel reflect me. Stella, certainly, in her unabashed devotion to the group for a decade, often will say things I write in my emails to women–encouragement or concern or a reminder that the future will look very different that the landscape currently in view. I too once thought I would never have children, only loss after loss. I probably hit my lowest low when I was pregnant for the second time and my doctor called me to say my screenings with this new baby were abnormal.

“It will happen again,” I thought, my belly already fat enough that I had to lean forward to rest my head on the work desk. “It will happen over and over again until I can’t take it anymore.”

And that was when I formed a resolution I still repeat to women who feel their losses will recur and they can’t face it. “Can you make it through one more?” I ask them. “Not two more or five more or an endless stream of them. But just one more?”

When you say yes, you know you can make it through one more loss, you are ready to try again. Because your last loss may indeed have been your last loss.

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Anxiety and Hope

February 8, 2007 at 1:47 pm · Filed under About Deanna's Book, Deanna\'s Story, Miscarriage

I think all of us find ourselves riddled with self-doubt at times. Sometimes I wonder if I am any sort of spokesperson on this issue. Regularly I fear I’ve gone too far, or not far enough. I examine the outline of the book, review the situations, struggle with whether or not I covered everything. If I got things right.

Conceiving an idea is such great fun. There is so much joy in it, such hope. You can believe in something when the concept is broad and bright and entirely in the future. The execution of it is all together different. There are potholes, gaps, chasms, gorges between your dream and its fruition. You wonder if you fail, how many people will watch you go down.

Baby Dust is with six readers right now from various demographics. Women who’ve lost babies, women who haven’t. Doctors and editors and just writer friends who have no idea what darkness I’ve laid in their hands. I will listen to what they have to say about it, make my adjustments where need be.

For the people who read it who’ve never been through a miscarriage, I find they don’t believe some of it. “Of course you have to go to the hospital!” they say, and refuse to accept that this might not be the best course.

“No one would say that!” they exclaim when they see what comments are made to women fresh from their losses. They can’t imagine they might be told “It wasn’t really a baby anyway,” or “Just try again and you’ll be fine.” Or our favorite, “It was all in God’s plan.”

Initially I think–exactly, and that’s why you need to read this book. And learn. Then I think, what if they still don’t believe it? What if these scenarios do more harm than good? What if people think it’s gratuitous? Or disingenuous? Or manipulative? Or just bad?

Today I grapple with both anxiety and hope, much like we do when we learn we are pregnant again after a loss. Yes, it could turn terrible, and we might face awful devastation. But it could also be wonderful.

I take solace in Winston Churchill.

You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.

I sure do hope he’s right.

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Flashbacks

January 29, 2007 at 9:54 pm · Filed under About Deanna's Book, Deanna\'s Story, Miscarriage

Today, having sent Baby Dust to a few novel-writing friends to take a look at, I decided to focus on the rest of my to-do list and get my 2006 receipts entered for taxes.

On top was a pile of medical things, because I’ve been monitored for cervical cancer since last January. (Next biopsy–Feb. 12. Ick.)

I figured with everything going on, I’d better start a new folder for medical records, so I went to the file cabinet to see what already existed. Under medical, I found a packet rather unusually titled “old stuff.” So I pulled out this folder to see what might be inside.

A medical bill. Several, in fact. I scanned the list to see what they were for.

• Prenatal 1-3
• Antepartum Care
• Mycoplasma Culture
• Prolactin
• TSH

Right about here I realized what I was looking at but read on, much as someone might rubber-neck a car accident.

• Lupus Anticoagulant
• Prothrombine time
• Thromboplastin

I knew the date I would see. May 1998. These were the tests they ran to try and figure out why my baby had died. They didn’t figure it out then; I’d be pregnant with Emily before we understood the reason. If there should ever be a reason for something like that.

Strange I would come across this bill the same day I set Baby Dust aside, the first draft done, a whole trove of stories just like mine contained within its pages. Maybe Casey needed me to remember that they were little people, not just graphic incidents, or maybe he wanted to remind me why I was qualified to write it at all. Or maybe he just wanted to drop in, to show me he knew it was a big day, and to sprinkle me with luck as I start to send it out to agents.

Doesn’t matter. I can make it anything I want to be. And I choose to get dusted with hope.

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I finished it

January 17, 2007 at 11:48 pm · Filed under About Deanna's Book, Deanna\'s Story, Miscarriage

I’m saying it here first, before I tell another living soul.

Baby Dust is done. I wrote the last sentence two minutes ago.

I’ll update you all more on what is going to happen next later, but I’m sitting here bawling my eyes out and the ending worked out better than I thought it could, as if someone or something else told me exactly what to say, and how to say it.

Now, I’m going to go to bed and sleep.

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10K by Tuesday or bust

December 23, 2006 at 6:59 am · Filed under About Deanna's Book, Deanna\'s Story, Miscarriage

I’m going to make a little push to write another big chunk of the book by midnight Tuesday. We’re all off work; I’m not leaving town until Wednesday, and I can stay up as late as I want.

I’ve added a new character, Constance, and I’ll see how she’ll work out. She’s married, has two kids, and works in a day care–a painful place after her miscarriage, especially when she feels some of the mothers mistreat their children. She comes home to find her husband fired from his job (again!) and insisting–no more babies. She can’t bear to end her reproductive years on a loss. So the conflict begins.

I hope to have a finished draft of the novel by Feb. 7.

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