My mother and stepmother got breast cancer six months apart. I realize, since only one of them is my blood relative, it doesn’t mean, you know—
Mid-summer, mid-pelvic exam, I am in the middle of this sentence when pain whooshes through me. I make a noise of surprise.
The doctor is not surprised. She holds up my IUD in triumph. Such a small, alien-looking object: a white plastic T, no bigger than a bottle cap. So strange to think it spent five years inside my body. Addressing the device, not me, she says, “Thank you for doing your job,” and in this moment of our shared appreciation for effective birth control, I will myself to forget that she has just yanked the thing from my body without warning while I was in the middle of a sentence about cancer. We do not return to the subject—I can’t even remember why I brought it up, except that it always comes up at these exams, the body’s reproductive capacity and the what-ifs of cancer stubbornly linked.
For now, what’s important is that the IUD is out. I’m about to turn thirty-eight, so I’ve come prepared for warnings and doubt, the jab of the word “geriatric” or the slightly more palatable “advanced maternal age.” But the doctor is matter-of-fact. You’re young and healthy, she says. You’ll probably be pregnant in six months.
Less than three weeks after my doctor’s appointment, I’m walking toward my office from the subway when I decide to send my husband a voice message.
This is not our usual practice, but we’ve been apart for weeks, and I know he’s driving—from Asheville to Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he’ll play his last tour show before heading home to Brooklyn—so I decide to rattle off a few items of note. I tell him the weather is good and almost cool, and that our friend’s baby, who has recently been to the ER, is doing OK. Then I tell him my period has arrived. My first period in five years. And so, game on, I say.
GAME ON, Eamon texts back in all-caps.
Around this time, I pick up a copy of Taking Charge of Your Fertility—a textbook-sized volume that will teach me things about my body that I’ll wish I’d learned decades earlier—from my local library. I imagine a librarian, or maybe just some kind of hovering, all-knowing library spirit, taking in the scene: Thirty-something woman, after months of leaving with novels in hand, recently switched to early motherhood memoirs, and now, here she is, diving all the way in.
But the library is quiet; no one cares what book I’m checking out or registers its significance. I’ve arrived just before closing, and a police officer stands by with a heavy-looking key ring. A young boy hovers near her and keeps asking eagerly if he can lock the door yet. “Not yet,” she tells him patiently. “Another two or three minutes still.”
The call about my stepmother’s cancer and the call about my mother’s cancer came, as far as I can recall, about six months apart. I was twenty-four and then twenty-five, in graduate school, living in Morningside Heights in Manhattan. Both times, I was home by myself.
The first call came not from my stepmother but from my father, his voice wobbling and small. With each recurrence it would always be my father. Though my stepmother and I talked somewhat regularly, he was always the bearer of this news.
My mother called me herself. She sounded apologetic. A mother, sorry to saddle her children with a new source of stress and sadness when my brothers and I were already half a year into those same feelings with our stepmother. A mother, wishing she could spare her children pain.
I apply myself to the task of getting pregnant the same way I would to any other new challenge: by being a very good student. I study the big book from the library and do exactly what it tells me to do. I order a special thermometer and begin tracking my temperature each morning to see when I’m fertile. I like the idea that I can treat my body’s slightest changes, usually mysterious to me, as scientific data, and then act accordingly. I’ve started tracking mid-cycle, so the numbers are confusing at first, difficult to interpret. In the early days I report this data to Eamon, but he, understandably, finds the spreadsheetification of our intimate life a little unnerving. It is a lot to take in first thing in the morning. He suggests more fun ways I could make my findings known.
This application of science is useful, but it’s not enough; it can tell me about the present but not the future. For the first time in several years, I begin pulling tarot cards—an obvious symptom of my profound resistance to uncertainty and lack of control. One day I try a three-card spread: past, present, future. For the future, I pull the Wheel of Fortune. Online, I read: The Wheel of Fortune card asks you to be optimistic and have faith that the Universe will take care of your situation in the best way possible. … If you are someone who likes to have control and stability, then the Wheel of Fortune may come as a shock to the system. This Tarot card suggests that factors outside your control are influencing your situation.
These words, I know, could apply to nearly any situation, but isn’t that the beauty of it? Have faith that the Universe will take care of your situation in the best way possible. My best friend, Zoe, has been reminding me repeatedly that I am not in control, that I will continue to not be in control, so I better get used to it. I do my best to place myself in the Universe’s care.
Once, the cancer call from my dad came as I was walking to the subway, on my way to one of my post-grad-school part-time jobs. Late winter or early spring.
It was my stepmom’s first or second recurrence. The information conveyed in these calls has blurred together in retrospect, and I can never quite wrangle the chronology: When did the recurrences start coming faster? When was the hysterectomy? When did we really know how bad it was? But all of that seems beside the point now, and I can’t bring myself to ask anybody in my family to fact-check my memories.
I stood frozen on the sidewalk, unsure whether I should keep walking toward the Franklin Avenue station and head to the Upper East Side, where I was to spend the afternoon reading the newspaper to an aging, mercurial, blind writer, or turn around and go home. The right feeling, the right answer, didn’t seem to exist inside me. No decision felt right or possible. The world inside of me had disconnected from the world outside of me, and I didn’t know what to do with the outside, where to put my body in space and how to care for it.
All I could think to do was outsource my emotional compass. I called Zoe, but on this particular day she didn’t pick up. I called Jaime, a close friend from grad school who lived just a few blocks away. She told me how sorry she was. “Go home,” she said. The care in her voice made my face crumple. It’s often these moments of care that break me down, not the bad news that precedes them.
I’m at a storytelling event at Joe’s Pub on an evening in late September when the bleeding starts. A friend of mine from Texas is performing, and I’ve invited along a newish writer friend, Catherine. A handful of years older than I am, Catherine has three teenage kids and so knows many things that I don’t yet know. She also knows, because some friendships move quickly past pleasantries, that Eamon and I have very recently stepped into the process of “trying” after years of uncertainty.
I finish off a veggie burger and fries, sauce sticky on my fingers, while listening to my Texas friend tell a delightful story about learning to two-step in her forties. A woman in her fifties is up next. She is in the middle of a story about becoming a comedian after getting an emergency hysterectomy when I feel a cramp and then a sudden gush. Denial kicks in: Maybe it’s fine. It’s clearly not fine. I get up and walk swiftly to the restroom, glad that I have a tampon with me.
Red, red blood, not the dark red of a period. I know this immediately even though I have only just had my first period in years, and as alarm bells go off in my mind, I begin to sweat, my heart suddenly clanging. It’s only day twelve of my cycle, as far as I’ve calculated, so it’s clear that something is wrong. I don’t know what the wrong thing is, but one possibility surfaces even as I try to push it down.
After the storytelling event, I tell Catherine what’s happening. She is concerned but calm and insists on walking me to the subway. I take the D train to Atlantic, intending to transfer to the 2 for the rest of my trip home, but as soon as I get off the train, I can feel that I am beginning to bleed onto my black jumpsuit—one of my favorite items of clothing despite the seven buttons I have to undo and redo all day. I exit the station and walk briskly into Target. The Atlantic Center Target is not an ideal place to go at a moment of worry bordering on panic, and I feel exposed and strange under the fluorescent lights. I buy panty liners for now and pregnancy tests for later, and head to the restroom to do damage control. Seven buttons down, body exposed in the cold gray light of the stall. Panty liners were a bad choice. I’ll just have to get home quickly. Seven buttons up.
When I emerge from the store there is no 2 train coming for ages, so I summon a Lyft. The car comes quickly, but the ride takes forever. The final stretch is a multi-block gauntlet of washboard, bumps, and holes. My street in Prospect Lefferts Gardens has been like this for weeks: regraded and uneven, not yet paved smooth. The driver maneuvers the car with such painstaking care that time itself seems to slow. I keep shifting my weight, hoping I’m not bleeding onto the seat.
At home I tell Eamon that I’m probably not pregnant, but I’ll take a test to be sure. Do I really believe this, or am I already rewriting the narrative, accepting that the period I had twelve days ago wasn’t a period after all, but rather heavy implantation bleeding, the first sign that something was wrong? Have I said it in an attempt to reason with myself, to try to make it true? As soon as the second line appears on the test, dark and definitive, it’s impossible to remember.
When Eamon and I look at the positive pregnancy test together, what passes between us is both rooted in what’s actually happening and somehow outside of it. We are two people in the midst of a small, unfolding crisis, our minds still catching up with the shock this evening has dealt us, but we are also any couple anywhere that has tried to get pregnant and suddenly discovered that this hope has been realized.
We can’t help the joyful feeling that rises up in both of us. Maybe it’s awe: Now we know that a pregnancy is possible, a fact both ordinary and miraculous.
We stare at each other across the kitchen table and it feels as though time is suspended, as if the alarming circumstances that brought us to this test have momentarily vanished, and I can see our present and possible future from somewhere just outside of my still-bleeding, still-adrenalized body. Hope is stubborn, and a little bit of magical thinking surfaces: Maybe it’s fine. Maybe this is somehow normal and someday we’ll laugh about it.
For just a moment, we are inside a bubble together, and in that bubble, instead of pitching toward what will be, tomorrow and in the weeks ahead, we are filled with what could be, maybe not now, but eventually. Inside the bubble there is love and a giddy sense of possibility. When reality rushes back in, I attempt to hold on to both.
I have never felt correctly calibrated to crisis. I’m always questioning the amplitude: Am I feeling more than the situation calls for? Or less? Am I in shock, or numb, or not processing this experience in real time? Am I supposed to?
Is it a crisis when, two months after the pelvic exam that violently rid me of my long-term birth control and just three weeks after my husband and I started trying, I begin bleeding heavily? How upset should I be, the next morning, when the ultrasound shows only a blank space, meaning most likely a chemical pregnancy, meaning over, meaning early miscarriage, meaning I had been exactly five weeks pregnant but am not anymore? What about, minutes later, when the nurse says Congratulations? Did she misread my chart? Does she not know what’s happening to me? Or does she know and still think this is the right thing to say? Too stunned to be anything but blunt, I reply, For having a chemical pregnancy?
God is good, she tells me. He does everything in his time. I’ll never know if she is attempting to recover from her mistake or doubling down.
My OB-GYN’s office is in Catherine’s neighborhood, so we meet for coffee after my ultrasound. When I tell her that the pregnancy test reminded me of Covid tests, she laughs and says for her it’s the reverse. I talk to Zoe on the phone while walking home through Prospect Park, feeling relieved, almost ebullient: Something unfortunate has happened, but at least I now know what it is, and I have made it through (I assume) the worst of it, and here I am, taking a personal day, doing nice things for myself. I stop to buy sandwiches and an enormous Italian donut for Eamon and me. In a fortuitously timed session that afternoon, my therapist praises my self-care. It’s also possible that I’m still in shock.
My thoughts through the evening are all variations on a theme: I am walking to the grocery store and also I am miscarrying. I am chopping an onion and also I am miscarrying. The reality of the thing happening inside me goes on alongside the reality outside of me. These realities feel almost entirely separate; maybe this refrain is my attempt at merging them.
I study the chart of my morning temperatures over the last few weeks. Where, in a healthy pregnancy, there should have been a steady rise followed by sustained highs, there are instead jagged switchbacks, then a drop, a confusing rise. I picture a bird trying to get off the ground. A weak creature attempting to fly but never making it high enough. It makes sense, now, that I found this chart so hard to interpret. Wings, haplessly flapping.
Miscarriage, more than one person reminds me, means my body is doing what it’s supposed to do. But that is decidedly not how it feels to be inside a body that’s having one. A few months ago, during a conversation about labor and birth, Zoe pointed out that we are used to pain signaling that something is wrong. It’s no wonder that we would find it jarring to experience pain when something is going right—the something in this case being putting an end to a pregnancy that wasn’t viable. A fact that I have to simply trust because despite how far the medical world has come, so much about pregnancy remains unknown, a wild and unexplored continent. I was briefly pregnant and am no longer; there is no way to find out more.
I think of my OB-GYN holding up my IUD and saying, Thank you for doing your job. I imagine saying that to my reproductive organs after multiple rounds of the most intense cramps I’ve ever felt, after bleeding so much that I wonder if I need an iron supplement.
For weeks, on every crowded subway, I scan the faces and wonder who else knows what I now know: how the sudden end of a pregnancy can pull the ground out from under you, how an event so ordinary it occurs in roughly a quarter of all pregnancies can still feel seismic and harrowing. How the world keeps swirling around you, relentless and indifferent, while your world shrinks down to the size of your body. How it feels to live both fully in that body and at its mercy.
My stepmother’s recurrences: there were so many. I was always far away, farther still once I left New York and lived across the country, the diagnoses always seemingly abstract. Impossible to comprehend how such a thing would feel inside of a body. My inability to hold all the details in my mind at once felt selfish, and maybe it was. But it was also the result of so much medical jargon and accumulation over the course of a decade. And perhaps there is a kind of selfishness that can’t be fully separated from self-preservation.
When the news arrived, the meaning always boiled down to this: It was back, and everyone knew that every time it came back, the outlook was worse than before. What else was there to know? Each time it seemed to return a little faster, the reprieves growing shorter. Each time, my family and I were left with a little less capacity for hope.
It’s not really possible to become inured to news of this kind. Each call ripped me momentarily from reality. But always, unaccountably, reality kept right on going.
Two days after the ultrasound, when I return to my OB-GYN’s office for a second blood draw to confirm that the pregnancy is over, I’m shown to a room by a nurse with long pink braids and tattoos on her arms. I like her immediately. She is kind and laid-back. She does not congratulate me or mention God’s plans.
This room isn’t like the exam rooms or the dim room where I had my ultrasound. It appears to be a room just for drawing blood, with two seafoam-green armchairs for this purpose. The chairs are institutional, ordinary, and immediately familiar. It takes me a moment to place the memory: They remind me of the one my mother sat in all those years ago when I went with her to her last chemotherapy session. That chair, in my memory, was sandy beige, roughly the color of the New Mexico desert outside the hospital windows.
A strange thing, to be pulled back to my mother’s cancer at this moment, as the nurse finds my vein and collects the blood that will confirm the end of a very short pregnancy. But then again, why wouldn’t I think of my mother?
Pregnancy, even one as short as this one, is a visceral reminder of that most fundamental reality, one that most of us suppress to get through the mundanity of our days: that death and life lie closer together than we like to think. My mother, knock on wood, has never had a recurrence. But even now, if I hear the slightest hint of weariness in a voicemail, I call her back right away.
My telehealth follow-up with the doctor is scheduled for the middle of a workday. Lacking a private place to talk at my office, I opt for the next best thing: the anonymity of the public. I pick up lunch, walk to a nearby square, sit on a bench. Then I calculate that a different bench is slightly more private, slightly farther from the nearest other people, and I move to that one.
By the time my appointment begins, people have occupied every nearby bench anyway. The last vestige of privacy disappears when I’m unable to get the telehealth website to connect to my headphones, my doctor’s voice instead blaring from my phone’s speaker. To live in New York City is to live in public, to live by a social contract of unusual intimacy: How many times have I cried on the subway? How many personal calls have I taken on the sidewalk, voice low, words vague? But the projection of what’s going on inside of me at this moment into the lunch hour of strangers feels like a greater violation than I’ve bargained for. I’m flustered and no longer want to ask the questions I’ve been planning to ask, questions I’ve written on a yellow Post-it that I can’t seem to find.
As the doctor advises about when my partner should and should not ejaculate—a flurry of instructions that seem to me medically dubious and which I promptly forget—I spot my Post-it. It’s on the bench I’d abandoned, where a young woman is now sitting and eating a salad.
The call—to review lab results that I’ve already seen and easily interpreted on an online portal—lasts less than ten minutes. Preconception counseling rendered, reads the note file for this appointment, which seems both inaccurate and beside the point. For this convenience and minor humiliation, I am charged $75.
What do I remember, now, about that day when I went with my mom to her last chemo session, when she sat in a beige chair as powerful drugs flowed into her body to keep the cancer cells from spreading? I remember that the nurses liked my cheery mom, that they were friendly and warm. It’s likely that my mom brought along a knitting project to occupy her hands, though I can’t say for sure.
I remember the half-formed thought that nagged me when I left the clinic in a rental car. I had a long drive ahead of me, from Santa Fe to Moab, Utah, a town I’d recently become interested in writing about. A uranium boom town, where, though no baseline study had ever been done, it was an open secret that many people had developed cancer after working in the mines and the local processing mill. The half-formed thought: something about driving from a chemo session to the site of a sixteen-million-ton uranium tailings pile. About the cancer stories that have webbed across the Southwest and the country since the dawn of the atomic age, about the violence of the substances that both cause and treat the disease.
Our bodies are never really separate from the environment they occupy. Our choices and circumstances, the ways we move through the world, become part of us. Normally, this vulnerability remains invisible to us—or to me, anyway. A mother, who is as sharply attuned to her child’s wants and needs as her own, knows all too well that the lines we draw around ourselves aren’t as solid as they seem.
I start bleeding heavily again on a Monday morning, nearly two weeks after the miscarriage began. This catches me off guard: I have always imagined a miscarriage as an isolated event, sudden and brief. No one has warned me that it might be an ongoing event, one that could unfold in my body over the course of weeks. Such a process seems out of proportion with the short span of the pregnancy. But my body is indifferent to my insistence that what is happening to me is minor and small.
It’s early October, summer maintaining an iron grip on the temperature dial even as the leaves begin to yellow, the light to soften. I trudge up the subway steps and continue my usual route to the office, but today is not a usual day.
The last thing I remember before the stranger shoves me on the street: I’m looking at a set of ads newly wheatpasted upon a row of plywood walls that I walk past several times a week. The ads are for a luxury brand, though I promptly forget which, and one of them features a popular Joan Didion quote about loving New York, black text on a white background. When I look ahead and see three people walking in my direction, I’m still thinking about the ad, wondering what Didion would have made of it.
As the three people get closer, I try to navigate around them, but the sidewalk isn’t wide enough for all of us. I move to the right, but the woman closest to me doesn’t move aside. Then her fist is against my chest, pushing me off the sidewalk.
“Jesus,” I say, too stunned to say anything else. “Jesus,” she mocks, leering at me, and then the three of them keep walking. I look around a little wildly, hoping to lock eyes with someone else who can bear witness to what has just happened. A man strides past, then a woman jogging, but nobody stops.
For the last two weeks, I have felt more permeable than usual, as if all of New York City can sense the churn of my body and the churn of my thoughts. To be shoved by a stranger is a shock and a corroboration: My vulnerability is visible and has made me an easy mark. I am not strongly tethered to the ground. I can be pushed out of the way.
The shove elicits what I gauge to be a true crisis response: I sit on a stoop, my face to my knees, heaving with sobs. Sobs as automatic as a reflex, as impossible to control as an infant’s. This crying feels like a valve opening all the way, an enormous release. It will take days, maybe weeks, to shut the valve.
Minutes before my father called to tell me my stepmother’s cancer had once again returned, Eamon and I were eating breakfast at our kitchen table when the floor began to move. A bright July morning in Santa Barbara, everything ordinary until it suddenly wasn’t anymore.
We stared at each other. In movies, an earthquake means violent shaking, breakables tumbling from shelves. But since we were far from the epicenter, the movement reached us in a different form: the floor zig-zagging beneath the table.
We were unharmed, not a thing out of place in our home, not even a picture frame askew. Still, the experience unsettled me, and I could feel it subtly reconfiguring my relationship with the world around me. For days afterward I distrusted the ground, now that I’d experienced the way it could turn as wavy as water under my feet.
We were still recovering our senses when my father called. Did I tell him about the earthquake, which seemed suddenly both irrelevant and remote, before or after he shared my stepmother’s news? I can’t recall.
A few weeks later, when the magazine I worked for folded and I was laid off, the silver lining was that I had time to go to New York and see my stepmother. There is a photo of the two of us standing on a Manhattan balcony, both of us in loose black dresses, the green treetops of Central Park gathered behind us. I didn’t know it would be the last time I saw her.
Every time I see the stranger who shoved me, she is sitting in the same spot: slumped on a step outside the Duane Reade at the end of the busy block where I work. She looks spent, her body gone slack, eyes dull. I can’t be positive it’s her, but I recognize her build, her coloring, her hair. No one else appears to notice her as they walk past, and she takes no notice of me.
Life has clearly dealt this woman a bad hand, much worse than mine. After the shove I kept thinking, kept saying, I am a very lucky person having a bad day. A very bad day in a string of difficult days, really. But even in the worst of it, I keep things in perspective, keep undercutting my own feelings. I am a very lucky person.
Eamon reminds me that being pushed on the street is assault. The scale-minder in my mind wants to object. It is such a small assault. On the scale of assaults, it is the most minimal there could be. This is not comforting, but I can’t stop myself from thinking it.
As crises go, miscarrying at five weeks is an extremely small one. It is a source of disappointment and discomfort, hormones gone haywire, but not a source of grief the way miscarrying further into a pregnancy might be. It is not a crisis like having an ectopic pregnancy is a crisis. It is not a crisis like cancer, like any of a million worst-case scenarios. Is it a crisis at all? If it is, it is a small and private one. A crisis contained, concealed within the body.
This is what I keep telling myself, the scale-minder’s minimizing refrain. And it is partly true: there are many worse things that can happen to a person, to a body. But what is happening to me refuses to be as minor as I am willing it to be. How could it be contained when the experience of miscarriage is one of expulsion, of the inside becoming outside? And how could it be concealed when it’s made me feel so exposed?
Zoe reminds me that it would be OK to be upset about being assaulted by a stranger on the street even if I were not in the middle of a miscarriage, though I keep insisting on the compounding effects. The two events will always be entwined; they lived in my body together.
Exactly a week after the morning of the shove, I walk up the same block on my way to the office. I don’t feel quite so permeable anymore. Still, my mood teeters easily; I blame this on my hormones working to get back to normal. I want to feel normal. More than anything, I feel impatient. I want to move forward, to hit the reset button. I want my off-kilter reproductive system to right itself, to begin a new cycle so we can try again.
I stay on the opposite side of the street, not exactly on purpose—I simply turn right immediately rather than waiting for the walk sign—but I don’t mind the distance between the scene of the shove and me.
Then I notice: The ad-covered plywood walls are simply gone. It has never occurred to me to wonder what was behind them or to imagine that the answer might be nothing: a vacant lot, an expanse of tall weeds springing from sandy-looking dirt.
How strange, to see behind what I’d taken to be solid. A hidden space, suddenly exposed.
In the brief window after the earthquake and the layoff and before the pandemic descended, we moved to Austin. After our first year there, our landlord—feeling, like the rest of us, cooped up after so many months of Covid-induced isolation—decided that he’d like to live in our house, which was more spacious than the one he’d been living in next door. Eamon and I were well-practiced at packing and moving together, but this time I was nearly useless. It was December, and my stepmother’s condition had been rapidly deteriorating. By Christmas Eve, she had entered hospice.
Though moving is always stressful, normally I can find some enjoyment in the Tetris of fitting books snugly into boxes, the sense of accomplishment as the shelves grow bare. This time I felt none of that. I lacked the drive to place things in boxes, lacked the energy to even be properly mad at our landlord for forcing us out.
For our next house on the other side of Austin, we sprang for a nice couch, olive green and deep. I was on that couch for the phone call in which my stepmother made me promise I wouldn’t fly to New York, in the midst of the still-raging pandemic, for her funeral. I was on that couch for the call when she enumerated the reasons she was proud of me and expressed her hopes for my future—a conversation I wish I’d recorded or at least taken notes on, but my inability to accept what was happening in real time, my feeling of frozenness as she spoke, prevented this. What is the correct response to a crisis that unfolds slowly, across a decade?
What I remember most vividly now: how emphatic she was when she urged me to really think about having kids and not to miss my chance. I was in my mid-thirties and generally avoided this subject with all of my parents.
My stepmother never had kids of her own. We were her kids, in a way, my brothers and I, though we’d been teenagers when she entered our lives. I can’t remember, in that call, if she told me she had regrets or if I could just hear it plainly in her voice. In the years that followed, I heard that voice in my head often: not just the urgency, but the way her words felt like both a warning and a wish.
During the miscarriage I’m aware that what’s happening will be rewritten by what happens next, that the future will flow in around this moment. The word “recurrence” looms—my thoughts keep snagging on the way it is used to describe both the return of cancer and the experience of multiple miscarriages. “Recurrent pregnancy loss” is the term. As Eamon and I begin trying again, I wonder if thinking so much about these different types of recurrence, these different kinds of losses, counts as a bulwark, a curse, or a kind of prayer.
At the same time, I wonder: If I get pregnant again, quickly and without complications, will this become a footnote? A blip I could almost forget? Or will it always matter that this happened?
Maybe it will always matter, because I feel right away that it has changed me. I keep thinking: I am changed but not as changed as I will be. The stakes are higher now, or rather, they were always this high, but now they are real to me. The word “trying” suggests agency and intent, but nothing has ever made me feel less in control. Have faith that the Universe will take care of your situation in the best way possible, I realize, is just another way of saying, God is good; he does everything in his time. The path to—and through—parenthood requires nothing less than total surrender to uncertainty.
Because it happened as soon as we started trying, the experiences can’t entirely be separated: We began trying, there was an early loss—the whiplash of going from not sure to suddenly sure to thinking I wasn’t pregnant to knowing, only as it ended, that I had been. These experiences delivered me into a new place, an in-between place, a passageway. A much bigger room, one I can’t picture, awaits on the other side.
Rebecca Worby’s work has appeared in Orion, Outside, Lit Hub, Guernica, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University and currently lives in Brooklyn. She is the editorial director of Reasons to be Cheerful, an online magazine founded by David Byrne.
