underneath it all

For months there was a thrum under everything I did: my fault? My fault? An insistent birdsong. It was so constant I forgot what it was.

One of the first things the doctors say after a miscarriage is that it was nothing you did that caused it, but they’re trained to say that. They can’t know everything I’ve done.

For example, when I was pregnant, I lifted a box out of my car that I thought was empty, and too late realized it was full of stuff, and to manage its weight, I shifted it onto my stomach, just a little. I’ve replayed that moment a million times. What was so important about lifting it myself, that I couldn’t have asked someone else to do it? Why wasn’t I more protective, why didn’t I remember, why didn’t I move like I had a life to defend? They say that in the first trimester, that sort of brief pressure to the stomach doesn’t even impact a pregnancy. But there is a dark voice in me that overrides anything on the Mayo Clinic website, anything a doctor tells me. My fault. My fault. 

After that doctor’s appointment, once I was able to speak, one of the things I wanted to tell people was that the whole “thinking it was my fault” thing wasn’t one of my issues. We didn’t need to spend any time in that country. I really thought that, for a long time. Now I wonder if I’ll ever leave.

The online forums are full of stories about women who got pregnant again, even before their next period. I read a lot of these. I shoveled them up like a monster munching bones, ravenous for them. It would be like it hadn’t even happened. I would go from pregnant to not pregnant to pregnant, and this dark chasm that had split our lives in two would be nothing more than a blip, a brief stop on the road to where we were really supposed to end up, anyway.

But I didn’t get pregnant the first cycle. I could barely tell there was a cycle. After months of tracking my cycles religiously, I was used to their predictability – now none of the signs made sense, everything seemed random. It was like staring into a murky pond. 

To get a sense of what was going on below the surface, I started taking ovulation tests every day. The first five I took must have been from a faulty or expired box – none of them worked, not even the control strip. I threw them away and bought a new set – the kind that come in a bag of 100. Those came up negative, negative, negative. I googled it to see if I was doing it wrong. Tried taking them at different times of day, then always the same time of day, then drinking more water, then drinking less water. Negative. Every day, hunched on the tub just like I’d been when I took that pregnancy test, staring at a strip that looked just like a pregnancy test, waiting to see what answer my body was giving me. No, the test said, over and over. No. No matter what I told myself, it felt like failing. My fault. My fault. A new heartbeat to override the one I’d lost. 

For a long time, it was so constant, so subterranean, that I couldn’t even really admit to myself — or anyone else — how loud it was in my head.

For a while, around the time I ovulated, I’d stop drinking. It was more like holding my breath. Just in case. When I got my period, I’d say something like okay fuck it we’re drinking tonight! with a forced cheer that sounded nothing like my voice. I’ve never been a heavy drinker, or the kind of person who “parties.” But those nights, I’d glug wine into my glass as full as I could. I’d order the next drink too fast to think about it. The first couple times, I convinced myself I was having fun. Until one night, as I poured another drink, I heard a thought crystal clear inside my head: 

It doesn’t matter, I thought. I’m alone in here.

The thought was so profoundly cruel, so reminiscent of the Depression Voice I’ve worked my whole adult life to fight off — that my partner and my friends have helped me battle, for years — that I couldn’t help but be shaken into some kind of clarity. The next month, I stopped drinking entirely, and I haven’t gone back since. Not because drinking is “bad,” or because it “fixed” anything, but because it had become a way to torture myself, and I knew that no matter what little voices were whispering in my head, I couldn’t keep following them down that particular road.

I have learned —just a little — to be kinder to myself, mostly by copying as closely as possible the way my partner and friends talk to me. It’s not easy, but at least I am coming to understand how much I don’t want the alternative.

One thing has surprised me, though. It turns out that when you let go of the conviction that it’s all your fault, what’s waiting for you on the other side might be even worse: accepting the fact that you can’t control any of it.