This Used to Be Us

by Renee Carlino

He doesn’t imagine the women they would’ve become every time he looks at his own body in the mirror.

Once my back-to-back miscarriages were public knowledge at work,

I was full of dead babies and spiders.

“That’s how it always is, because divorce is final and everyone knows marriage is not,” he said.

We’re getting a divorce, not making a promise to each other. It’s final. It’s the end of a promise, a union. It’s a death.

surface. If we were meant to be, wouldn’t we have survived that?”

There were Dani’s two miscarriages, when I almost cried, but not from the loss as much as from seeing Dani’s pain, physical and emotional. And then the birth of our two

finally. It was the finality of it. The death in it. The mourning of something I actually loved.

Even music is too strong of a reminder for him, so he gave me his entire record collection.

How do kids break our hearts, put them back together, and then teach us how to be good human beings again just by virtue of their own virtue?

I’m a firm believer in messing up your kids just enough to give them a sense of humor.

“A fetal doppler is so that we can know if the baby is dead inside of me.”