Delicate Condition

by Danielle Valentine

A part of me even thought maybe I deserved it, that things were going too well, that I was overdue for some trauma.

Of course, that’s not what happened. But sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t stop my mind from obsessing, wondering if I should have done anything differently, it’s nice to imagine that it did.

Pregnancy books all said women who experienced morning sickness were less likely to have a miscarriage. It put me in the bizarre position of hoping for the pain, the nausea.

After two years of trying to get pregnant, my body was more of a mystery to me than ever.

My baby will never cry, I thought. My baby is dead or else it’s dying right now, inside of me. It’s dying and I can’t do anything. I can’t protect it.

I knew it was my baby. My baby wasn’t inside of me anymore. I was no longer pregnant.

I felt a moment of fury, followed by numbness. What did it matter? What did anything matter?

Tiny onesies, I thought, a sob building in my throat. Baby hair and baby smiles. All of it, gone.

The only way to stop that from happening was to start again, to get back some small portion of what we’d lost. “Don’t you want to keep trying?”

“I don’t have time to wait, Dex.” It felt important to me that he understand this. Maybe this would seem strange to someone else, but I had an almost frantic desire to start trying again. It felt like time was moving too fast, slipping away. If we didn’t act now, do this now, it was never going to happen, I could feel it.

And, in the end, nothing I did or didn’t do even mattered. I still lost the baby, and no one could tell me why.

I stared at the vitamins for a moment, feeling sick. I’d taken them religiously. One vitamin along with a cup of hot water and lemon at the same time, every single morning for almost two years. Not that it had done me any good.

Instead, I blurted, my voice choked with fresh tears, “Can you get me my baby back?”

The pain that rose inside of me was different from the pain I’d felt during the miscarriage. It was different from any pain I’d ever felt. It was like someone had pulled my heart out of my chest. I wasn’t a person anymore, just a shell, a body.

I was tired of being strong just because it made things easier for everyone else.

She was here because she’d been diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome—a diagnosis she’d had to fight for, considering her previous doctor was convinced she couldn’t get pregnant because of her weight.

as if all their fertility problems could be solved with a salad and a jog around the block.

“To be honest, I…don’t really buy any of this. How is sitting in a room filled with a bunch of other sad people going to help me? I don’t need to talk about how I can’t have a baby. I need…I don’t know. Maybe I need a new body, one that works the way it’s supposed to.”