I walk across the expanse of lawn, skirts swaying over freshly mowed grass. I rarely wear skirts anymore, but it felt appropriate for Mother’s Day. Even dressed as I am a part of me wants to gather the numerous small mounds of bruised blades and mangled dandelions to mulch around new growing things, but it’s been six years now since this day has been about life for me. I reach out for life anyway, for connection; expanding as I only can in large green spaces, like a leaf unfurling to soak in sun. There is a great blue heron gliding jerkily along the edge of the pond across the creek. It has seen me too, of course, but has not yet decided to fly off. I take that as proof that I am calm. I can be calm, even in grief. The calm is not inside me yet, but I am here to find it. I am here to find a way to survive tomorrow, once again.
The tree is eye-level now, red baby leaves still mostly tight and covered with fuzz, red-brown trunk both sturdy and delicate with it’s thin, peeled and curling outer layer. It’s a paperbark maple, a slow growing tree that can live a long time. We planted it here on my in-law’s property three years ago now. It was a risk to attach her loss to another life like this, but I needed to have something to watch grow up. And, after moving out of state, we needed a place to bring our missing. If I close my eyes I can see the cemetery, the tiny island of grass surrounded by asphalt that they called the Angel Section. The stones are small and all placed unusually close together. This ground is full of dead hope. The people who come here bring all kinds of things with them: baby blankets, toys, infant shoes, pictures, and so many pinwheels flashing in the sun. Rena loved this place when she was small, so many things to look at. I was constantly watching to see where she picked up that plastic truck, that doll, that pinwheel, hoping I could return everything to its proper place before we left. Sometimes we brought things too, mostly flowers, once a lovely glass hummingbird rain gauge. It was stolen within weeks. I hated that cemetery, with all it’s trappings of life abandoned. I hated the black iron gates that closed well before sunset. The last I saw of it was those gates, at midnight, illuminated by my car’s headlights, a day or two before we moved. I pressed my face against the bars, cool in the warm august night. I imagined what it would be like to fall apart completely, to be carried away sobbing and shrieking by uniformed officers responding to “a disturbance at St. Paul’s.” I wondered if we should have had her cremated, that tiny body reduced to an impossibly small amount of ash, so we could take her with us. I felt the horror of my thoughts, of what becoming a mother had brought me to. I left after a half hour of silent tears.
A twig on her tree is dead, so I break it off. It is fragile as old bone. I bend it in half, snap all but one connecting strip of bark. It is helpful for me to have something to play with in my hand. My chest is tight with the longing, the unfairness, the shame of having failed to grow a child who could survive outside of me. And always, underneath it all, the deeper shame of knowing I hadn’t wanted her. Only seventeen months between her and Rena, my oldest. Two babies at once. I couldn’t do it. I was so angry at my body for betraying me, morphing around another life that fed off my energy, taking most of what little nourishment and fluid I could persuade it to accept. Maybe if I hadn’t been so angry…maybe if I had bought the good multivitamins sooner…maybe if I hadn’t been so depressed I could have eaten better, drank more, done…something…differently…I strongly resist pointless events. Always, somewhere, there is a reason, right? There must be a way to prevent bad things from repeating. My mother suggested blood tests. Maybe I was deficient in something crucial? Yes, I thought, that is obvious. I must be deficient. If a mother loses a baby, whose fault could it be except hers or God’s? I was told there was no point in blood tests. Anencephaly is rare, cases pretty much even across all studied countries, developed or not. A cause has never been found. I decided to blame God instead.
A red winged black bird lands in a tree on the bank of the creek. The branch bobs under the force of its landing, causing the bird to shift its wings for balance, red patch flashing under the bright sun. It was a day like today when we buried her, the hot sun melting us through our dark clothes. Her casket was white and blinding in the sun, obscenely tiny under the spray of flowers. I don’t remember what kind of flowers. My husband’s parents and all of his siblings had made the six hour drive. My family was there, plus my aunt, who had flown in from New Mexico. My midwife and her daughter, who had been my birth attendant. Two representatives from the funeral home. It felt both comforting and like a trial by fire. Driving home afterwards my husband had rolled down the window, stuck his arm out, sang along to the radio at the top of his lungs. There was release in having the details settled, the ceremony over. We could find a way to move on now. I watched him as he sang, wanting the relief to be contagious, wanting to understand his willingness to go on with life while carrying the pain. I hoped I would be able to feel it, too. I hoped he and Rena would be enough to pull me through. I hoped.
A fish’s mouth lips at the surface of the pond, the body a dark shadow beneath that carries it to safer, deeper waters at my approach. Two mallard ducks cross to the other side, wary. The heron has already flown away. I pick my way around the narrow end of the ellipse, eyes down because of the muskrat holes. Water fills some of the holes, the pond swollen with spring rain and runoff. A fat tadpole wiggles away from my approaching shadow, diving underground, underwater. This pond is a womb, so many lives begin here. Many of them can not live outside it. Some will, one day. Some choose to stay. The muskrat has something green and leafy in its mouth. I’ve never seen it before. It is just a red-brown patch of wet fur and black eyes casting a narrow V behind it, and between the legs of the V the undulating ribbon of it’s tail. I walk slowly, watching the muskrat swimming just ahead of me, parallel to the bank. I take its continued presence as another sign I am calm. Abruptly it dips and is gone. I feel the sun pressing down on me, heating the fresh sunburn across my shoulders. The burn feels good just now. There is sometimes relief in pain that has a fixable, preventable cause. Why do I always think I don’t need sunscreen in May? The ground is squishy with last week’s rain. I am flinging droplets of mud onto my calves and hem with every step. I gather my skirt in one hand, a practiced gesture from a youth spent attempting to embody modest femininity. At least it has some uses. I pass the boulder by the near end of the pond where we took pictures, my husband and I, when we were engaged. My cheeks are bright in those photos, ruddy with happiness and the chill of the autumn wind. We had our path laid out neatly before us. Until that night, six year ago, we knew exactly what the future held for us. Naivety is a girl who thinks life will be perfect because she’s followed all the rules and God owes her.
I cross the creek again, back on solid ground. I buried my baby’s placenta with this tree, the last thing I had of her, or of me as I was before. I remember watching my dark blood soaking into the hole we dug for the tree, blood that had been frozen and thawed. It felt appropriately gruesome, like birth. I planted a part of myself with the sapling we put in the ground, and it is growing up, not quite straight, but tall and strong. She would be six tomorrow, my baby; tall enough that I wouldn’t have to bend much to wrap her up, big enough to fill my arms, old enough to be very excited about the day at a farm we have planned for tomorrow. She would hold the baby rabbits and kids and chicks, maybe even a piglet, and I would take pictures of her big smiles the same as I do for her sisters. She would be the middle child, Rena’s best friend, Lee’s advocate when Rena gets bossy.Teresa means “harvest,” maybe she would be my gardener. Resa we were going to call her, Rena and Resa, our almost twins. Rena feels the loss of her sister, although she isn’t old enough yet to imagine what life would be like if Teresa were here. On days like today I do that for her. The enormity of it swells up and I am finally overcome. Tears and gasps, the pain like labor, breathing through it again and again and again. I can breathe. I fill the emptiness of waiting for that first gasping newborn cry, the mother’s reward for all the pain and work and discomfort, with my own breathing. I breathe in the May air, thick with damp, clinging newness. I breathe in the sun, newly hot once again. I breathe in the scalding memories and the tenderness of healing wounds. I breathe out calm and I feel it; strength to survive tomorrow, hope to last another year.
I touch the delicately roughened trunk of the baby tree, pluck a piece from a decorative curl of onionskin bark, place it and the bit of twig I still carry in my pocket. I imagine a V stretching out behind me as I glide back across the yard, skirt rippling in the wind that dries my tears.