My Beast

How do you not compare yourself to others?

In reading Shape of a Mother today, I found a recent entry from a woman at 37 weeks bearing her third child, from twelve pregnancies. Nine lost children. Nine. She certainly deserves a lot more pity than me. Yet I wanted to weep, and not for her.

Nine. I can barely handle three, and those weren't as bad as for my niece, who lost two, including a stillborn at 23 weeks and a molar pregnancy at 10 weeks. She nearly had to go through chemotherapy for the resulting tumor, but it resolved in time. She now has a two-year-old daughter and no more plans for children. She's not even thirty yet.

Since last August's miscarriage, two feelings compete within me about having another child--the desperate fear of another loss, and the desperate want of another pregnancy. The second has been winning, the voices inside saying, I need to grow another child. I need a homebirth, MY homebirth. My children NEED to number three. My girls need another sibling--one each is not enough.

I visited Jacksonville eleven years ago this month. I was treated to an expenses-paid trip for niche-market editors, by the Convention & Visitor's Bureau, to entice us to write about their destination in our publications. (We were publishing Latina Bride then.) They took us to a popular beach festival, Fiesta Playera. I paid a fortune-teller five bucks to read my palm. I sat in the white tent, nearly fainting in the heat, missing the girl's words (she couldn't have been older than 19) for trying to catch the breeze sneaking in through the flaps. What do I remember from that ten minutes? That I have a short life-line, broken and feathered, telling of future illness and early demise. And oh, "you will have three children, all girls."

I have lived my life since then all hung-up around those words. How silly of me.

Paranoia feeds on the littlest details. Big deals don't mean much--they are too obvious, too loud and verbose when speaking to dark minds. No--subtle trends, false starts, small aches, tiny incongruities, pale hunches, ignorant slights, these things are what feed the monster of the deep, the lurker in the dark, the hulking sulking waiting breed of fear that hides behind rational feelings with its mouth wide ready to devour them and leave just fear and the urge to flee in its place.

The easy way would be to say that I'm done. No more pregnancies. No more miscarriages. No more... tears... hope... butterflies... babies... children...

What would be left? Disappointment. Fear. Pain. Failure. Broken-ness. Regret.

So I pull together every ounce of resolve, apply a numbing salve, drop the trap over the cave, shush the voices and follow the path on my palm, to try again.


I beat my fist
on my chest

the hole made there
weeps
moans

a voice cries out through it
NO!
No more!

How could I feel my
stomach in my throat
when all inside
is empty?