When I was 8 years old, my mom, who was about 20 weeks pregnant, flew to Boston with my then-stepdad. She returned without a bump or a baby.
When she got home, she was devastated. So was I, because I’d always wanted a little sister. I’d been thrilled when my mother’s belly started to grow, and people began congratulating her everywhere we went.
She’d remarried less than a year before that, and the transition of having a new man in the house had been tough for my younger brother and me. A new baby was something we could all rally around, so it was especially difficult for all of us when my mom started experiencing complications.
At the beginning of her second trimester, right after she’d started telling people she was pregnant, she began bleeding and cramping. I spent a lot of afternoons at my cousin’s house while my mom attended doctor appointments. She’d return to pick me up, and I’d find her whispering in the driveway with my aunt. One night after dinner, we had a family meeting where she told us that the baby had a heart problem and would need surgery right after it was born.
The bleeding continued, and there were more doctor appointments and late-afternoon pickups and whispered conversations. A few weeks later, my mom went to Boston. When she returned, a new word was added to my second-grade vocabulary: miscarriage. At the time, I was old enough to know the baby was gone, but too young to understand or remember any specifics.
Still, my mom’s “miscarriage” shaped my perception of pregnancy. I understood its fragility.
Courtesy of Sarah Hunter Simanson
In the fall of 2017, just as the Memphis air was turning from humid to crisp, my mom and I went for one of our regular morning walks. She was between chemo treatments for the stage 4 cholangiocarcinoma she was battling, and I had just taken my first positive pregnancy test. I hadn’t told her yet. My mom didn’t even know my husband and I were trying. I was only about four weeks pregnant, and I was afraid of getting her hopes up at a time when she really needed things to believe in, so I decided to wait to share my news until my doctor detected a heartbeat at the six-week appointment and I had an ultrasound picture to show her.
As we walked under the canopy of brown and burnt orange leaves, I asked her questions about when she was pregnant with me: “How did you feel? What was it like? Did it hurt?” This…
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