Maternal Heartache

Nausea.

Sore breasts.

A missed period.

Two pink lines.

These words, for some, bring along with it a sense of: Excitement. Elation. Anticipation. Planning.

Still others: Fear. Dread. Uncertainty. Anxiety. A different set of “What ifs?”

Sadly, not all pregnancies end happily. For some women, miscarriage. For others, stillbirth or infant death.

Go into your local bookstore and peruse the shelves, and you will see titles like: Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (Anne Lamott), Down Came the Rain (Brooke Shields), A Better Woman: A Memoir of Motherhood (Susan Johnson), Belly Laughs (Jenny McCarthy), A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (Rachel Cusk),

Many of the books on the shelves talk about the anticipation during the pregnancy, about the end result, the new family, the beautiful baby, navigating motherhood for the first time.

But what about those women who don’t come home with a baby in their arms?

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir

Elizabeth McCracken allows us into her world and puts her heart out on the table for us to see what it is like for a woman to lose a child.

Her words are raw.

Honest.

And her words strike a chord within women who have suffered through, and still suffer through the aftermath of a child’s death.

Reading this memoir made me want to hop on a plane to meet her.

To sit and cry with her.

One thing that she said in her memoir made me want to stand up and say, “Damn it, you’re absolutely right!”

Please allow me to share:

• “I thought stillbirth was a thing of history, and then it happened to me, and yet now when I hear of a baby dying I’m just as incredulous. You mean they STILL haven’t figured this out?” (138).

This passage resonated within me.

In 2005, when my son was exactly two months old, I sat in front of the computer, sobbing. An online friend lost her son two months before her due date. She had previously lost twins.

A cousin miscarried.

My mother miscarried. I remember that. I was eight. She lay on the couch spooning with me after coming home from the hospital.

A good friend lost her precious baby girl last December shortly after birth. Anencephaly. Two months later, her friend from high school lost identical twin boys at 19 weeks. A dear friend lost 3 sets of twins and three single babies.

There are blogs written by mothers who are trying desperately to make sense of why THEIR baby died. Why THEY have to go through this heartbreak. What IF they aren’t able to have a child of their own.

This post is for them.

This book is for them.

By someone who gets it.

Someone who has been there.

Someone who is still reliving that experience.

Below are the comments of some women who were willing to share their feelings and reactions to McCracken’s book. They have all lost a child. Some have lost more than one. Some were able to go on to have a pregnancy with a different outcome, a happier outcome. Some are still waiting for that opportunity.

All of them hurt.

All of them have days, weeks, or months where it takes every ounce of strength to just get out of bed and get through the day.

All of them think about what might have been. What should have been.

I asked these women to respond to different excerpts that McCracken wrote:

• “…I’m also thinking about how we all are connected as mothers…It’s hard to be with grief. We all so want to help and there is really nothing to do. My crazy adored Aunt Pauline’s catch phrase was “offer it up…” An infant in the ice cream shop almost brought me to my knees yesterday. I breathed her in and offered it up.”(82-3)

Jenny wrote:

“I think this passage speaks right to the core of what I’ve struggled with. The inability to escape that which I desire, without a way to satisfy the desire. There are children, babies, pregnant mothers everywhere. It’s just as hard if you’re infertile, or lost a baby and someone who’s gone through the same is now pregnant. It’s a vicious cycle of emotions portrayed brilliantly, and shown real. If I had a nickel for every time I saw a baby, and it ‘brought me to my knees.’”

Amy shares this experience:

"I lost my baby, Lydia,back in December. I experienced brokenness then, but thankfully I was surrounded by amazing loved ones. When I think about my friends during that difficult time in my life then, and even today, I think about the many ways they have supported me and kept me afloat these last several months. They *did* a myriad of things for me and my family like helping with the memorial service, bringing us meals, watching our son, running errands and *so* much more that I have appreciated immensely.

However, I can truly say it was how they *felt* for us and *grieved* with us that meant, and still means, more to me than anything. They have lifted us up in prayer countless times, listened, cried, comforted, and experienced my loss right alongside me. And, I know for a fact, that when they see a baby, especially a newborn baby girl, they offer up their grief and feel the pain and desire that *I* feel when I see a baby as well...longing to have one of my own, longing to have Lydia in my arms. Although none of my friends could have possibly felt the wound as intensely as I, Lydia's mother, did, their love and compassion was evident through it all and this is why I know I will call them friends for life."

McCracken mentions her feelings on what others could have done or said:

• “I don’t even know what I would have wanted someone to say. Not: It will be better. Not: You don’t think you will live through this, but you will. Maybe: Tomorrow you will spontaneously combust. Tomorrow, finally, your misery will turn to wax and heat and you will burn and melt til nothing is left in your chair but a greasy, childless smudge. That might have comforted me.”

Angela felt a connection with this excerpt, saying:

“That excerpt definitely speaks to me in a really base way.

Not that it’s similar, but during a rough breakup a friend asked me “Would anything he could tell you make it easier?” And the answer was always no. No matter what he said, we would still be breaking up and I would still feel horrible.

The feelings after our miscarriage were very similar – what I really wanted from them truly wasn’t possible considering no one on that side had ever been through what we had. Even my mom, who had gone through 2 miscarriages before I arrived, gave me the usual platitudes.

I wanted them to scream at the sky with me. I wanted them to drop everything and concentrate on how I felt, what I was going through, how broken I was inside. I wanted them to cry with me without once telling me how I’d learn to get past it or that it’d get easier as time went on.

Most of all, I wanted them to feel what I was feeling and to truly know how it changed me and how it would affect everything that came after. But that just wasn’t possible. And for that reason, I found myself almost always wanting to scream at them. Although I agree with the author – if someone could have said that the next day I’d burn up into a wisp of smoke, I would have happily welcomed it.”

Cara, who is writing a book about her own experience of losing a child, had this to say after reading the book:

“An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken is a bold candid memoir documenting the author’s first hand experience with pregnancy and stillbirth. I read it in two days as her writing style encourages page turning. I was especially moved by her comparison on page 91 of a motherless child to a ghostlike character from a gothic novel. Without question, only a woman who has lived through the hell of birthing a dead child can nod in understanding at this image.

In the same vein (pages 92-94), her description of how others, even people close to her, didn’t know how to broach the subject, or even offer a standard condolence threw me back to my own postpartum days when family and friends would attempt to say something heartfelt but could only manage to look at my soft belly where Emma used to live.

• (pg.148) “But you cannot. You cannot. You cannot change time. You can’t even know that it would have made any difference: a baby can be born alive and still die. A baby can be born sick, and get sicker, and then die.”

As a writer and a mother telling my own story of the days and minutes leading up to the horrific news that our baby was dead, McCracken’s description of how she would love to create a gap in time by adding white space to her page and re-writing the words her midwife said brought me to tears. They evoked my own convoluted memory of labor and my unwavering belief that if I embraced excruciating pain I could breathe life back into my baby and in the moment of delivery she would arrive screaming and kicking, the miracle of all miracles. “

For Christine, this excerpt hit home:

• “I am a horror story, an example of something terrible going wrong when you least expect it, and for no good reason, a story to be kept from pregnant women, a story so grim and lessonless it’s better not to think about at all.” (McCracken)

“This passage rang particularly true with me. After my daughter died, I had a few people tell me that they didn’t tell their pregnant friends about my daughter dying because they didn’t want to upset them. I can’t tell you how much that hurt on top of the pain I was already inflicting upon myself. I felt like a freak, alone, and that my body failed me and my baby. I didn’t know what was worse: imagining my friends and co-workers whispering to each other in hushed voices, “Did you hear about Christine? Her baby died right before she was born!” or to think that my story was so horrible, it shouldn’t even be mentioned because it might be contagious. It’s a terrible thing to be a mother to a dead baby. Not only do I have to deal with the agony of my loss, which is invisible to most people, but I have to deal with the fact that I now make most people uncomfortable to be around me. I am “that woman whose baby died.” While she calls herself a horror story, I have referred to myself as a freak over these past nine months. It’s just semantics though, it’s all the same thing. Ms. McCracken is just more eloquent than I. I am so thankful she wrote this book, it makes me feel a little less alone.”

When McCracken found herself pregnant again after her son Pudding died, visits to the doctor were still painful. She writes:

• “When I returned for every successive appointment, the pregnant women in the waiting room made me sad: there they sat in the present, dreaming of the future. I couldn’t bear watching. I wanted a separate waiting room for people like me, with different magazines. No ‘Parenting’ or ‘Wondertime’ or ‘Pregnancy’, no ads with pink or tawny or pearly smiling infants. I wanted ‘Hold Your Horses Magazine.’ ‘Don’t Count Your Chickens for Women.’ ‘Pregnant for the Time Being Monthly.’ Here I was, only in this second, and then the next, nothing else. No due dates, no conversations about “the baby” or what life would be like months from now. No “This time will be different” or “Listen, it will all be worth it when you hold your child in your arms.” What I wanted, scrawled across my chart in shaky physician’s cursive: *NOTE: *do not blow sunshine up patient’s ass.”

Antigone related to this passage, having been in that waiting room more than once. She writes:

“I don’t remember the details of any day following the stillbirth so much as I do the day I went in for my postpartum checkup. I sat in the waiting room surrounded by happily pregnant women rubbing the bellies which contained still living children. A toddler played with building blocks nearby. I wanted to hide, to bury my head in the sand of a magazine. I still remember how frantically I dug through a stack of parenting magazines looking for something I could hide behind which wouldn’t force me to look at pictures of smiling babies.

Liz has got it dead on. We need a separate waiting room, separate magazines, and charts with great big flags. What happened to us and to our children isn’t okay and isn’t something we’re just going to get over with the next positive pregnancy test.”

It’s obvious by these responses that McCracken’s memoir is something that resonates in the hearts of those who are living with the memories of a child lost.

If you’re traveling down that road, this book will definitely show you that you are not alone in your heartache.

If you know of someone who has lost a child, this book should be something to pick up and read yourself. There might be something within its pages that help you give support to a grieving mother.

Here are links to others who have reviewed the book:

Megan of www.chikune.com/blog
Tricia of http://www.libraryqueue.blogspot.com
Corinne of www.corinnesbookreviews.blogspot.com
Swapna of http://www.Skrishnasbooks.blogspot.com
Luanne of http://www.luanne-abookwormsworld.blogspot.com
Carrie of http://www.TheBookGirl.net
Susan of http://www.38thavedivareaders.blogspot.com/
Allison of http://www.AllisonsAtticBlog.blogspot.com
Bethany of http://www.exlibrisbb.blogspot.com/
Marie of www.bostonbibliophile.com
The Kool Aid Mom of http://www.thekoolaidmom.wordpress.com
Nicole of http://www.linussblanket.com

http://abookbloggersdiary.blogspot.com/
http://bookingmama.blogspot.com/
http://blog.literarily.com

*Thank you to Hatchette Book Group for the opportunity to review this book.

I will be giving away three copies of this book. If you are interested in winning a copy, please leave a comment about why you’d like to read it. Winners will be posted on Sunday, October 5.