The Unexpected Nightmare

by Omwisseling

Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight:
Joys in anothers loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heavens despite.
--William Blake

This summer, I came face to face with a nightmare I was not even aware had taken up residence in the back rooms of my mind. For twelve years, I had known that I would never have children. Damage from rape as a teenager was supposed to have precluded that possibility. At fifteen, truly, this seems a small concern indeed. Given the situation at the time, I believe an only half-sarcastic "great" may have passed my lips.

And so I went on about my life. I lived in six countries in a fewer number of years, I pursued every opportunity that came my way in that seat-of-your-trousers manner that only the singleton in academia can manage. Then, as your irritating relatives all tell you will happen--in that smug, condescending tone which over-30-and-married people manage so well--I met someone.

Not just any someone, someone who had me by turns homicidal and enraptured. The kind of partnership one can really learn from, if one is willing to remove one's head from one's bum and make an investment. It was, unfortunately, in one of the raging phases that we found out I was pregnant.

We fought extensively for days, debating the relative merits of termination (of both the baby and our relationship), and making a go of it. My partner, already in his thirties and well established, was ecstatic. He was practically crowing from the rooftops when we decided to keep the baby. I could not find the words to tell him how a huge part of me strenuously desired not to be pregnant, not to be in this position, that this was never supposed to happen to me, that there must have been a mistake.

I was about five weeks along when we found out. My tongue seemed to cement more firmly to the roof of my mouth with every passing day. I could not talk to my partner--who was to become my husband--about the darkness that seemed some days to crowd even into the corners of my vision. Naturally, as is human, he began to formulate his own theories for the reasons behind this. I stayed away from our flat at nights, sitting instead in the garden of a friend, trying to balance my mind. I thought I would literally go mad (morning sickness was not helping). A good friend who is also a doula rubbed my belly and took as much of my worry for her own as she could.

Meanwhile, in my mind, small, lumpen creatures scurried forward to take centre stage. Some were predictable: average-sized, with clear voices that said "But your degree!" "But your career!" "But your father is so ill!" "But you were in a screaming row just yesterday!" "But you aren't married !" (I was surprised by this one.) These were easy to sort, to speak to, to corral to one side. What was left were inky miscreants who lisped and whispered: "A chance to be just like your mother after all!" "You'll smother her, you who have lived some of the horrors the world has in it." "You would condemn someone to suffer in this environment?" "Just what we need, another crazy mother just like yours!" "You? Raised by a nanny? What business have you with a baby?"

"Your body is not up for this task, something horrible will happen . . . " This last in a hiss that sounded like a promise.

I shook. This was never supposed to happen to me. I tried to articulate my terror to my partner, but seemed able to manage only staccato bursts of anger. Any worry, any misgiving seemed to injure him, as if in having reservations I was somehow doubting him, unsure of his abilities, thinking him unfit, saying he would not be a good father. He could not have been farther from the mark. It was crowded enough in my head, hurting him was more than I could stand.

So I shut up. We drank our champagne, I bought baby books, we moved my things from my flat to his. He told most everyone he knew. I had quiet, heavy conversations with a very few girlfriends. He was thrilled, constantly on the phone to his dad. I made secret, panicked calls to my GP in my home country. She was as apprehensive as I, so much so that she advised termination and taking a year to get in peak shape and do in vitro, if this was something I really thought I wanted.

I felt wracked with guilt that his sister and her husband, in the middle of fertility treatments, could not have what we had somehow managed by accident. I wondered what the punishment was for ignoring such an obvious miracle.

I chastised myself for being so negative. What was so wrong, after all, with having a committed relationship and a child on the way?

Apparently everything, though I had not realised it. I had never given any thought to having a family. I lived in the knowledge that it could not happen for me. Excepting two, my friends were all single women in their 30s, ranked at the top of their fields. Spur-of-the-moment visits, entire days in libraries or institutions, these were freedoms I had thought to enjoy forever. I had set the course of my life without even thinking about it, closed off an option in my mind entirely. Never would I have to wrestle with messing up my children as my parents had theirs, never would I face their challenges.

Entirely unawares, I had created a nightmare situation for myself. I often wonder how rape crisis could deal differently when helping young women who have apparently lost their fertility. In working to move forward from one nightmare, how many others do we unwittingly create from our best intentions?

On sunny days, in the park with a friend, I could remember some of the dreams I had once had about having children. I imagined teaching baby sign, as I had been taught. Swimming or cooking together. Nursing in my grandmother's rocking chair. How my partner might sound, reading and singing to a daughter. Reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Denis Lee, wondering where the clothes I had saved all those years ago might be. Cookie making, figure skating (speed skating, if the rest of the Netherlands had their way). Staying home, spending real time, as my parents were never willing or able to do. Wondering how the cat would react to someone even more demanding of attention than she. How we would manage a baby bath in our awkwardly shaped bathroom. I started and destroyed baby blankets until the wool was permanently kinked. I spent afternoons after work visiting local daycare centres, pregnancy yoga classes, la leche league listings and all of that ilk.

Somehow I could never choke it out over supper, tell him what I'd been doing that day, how I was trying. Three weeks later, I started having horrible nightmares of miscarriage. Every night I would jerk awake, paralysed, sure that there was blood everywhere. I started sleeping in the spare bedroom (partially for distance-related morning sickness reasons, admittedly). My doula listened with worry in her eyes to my dreams. I bungled another attempt to talk to my partner.

We had a horrible fight, accusations flying everywhere. I wasn't open, I didn't want to be pregnant, neither of us was taking things the way we should, my not wanting to tell everyone until I'd passed 12 weeks was just cowardly, on and on. The neighbours must have thought banshees had arrived. We went to bed with bruised feelings all around.

At three-thirty in the morning, I woke up in the worst pain I'd ever experienced. I stumbled downstairs and hunted for my PMT analgesics, lay on the cold floor of the bath in a near stupor. Forty-five minutes later, the pain was less, there was no blood. I went back upstairs, he hardly stirred. At six, I woke again. Worse than before. This time I managed to get downstairs, but no further. Holding on to the door frame of the spare room, I felt my legs turn to water; my vision swam and I was on the floor.

I thought I was yelling loudly for F, but in reality I must have sounded very feeble indeed. I thought I heard him answer, but he didn't come. Later he told me he had heard nothing, but I thought he was punishing me for our fight, thinking I was being dramatic. I was still there when he came down in the morning. An emergency appointment with the GP had us thrown in a taxi to the local hospital. A day of waiting, needles, ultrasounds, silence.

Still we could not talk. Never in my life had I not been in a hospital alone, and I had always wanted to have had someone with me. I had the opportunity to have a small dream come true in the midst of a nightmare, but I dropped the ball. I couldn't include him the way he needed to be included, too many years of being intensely private kicked in. The whole day passed in that nebulous place between sleep and awake, where you are in yourself but can also seem to watch, standing aside.

Watched as we drifted further and further apart, saw the threads that connected us, connected me to my baby stretch ... stretch ... snap.

Any further and I would have been severely ill. As it is, I have the chance to continue my dreams as they existed before, but they no longer seem so sweet.