Let's Pretend This Never Happened (20 page)

Collette looked at me with sad, dead eyes, her innocence scarred forever. “So what about
this?”
she asked as she enlarged a photo of a one-legged girl in a bikini. “Is
this
porn?
Or is it not?
Because I can’t even tell anymore.
I mean, it must be porn, because it’s in his porn folder, but I just don’t know. It’s a girl with one leg, who’s waterskiing. Is it supposed to be empowering? Is it pornographic? I DON’T EVEN KNOW.”

I didn’t have an answer for her. When you can’t tell whether something’s porn or not anymore, that’s when you know it’s time to go home. Or to quit. Possibly both.

IT WOULD BE PARTICULARLY
fitting (and easy) to finish this chapter with a paragraph about how I personally ended my career in HR because I lost my ability to tell porn from real life, but that would be a lie, as I actually quit because I wanted to give myself a year to find out whether I could be a writer. I told my boss that I had a book inside of me, and that I needed to get it out even if I had to squeeze it through my vagina. Because that’s exactly what the world needs. A book squeezed from my vagina.

But it must have been a worthwhile bet, since you’re now holding that very book in your hands. Unless this is the year 2057, and you’re a police detective holding this stained, unfinished manuscript as you stand over the
body of the lonely elderly woman who was found partially eaten by her own house cats, and this chapter ends with a handwritten note that says, “Note to self: Find a more upbeat way to end this chapter, because being eaten by cats is depressing, and also a terrible running theme to have in a book. Also, buy cat food and pay the insurance on the hovercar.” If this is the case then I apologize to you for the state of my apartment. Please know that I was
not
expecting company, and that I usually never have dirty dishes in the sink
or
partially eaten bodies on the floor. I can assure you this whole day is a total anomaly for me.

1.
Did you know that “ostensively” isn’t a word? Because I didn’t, and apparently I’ve been using the wrong word for my entire life. Apparently the “correct” word is “ostensibly.”
Ostensively
.

If You See My Liver, You’ve Gone Too Far

*Spoiler alert: Bambi’s mom doesn’t make it.

Okay, get prepared, because this chapter is kind of depressing and is about dead babies. I know.
Ew
. But they don’t
all
die, and in the end everything is fine. Mostly. If you just forget about all those dead babies. Or if you call them fetuses. Calling them fetuses makes it feel more clinical and less sad, but I’m pretty sure I get to call them whatever I want, because they’re
my
dead babies. And no, I’m not calling them “babies” instead of “fetuses” for any political reason, because I’m actually totally prochoice and you can do whatever you want with your body, but stop hijacking this chapter, asshole, because this is about me. God,
you have a problem
. Also, my editor is all, “WTF are you doing? How are you going to build up suspense if you just gave away the entire chapter in the first paragraph? Don’t you know about the six elements of drama?” and I’m all, “No, but I know that when I go see a sad movie I always want someone to run in right before the sad scene and be like, ‘Okay, Bambi’s mom’s about to bite it, but it’s
totally
going to be okay in the end. Don’t freak.’” And that’s what I just did for you.
You’re welcome.
My editor just pointed out that I just ruined
Bambi
for everyone who hasn’t seen it, but IT’S FUCKING
BAMBI
, y’all. It’s totally not my fault if you haven’t seen
Bambi
yet. It’s been out for
years.
Hey, have you heard about this new thing called “a sandwich” yet?
It’s awesome. My editor says I’m being purposely fatuous. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds bad, so I’m going to go back up to the top and add a spoiler alert. I’m like a goddamn saint.

So, how do you write something funny about dead babies? Answer:
You can’t.
So get prepared.

I ALWAYS IMAGINED
that when I got pregnant it would be awesome, and everything would go perfectly, and I’d pose for all those artfully naked, pregnant Demi Mooresque pictures and put them all over my house, and suddenly I’d have
less
cellulite, and then I’d go into labor while I was standing in line at the bank, but it would be okay because the baby would get stuck in my pants leg, so it totally wouldn’t slam into the floor. Thank God for skinny jeans with maternity panels;
am I right?
And that was basically exactly what I expected
would
happen the first time I got pregnant. In real life, though, I found out I was pregnant, promptly got so sick I could hardly move, and threw up into my office garbage can all day long. At the time I was still working in human resources, teaching people how to act appropriately at a nonprofit Christian organization in Houston. That sounds like it’s a joke, but I assure you it’s not. I was actually really good at pretending to be appropriate (when I wasn’t throwing up in front of large groups of people), but it started to become obvious to everyone that I was either pregnant or dying, so Victor and I decided to go ahead and tell everyone. And everyone was thrilled, except for the cleaning lady at my office who had to empty my trash can.

I had always wanted to be a mother. I didn’t really like other people’s babies, but I never considered that a job requirement, as I assumed that my baby would be kick-ass, or would at least quickly turn into a kid. When I was little I always wanted to have a slumber party, but my parents were too smart to ever agree to have one, and so I told myself that one day when I was old enough I’d have a kid and have a slumber party with her every night. That seems like a ridiculous reason for having a child, but there are
worse ones. At my core, though, was a need that I couldn’t quite verbalize. I wanted to be part of my family legacy. I wanted to give a child the kind of magical childhood I wanted. I wanted to see a small reflection of myself and the generations before me in a new face, and be reborn again too. I wanted to have someone I could beat at Scrabble.

Victor and I picked out names, bought baby sweaters, and wondered what our lives would be like as parents. I was nervous, but too sick to really worry. A few weeks before the second trimester, Victor and I went into the doctor’s office for an ultrasound. I hadn’t slept much that night, because I’d had a panic attack and ended up calling my sister at midnight, hysterically yelling, “OHMYGOD,
WHAT IF THE BABY’S A REPUBLICAN?
” Then she hung up on me because she enjoys being unsupportive. Or maybe she was mad that I call her only at midnight when I’m having panic attacks. I don’t really know. What I do know, though, was that I was braced to hear almost anything in that exam room.

“It’s twins.”

“It’s triplets.”

“It’s a Republican.”

“It’s a small bear.”

Granted, that last one seemed unlikely, but I was mentally prepared for almost anything—anything except for what the doctor actually told us: That there was no heartbeat. That the baby was dead. That
“these things happen for the best.”
And this is when I broke. It wasn’t obvious from the outside. I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I went numb, and then I realized that this was all my fault. If I’d gone to church, or believed in the right God, this wouldn’t have happened. The exam room door was the unlucky number that falls after twelve, and I’d wanted to ask for another room but had been too embarrassed to say why. If I’d demanded another room, the baby would still be alive. There were a million reasons why this was happening, and all of them were because of me.

I numbly followed Victor down the halls, and for the first time in my life I seriously considered suicide. I wondered if I would be fast enough to slip
away from Victor before he noticed that I was gone. I wondered if the building was tall enough to kill me if I jumped, or if I’d just wake up, broken physically as well as mentally, in a hospital bed. I wondered what I could do to not have to ever deal with this, because I knew I wasn’t strong enough to come out whole on the other side. Victor seemed to sense that I was planning on running, or maybe he was just on autopilot himself, because he held on to my arm almost painfully, leaving me no room for escape. We went home, and while I waited to miscarry, I had Victor call everyone and tell them to
never, ever
mention this to me again. No flowers, no “I’m sorrys.”
Nothing.
Because I knew that the only way I could survive this would be to block it from my mind.

And that might have been easier to do except for the fact that I
didn’t
miscarry. I continued to carry the baby for another month and then I had a nervous breakdown. I’m still not sure what triggered it, but my coworkers found me crying hysterically in my office. I didn’t even recognize the sounds as human, and I remember wondering what that horrible noise was, until I realized it was me, keening uncontrollably until I finally exhausted myself. Victor took me home, and my doctor eventually realized I needed this to end immediately and performed the surgery. There were complications from the procedure, and I ended up having a painful, hemorrhaging miscarriage that night. A week later I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and put on an antidepressant that made me suicidal.
Which is not really how an antidepressant is supposed to work,
turns out. Victor found me trawling online for suicide message boards, pulled my Internet access, and got me on another drug that worked. My psychiatrist worked with me until I was eventually able to leave the house without having a breakdown, and then he mailed me a letter telling me that he was retiring suddenly, which I’m pretty sure is code for, “You’re too fucked up even for me. I’m totally breaking up with you.” But that was fine, because I was better and stronger and ready to try again.

And then I got pregnant again.

And then I lost it again.

I switched doctors and demanded to be tested for everything in the books. That’s when I found out that I had antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, which I could barely even spell. I went home and looked it up on the Internet and it basically said, “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE,” but then my doctor told me that it wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s a rare autoimmune disease that causes blood clots, and worsens during pregnancy. I told her that I was pretty sure that I also had polio and testicular cancer, and she said that I wasn’t allowed to read WebMD anymore.

I was put on a regimen of baby aspirin and I was all, “Seriously? Fucking
baby aspirin
?” But my doctor assured me that it would thin my blood enough to stop having miscarriages. And that’s when I had another miscarriage. Coincidentally, this is the same time when I screamed,
“FUCK BABY ASPIRIN,”
and my doctor agreed to prescribe a heavy-duty treatment of expensive blood thinners, and I was all,
“Hell, yeah.”
Then she said, “Here’s your giant duffel bag of syringes so that you can inject the medication directly into your bloodstream,” and I thought, “Oh.
I have made a terrible mistake.
” But by then it was too late to back out, because I’d read all the Internet horror stories about women having strokes because of this blood disease, and I thought that perhaps all the blood thinners would help the polio that I’d also diagnosed myself with, and so I took a deep breath and I started giving myself injections. In the stomach. Twice a day.
Awesome.
It’s basically like getting the treatment for rabies, except instead of five shots you have to get seven hundred.

And after many,
many
months of shots I found myself pregnant again. This time I was getting further along than ever before. By the second trimester my stomach had become a patchwork quilt of bruises, and when I would pull up my shirt for checkups the ultrasound techs invariably gasped in horror, until I quickly assured them that I was
not
being pummeled repeatedly in the stomach. They still gave Victor the stink-eye, though, which was actually a nice distraction, since every time we had an ultrasound I would wince in terror, certain that the baby would be gone. But it wasn’t.

I kept my appointments and adamantly insisted that none of them fall
on the unlucky-numbered day. I took to calling that number “twelve-B.” As in eleven, twelve, twelve-B, fourteen. People thought I was insane, and I was. (Still am.) But I wasn’t taking any chances, and curing my worsening OCD wasn’t as important to me as the possibility that asking the cats to wish me luck was keeping the baby alive. Once, as Victor drove me to work in the morning, I realized that I’d forgotten to ask the cats to wish us luck and I demanded that he turn around immediately. He tried to logically explain that the cats didn’t actually have the ability to give me good or bad luck, but it didn’t matter. I
knew
that the cats weren’t in charge of good luck. These were the same cats who would stand inside the litter box and cluelessly poop over the side.
Of course
they weren’t controlling my destiny.
I
was controlling my destiny. I was just doing it by following all the little OCD routines that I’d picked up that had made life keep going. They were, of course, all the bizarre little routines that made my life incredibly complicated as well, but it was a mental illness I was willing to live with if it kept my baby (who we’d just been told was a girl) alive.