A Colorado native, Peg Brantley is a member of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and Sisters In Crime. She and her husband make their home southeast of Denver, and have shared it with the occasional pair of mallard ducks and their babies, snapping turtles, peacocks, assorted other birds, foxes, a deer named Cedric and a bichon named McKenzie. Red Tide is Peg’s first novel—find the trailer online.
Find Peg online at pegbrantley.com
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Sibel Hodge
To my darling child,
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Today is the first anniversary of the day you slipped away from me and I needed something to mark and remember that day. Isn’t it strange to think that I never even saw you. Never held you. Never told you I loved you. Never publicly acknowledged your death.
‘So why were you away from work last week?’ my colleagues asked me just after I’d lost you. I opened my mouth to speak, but what could I say? For one thing, I wasn’t ready to talk about the devastation of losing you that was the most agonizing pain in my life. How could I sit there at work and possibly even explain what had happened without breaking down? How could I talk about how just days before I was carrying your life inside me? I’d been ecstatic, riding a wave of bliss and dreaming of my baby. Dreaming of how, in a mere seven months’ time, you would be born and I’d be able to hold you in my arms, sniffing in your pure baby scent and tickling your tiny feet. That your eyelids were already forming and you could already suck your thumb. That your central nervous system was functioning and your skeleton was changing from cartilage to bone.
How could I explain to them that my life had just unravelled? That your death had erupted such a massive void in my life, even though I’d never met you. Never gazed upon your face. And how could I talk openly about what is still one of the biggest taboos of motherhood. Every other aspect is openly discussed, and yet this...this is still considered shameful, somehow. That it should be kept a secret. After all, isn’t it why we wait until after those first few months before we announce to the world that we are, in fact, pregnant? Why is it that we should feel like this? I think now that as women we think it means we’ve “failed” to do one of the most important jobs in the world that we can do. That it’s our fault it happened. Something we could have done differently. We feel “broken” somehow if we suffer a miscarriage. We feel that as there is often no funeral, memorial ceremony, or sympathy cards that it’s like it almost didn’t happen. Maybe society feels that women’s issues aren’t important enough to speak about openly – that a miscarriage is just a minor blip in a woman’s life. If statistics show that 1 in 5 pregnancies end in miscarriage, then how many women are suffering in silence? Millions? Trillions? Where are their voices? How can we be in the midst of such a health-obsessed time and yet miscarriage is still kept quiet?
And so, as they looked questioningly at me at work, as the letters piled up on my desk, the phones rang, and the emails arrived on my laptop, I told them, ‘I had the flu.’
I’d suffered the death of my child. I was in a kind of living hell. A time when even breathing took up all my effort. And I’d just contributed to the secret taboo of miscarriage.
Your dad and I mourned your short existence in silence, behind closed doors with the curtains firmly shut. We had to withdraw from the world and suffer our grief through a masked face that hid the enormity of our despair. Some close friends and family knew what we were going through. Your grandma couldn’t even talk about you. She still won’t acknowledge your existence. Others didn’t know what to say. Others tried to help, but what could they do? A shepherd’s pie or a casserole wouldn’t bring you back. This was a journey we had to go through on our own. Life had to go on. As far as I’m aware, the HR department in my office still didn’t even acknowledge miscarriage as a bereavement!
And so I feel so guilty about falling into the trap of accepting that I wasn’t supposed to talk about you. Why should society tell us things like, “Don’t worry, you never even knew it...It wasn’t even a proper person yet...Obviously, there was something wrong with it so it’s for the best...Well, you were still in the early stages. Better to have lost it now than when it was born”. Try telling that to someone who’s lost their mum or dad or sister or bother and see what the reaction would be! How can the centre of all my future hopes and dreams be summarized as an ‘it’. It may be that it was just “easier” for people not to talk about it, but downplaying or belittling the pain is only a short-term solution of putting a plaster over an infected wound. Pretty soon the wound becomes toxic.
Why should the miracle of life and the devastation of miscarriage be deemed a subject that shouldn’t be mentioned in polite conversation? The complexity and depth of all our stories need to be told and acknowledged. We need to let people know everything isn’t OK. We can’t just ignore it and the pain will go away. We can’t just move on as if nothing notable happened that day. A cup of sweet tea and a walk in the fresh air won’t fix it. If no one knows the reality of what it feels like, how can society understand how important this is?
And so today, as I acknowledge and honour your life, I know that the one thing worse than losing someone who meant everything to me is having to sweep it under the carpet and pretend that I’d lost nothing.
I’m finished with my lonely grief. I was pregnant. You did exist. I’m singing the words out loud, my baby, and I’m sharing you with the world. It’s OK for me to remember.
You may be gone, but you’re never forgotten.
Your loving Mum XX
Sibel Hodge