Donna Fasano is an award-winning, bestselling author of romance and women’s fiction novels whose books have sold 3.6 million copies worldwide.
Find Donna online at DonnaFasano.com
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Karin Cox
Dear Foetus,
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That’s not really the name I would have chosen for you, you know. It sounds a little austere, too clinical, and it rhymes with Cletus. But that is what the doctor calls you, when she’s not busy calling you a Blighted Ovum. It’s what is written on my medical chart, and it’s what the sonographer told me when the room filled with silence, when the absence of sound was the absence of just a tiny flicker of green-blue light on a screen—your missing foetal heartbeat that should have been there, shining like a little torch, hammering like tiny galloping hooves against my uterine wall.
The silence was eventually broken by a voice pitched to an impossibly hopeful timbre. “Perhaps your dates are wrong. It could be that it’s too early. Are you sure you’re this far along? It’s not uncommon for a foetal heartbeat to go undetected if it’s before six weeks. I think your doctor will tell you to come back in a few weeks. We’ll check again then.” Much nodding and sad smiling.
But I wasn’t, Angel—which is what I call you in my heart—I was more than six weeks. You had graduated from embryo to foetus, and you had been with me for nearly double the technician’s shaky assessment, or had you? You were small for your age, not yet a bean, not yet a bug. Not yet a peanut: our fond name for your sister at that age. Not yet a human being, I am told. But I had felt you in those first joys of pregnancy: the burrowing of implantation, the burgeoning breasts, the belly, the greasy nausea of hormonal changes, the blood swelling to fill my veins. Then bleeding out in troubling, scarlet reminders of ephemeral life.
“Rest,” I was told. “Stay off your feet. Don’t carry heavy things.” But, it did not matter. Now I carry secrets and shames guilty as a grave. Perhaps I picked up your sister one too many times. (She’s a big girl now. You’d like her, although she sometimes tries to sit on the cat and would probably do the same to you). Maybe I should have said no to that bumpy Boxing Day boat ride, with a silent passenger now forever muted. Maybe I wasn’t cautious enough. Maybe this is retribution for deeds done long before your time, Angel. Or maybe, as they tell me, there was something wrong with you. Maybe you were not shaped right to fit this world, your chromosomes misaligned, your tiny soul too soft to sift the rights and wrongs of existence.
But I knew, in that moment of your fledgling foetal heart’s silence and the technician’s rapid-fire reassurances, that you, too, were lost to me. And I thought then that cherubim are always seen in pairs. I am glad that you are not alone in the ether of your existence.
I delivered you two weeks later, in the still hours of the morning on the day the doctor had scheduled me another hopeful ultrasound. Not in the bright-light humming faux intimacy of a busy delivery ward, your father at my side, your toddler sister clutching a teddy for you that she *might* reluctantly part with at your birth. But in a toilet bowl filling with your blood and mine, clutching my stomach, not expecting the knife-twist of contractions this time around, not expecting to see my body’s miscreant beginnings of your birth. Placenta, gestational sac, foetal pole, foetus, miscarriage, spontaneous abortion—all words drawn slowly from the mouth, and from the body. Women’s business. Mothers’ business. And doctors’. Fathers’ business too, although no one talks of that. And sisters’. Aunts and uncles’. Grandparents’. They all knew, of course. How to keep it hidden over Christmas? How to avoid ham, or fancy cheese, or leftovers, or, in Australia, rare steak and beer. How to eschew wine and merriment, or retire at 8:30 pm exhausted from a day of unwrapping presents. No, they all knew. And now, they all feel your absence. Less keenly perhaps, but still they know you are lost to them. A memory of congratulations.
My hair is dull again now, Angel. My womb, a tomb. My stomach is as empty as my heart. And yet, I can feel, nestled where you once burrowed, something else: some tiny, heartless hope. You are lost to me, Angel—you and others—and yet I thank you all for being mine for a time. For teaching me how fragile, how precious, how miraculous is life. How necessary is love. How sadly sweet, remembrance. How powerful, choice. And how irrepressible, hope. So hold hands for me and sing to me the silent shushing whispers of the womb, and I shall sing back to you that we are here, and that we are waiting, and that we still have hope.
With love eternal,
Mummy xxox