Unfruitful

Still Life with Brass Cauldron and Jug, Vincent Van Gogh

I am sorry to tell you that I have been miscarrying since Saturday, and I am still miscarrying in the wee hours of Wednesday. I have been in labor, of a sort, for day, and I am wearing down -- between the cramps and the blood and the effort required not to take these things out on the innocent, which is everyone including myself.

Perhaps you know the tired smell of old blood, the first indicator that something is wrong. I do.  And I know the smell of the clots, huge slithery malignant plops of blood. And I know the smell of fresh blood, copious amounts of it, cups and cups passed into the little pot of the frog potty which has been sitting mostly unused in my bathroom for ages, so convenient for searching for the slippery little sac which shows that baby has been passed whole, without leaving bits inside. And I will surely find, in days and weeks to come, elusive spatters of blood turning dead and brown in my bathroom, reminder of a semi-week of loss.

The ER has assured me that apparently one can go on soaking several pads an hour and cramping until one's follow-up appointment, as long as one is not light-headed. One has not been been light-headed. One has been all too conscious, awake in the middle of the night, quivering in pain or fury or self-pity or any number of the emotions which everyone assures me must be so all over the place right now. Perhaps they are right: the ER tech doing my ultrasound asked my name, and I found myself dripping tears into my stiff blue surgical mask. 

I have put a lot of effort into remembering that feelings are not a guide to anything except feelings, but as I drag into the eighty-fourth hour of dull ache and more (though less) blood and no reassuring sac, the feeling of grace is stripped away and I am laid bare to the reality of grace. Mankind cannot bear much reality, and neither can womankind, who already are confronted with the reality that their bodies will betray them. So little is in our control, and all we do is try and lay a good foundation on which to rebuild after the storms. Maybe that's the only fruitfulness there is, in the end.