“How many pregnancies have you had? And how many live births?”
A pair of questions that stopped me in my tracks the second they left my ultrasound tech’s lips. Thrown so casually into a list of intakes asked of me on a Friday afternoon. The questions rolled off her tongue innocently, with little thought, as I am sure they did with the 10 patients she’d seen before me that day. But to me, hearing them upon walking into that dark room, my body froze, my heart started to pound, my mouth opened, but nothing came out. Before today, I had likely been asked these two questions dozens of times over the course of my life, but never before had the answers been disproportionate. The unevenness of the numbers I had to say out loud caused my uneasiness.
“2 pregnancies,” I mustered the strength to say as I felt my eyes fill with tears. My brain started filling with thoughts of my unborn baby. I began to think about the life my husband and I had already dreamed up for him or her. The joy was, and is, still present in my mind; because sometimes it doesn’t feel real that the answer to the next question, “how many live births?” isn’t the same as the number I used to answer the first. But as I prepared to answer the second part of the question, the grief, as it has a habit of doing, quickly crept in right past the joy.
“1 live birth,” I forced out of my mouth while simultaneously holding back tears. I quickly wiped the corner of my left eye before the droplets that had formed had the chance to run down my face. I hoped my quick reaction to the involuntary tears, along with help of the dim lights in this room, would allow the sadness to go unnoticed by the tech; but despite those factors that I thought would work in my favor, she noticed. Which I only knew because she flashed me that smile. The one that is meant out of kindness but leaks out compassion that feels slightly more like pity. I returned her gaze with a tiny, lips-sealed curl of my lips. Somehow, that halfhearted smile and the words “1 live birth” leaving my mouth graciously brought the face of my sweet two-year-old son into my mind. How lucky am I to get to be loved by that boy, I thought to myself. To know that when I get home from this appointment, he will be waiting for me with a “mama’s home!” and greet me with arms wide open.
The joy and the grief simultaneously exist in me in a way that feels heavy but hopeful, painful but grateful, whole but uneven all at the same time. Feelings that, like the answers to that pair of questions, are regrettably disproportionate. And heavily uneven.
