The original
story
It used to be a big
secret, something I shared with only
my closest friends, often via a tear-sodden,
drunken confession. It was the story of me,
pregnant at fifteen and then barely sixteen,
living in an unheated, unplumbed cottage called
the Little
House that was about twenty feet
from my grandfather’s place. My mother was four
houses down the street; my father was in another
state; my grandfather
was essentially
deaf. At night he would remove his prosthetic
foot and take off his hearing aids. No one saw
or heard me. No one knew I was pregnant until I
was about six months along.
On a cold night in late November 1985, I awoke to
labor pains. Somehow I made it to the main house to
call my mother. She rushed to my cottage and I gave
birth shortly after as she coached me to "Push!
Push!" The boy was stillborn. And nothing about my
life changed.
This story is about shame and guilt, anger and
tamped-down grief, and yet I have gotten used
to telling it. Despite the fact that doctors
could find no cause for the stillbirth, I have
always felt as though I have blood on my hands.
Most of the shame, however, is in that last
sentence of the paragraph above: Nothing
about my life changed. Nobody removed me from
the Little House, took me in, fought against my
considerable adolescent anger. No one was
capable. And while I know it is not because of
who I was or who I am, I still carry it around.
It packs a huge emotional wallop. I’ve written
about the pregnancy and the labor, toyed with
turning it into a memoir, but there is no
transcendent ending. And that’s where I’m stuck.
But, hey, at least I’m sharing. I no longer carry
the secret and by making my experience open,
fitting it into the larger narrative of my life, I
have become open to telling other stories, to
writing and creating. And there is still time to
transcend, to see the experience from the vantage
of strength.
I haven't given up.