“This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’” Matthew 6:9-10

“This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.” Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

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My husband and I drove to the cemetery where my Nannie was buried a few weeks ago. We walked among the headstones, some old, some fresh, like Nannie’s, newer graves sitting along the left, the old, unreadable graves to the right of Mountain Grove’s driveway. This piece of earth that is dedicated to the dead sits surrounded by dogwood trees, their fragile bows and delicate flowers hiding, keeping watch like living angels over the dead.

The oaks reach over the oldest graves, shading them from the glaring sun. In some places, the ground is soft from years of decaying leaves, the headstones toppling over, causing deep, haunted craters. Honeysuckle vines wind their way around the old trunks, their scent the smell of childhood, stamens on tongues and nectar as sweet.

My great grandparents and great-great grandparents take their rest here, their headstones unreadable. My grandparents lie in newer graves.

From this place, I see the rusted-out trailer that belongs to the Bentleys, a family dogged by sorrow and loss. The rust-red, clay-hardened land between their house and here is covered in kudzu, a green ocean between the living and the dead.

I notice the babies buried here.

Too many babies: Charlie, age two; Samuel, age one; Dolly, born and died the same day; Elizabeth, age four. Child after child.

I see myself in these graves, a mother who is learning still, seven years later, to live without two of her children.

An echo of the women who have come before me—my aunts, grandmothers, cousins, and friends—who have learned to continue.

*************

No one in my family talked about miscarriages. They happened behind closed doors, babies mourned in private. My Aunt Kim lost three babies, my Aunt Jane, one.

Aunt Jane only had boys, but she longed for a daughter. “I’m sure it was my girl, the daughter I never had,” she would say, a way of finding hope in the loss of her baby.

We were at a cookout the summer of one of my Aunt Kim’s miscarriages. Uncle Marcus, Kim’s husband and my dad’s baby brother, sat at a rough, wooden picnic table, trying to find a piece of shade under a tremendous oak tree. Marcus is the black sheep of the family, a Methodist among Baptists, a drinker among teetotalers, a cusser-in-public among cussers-in-private: my favorite uncle.

That day he asked me if I wanted Kim to have a girl or a boy, even though he knew I wanted a girl to break the tie between me and my sister and my cousins Michael and Steven. His question was full of expectation.

But there would be no new baby: no fat cheeks, no baby slobber, no milk drunk sighs, no soft baby blankets or the sweet and sour scent of a fuzzy baby head.

I couldn’t figure out where the baby had gone since we had no funeral and no one talked about my disappearing cousin.

No one told me that Kim likely flushed her tiny baby down the toilet. I couldn’t ask Kim about this baby, where she was, what had happened to her, why there was no grave to visit. But there would be a day when I, too, would flush a part of me away, wishing for just a moment more to hold onto something, anything, that was my baby.

Kim’s experience would be an anchor for me years later.

*************

I watched as one line became two on the pregnancy test, confirmation that there would be a third baby in my house in only a few, short months.
My two other children were sleeping safely in their beds, a girl and a boy, the American dream. Abby and Jake were young, too young to join in the zeal of my expectation.

When I had realized we were expecting our daughter Abby five years earlier, I ran out onto the porch, waving the stick in the air like a flare.

Jason ordered me back inside the house, swearing that if the neighbors saw me the whole town would know.

This time was no different. We laughed, hugged, and went to tell our families the news.

My mother-in-law was a quiet lady, a gentle spirit who never raised her voice. With every pregnancy announcement, Lucinda screeched, “OH!” her lips pursed into a small, round O in the middle of her equally round face. She clapped her hands together and bounced on the balls of her feet.

My parents are much more reserved. When I told them I was expecting our daughter Abby and that they were going to be grandparents, my mom spit her sweet tea across the table. When she found out that our second child, Jake, was going to be a boy, she responded, “Well, I was hoping for a girl.” This third time, she just shook her head.
A few mornings later, I went to the bathroom and stared in horror at the streak of dark reddish brown on the toilet paper.

I called for Jason. Something was wrong.

It would be a week before my body rejected our new baby. A week of trips to the bathroom, praying that there would be no blood. A week of tears and prayers and pleas of “God, please don’t let me lose this baby.” A week of calls to the doctor’s office, begging them to do something, anything, to help me keep this baby. A week of a hundred pregnancy tests, watching one of the two lines get fainter and fainter and fainter. A week of trying to hide my tears from my five- and three-year-old who couldn’t understand why Mommy was so sad.

On Friday, I walked into the cold, sterile writing lab at 8:00 a.m. to do my time as a writing coach. The air was crisp for September, the scent of rain hung in the air, the room musty, closed in, no windows in the stark, white walls of the basement room. The only window, a large-tinted plate of glass outside the door that diffused a bloody purple into the hallway.

I saw no students. I made trip after trip to the bathroom, praying, “Jesus, please let me keep this baby. Please.” But, the blood was back, dark and telling.

I called my doctor again: Yes, I’m sure I’m pregnant. I’ve taken ten pregnancy tests. I’m only six weeks along. There’s nothing you can do? Let nature take its course? Are you sure? Call you if I need you?

After my time in the lab was over, I walked into the freshman English class I was teaching.

The classroom of eighteen-year-olds gazed at me, bored, lost, wishing they were still in bed. Ten minutes into the lesson, I felt my stomach contract in blinding pain, the world going almost black. I breathed.

I left the classroom and collapsed on the floor of the hallway, the world fuzzy at the edges. My friend Jenna pulled me to my feet.

I somehow made it to the doctor, somehow got the news that it was over, somehow got back home to “rest and recover.”

My mama brought a chocolate pound cake, the kind our family reserves for death, her way of mourning her unborn, unknown grandchild.

I heard about women who had miscarriages in the early weeks.

It’s a good thing you weren’t that far along. That makes it easier.

It probably wouldn’t have survived. It’s your body’s way of saving you from that kind of trauma later.

That night, I stood in the shower while hot blood and water ran down my legs, the dream of my third baby washing down the drain in swirls of red and wet. I ran my palms down my inner thighs and tried to hold that baby who wasn’t a baby, that nameless life that I would carry with me for the rest of mine.

Three months later, I took another pregnancy test and watched one line become two.

I took pregnancy test after pregnancy test. In the end there were fourteen lined up on the counter beside the sink. Again, we rushed to tell my parents and sister, Jason’s mom and sister. Again, my mom formed her mouth into a grim line.

Again, Jason’s mom clapped her hands and squealed with delight at the prospect of a new grandchild.

Less than a week later, on my then-youngest son, Jake’s, birthday, two days before Christmas, I found myself sitting in the recliner crying as my body rejected a baby.

My stomach contracted, my face soaked with sweat and tears.

There was no warning, no tell-tale blood or phantom pains.

“God,” I prayed “how could you do this to me again?

Soon, the pain was too much to bear. On our way to the car, I bent over and threw up in the daylily bed.

We spent the next few hours in the dingy waiting room of the emergency department. I held a thin plastic bag, something the intake lady had thrust at me when she witnessed my green color. Jason and I watched as a family of five wrangled their kids across the aisle from us. Not one of them seemed sick.

Why should these people get a front row seat to my suffering?

Around midnight, Christmas Eve, we made our way back to a sterile room. I shed my clothes, donning the papery hospital gown and climbed onto the stretcherish bed. We waited.
The doctor ordered an ultrasound.

I lay there as a young technician ran her wand around my clearly not pregnant belly, my eyes trained on Jason’s face, not daring to look at the black and white screen.

“Just let there be nothing there, God. Please.”

After we returned to the room, the doctor examined me, feet up in stirrups, a position that should be taken for birthing babies but for me was taken to confirm the loss of life. Jason held my hand.

The doctor told me he cleaned me out as much as he could so that I wouldn’t have to go through Christmas bleeding.

His kindness was too much for me. I couldn’t even say thank you.

Six months later, I took a pregnancy test only for it to show two lines. I quietly called Jason and whispered the news through sobs.

“I’m sorry” was all he could say back to me.

We didn’t tell anyone about the baby. On my way home from my first doctor’s appointment, with a shiny black and white ultrasound picture lying in the seat beside me, I called my mom.

Our baby boy was born the following January on a clear, sunny Thursday morning, a scheduled C-section.

I lay on the table in the operating room, feeling the tug and pull of the doctor as he worked the baby from my womb tears welling in the corners of my eyes.

After he was born, they held him to my face, and I breathed in the sweet and salty baby scent. We locked eyes, and I knew that his name was perfect: Seth, replacement, the one who would mend my heart.

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