The slumbering house cradles the echo of your footsteps as you wander its sleepy halls.  Sleep should have come for you hours ago, but your anticipation has successfully warded off any chances.  The contractions come so lightly and irregular that you wonder if it’s even labor.  Perhaps it is the Braxton-Hicks you read about.

The NICU carried a low, steady hum that seemed to live inside the walls. Machines breathed in rhythm. Monitors blinked in soft pulses. My daughter, Charlie, lay beneath a warmer that cast a pale glow across her skin. She was six weeks early and small enough for my hands to meet around her torso.

I found out I was pregnant at three in the morning after the Spring Equinox Witches’ Market. Spring still felt very far away, I was still in my big Canadian coat, still wearing rubber gloves under my winter cycling gloves to break the wind, which the man in the Leith Walk bike shop taught me to do. Before I accepted the new job in Edinburgh, my husband and I talked endlessly about the weather. Was it really as bad as we imagined? Could we really live up there?

It’s been seventy-two days. 

I manage to get the dog out this morning and the kids some breakfast, but then crawl right back under the covers. I don’t have it today. I am exhausted and my body hurts though I have barely moved in days. 

The slight rise and fall of my chest is the only evidence that I am not dead. Long pauses between breaths; my breathing is shallow and slow. Cradled by the foam liner of the mattress, my limbs are heavy and still. Staring at the wall, I barely even blink, hopeful that time will pass around me and leave me overlooked in the safety of our bed.  Maybe if I remain still, the kids will forget that I am here? Maybe they won’t need me for anything?

“Mama, when are we going home?” my son whispers, his eyes glued to the car window.

I grip the steering wheel and glance behind me. His flip-flops and beach towel are strewn across the back seat. His goggles, around his neck. Pinkish popsicle stains skip across his white camp t-shirt. All signs of a good summer, or so I would have thought.

I wish I knew how to answer him. I’m not sure I want to go home.

“You miss being home?” I ask.

“Yes.”

I can’t remember what horrible thing I said to her the night before, so take your pick. Maybe it was after I got a third degree burn getting her dinner out of the toaster oven when I said: “Shirley I’d put a feeding tube in your stomach if I never had to cook another fucking tray of chicken nuggets.”

The insertion of my daughter’s feeding tube was sold as a simple procedure- up the nose and down the throat, swallow, swallow, swallow, the nurse explained. Like threading a piece of spaghetti through your face!

I expected to like being a mother. 

I expected to be good at being a mother.

I expected to raise children who would appreciate that I wasn’t an embarrassment, not obese or out of style, or driving an old beat up Buick.

On the first day of preschool, my son gripped my hand. He peered into the classroom, his eyes wide. “Go ahead,” I said, squeezing my fingers out of his and nudging him forward. The teacher approached and crouched to his level, saying his name with a smile.

Would you feel differently about me if I wanted to have children?

His pause told me everything; before he could parse out, I think so? I knew. It was more telling than the way he’d wheezed, I'm excited to see you too, dread of my visit dripping from his voice. In less than a week, I was supposed to fly out for a long weekend together. We’d been dating long distance for six months and everything seemed to be going well. He mentioned via text the previous night that he’d call to explain his ‘situation’ in the morning. I’d understood his situation as ‘needing a ride to the dentist’ while I was in town; he’d just received the bad luck news of an impending root canal. I didn’t anticipate his ‘situation’ would entail phrases such as my love has plateaued and I just need to rip off the Band-Aid.

On my study’s display shelf devoted to cherished objects stands a miniature porcelain Dutch clog from Delft. HOLLAND it proclaims above a hand-painted image of a windmill and house by a river, small waves brought to life by slashes of cobalt glaze applied by a skilled hand.

At first, I wonder if this is a memento from a trip to the Netherlands, homeland of my maternal grandfather. My cousin sends me photographs of other Delft blue and white porcelain brought from Zeeland by our great-grandmother and given to her mother, my aunt: a set of two canisters, a platter, a dairymaid statuette. I fantasize that this clog creates a connection between me and relatives I’ve never met. I want this heirloom to show me how I belong to this family, and it does, but not in the way I expect.

I’m sorry I couldn’t go to your wedding and that my explanation was vague and seemed rude. My doctor wouldn’t let me fly. I couldn’t find the words. I worried that mentioning pregnancy loss would cloud the conversation of your celebration.

A woman appearing before you desperately frightened by the usual gesticulations, the kicks and rolls inside of her becoming suddenly still, by the warm trickle down her leg, fluid or blood but too soon, too soon. What if you took her by the hand and walked her to a room much like a bedroom, with bleached sheets and pillow cases, bassinet and muslin blankets, with warm light coming through a southern window but stark for its waxed floors where blood pooled at your feet just last week, now a shadow upon which you sometimes slip for the mercilessness of memory? Merciless because this isn’t the first time and, by the wickedness of fate, it will never be the last.

I was twenty-nine. I didn’t know what to feel, or what it would feel like. That first sonogram seemed other-worldly. At every twitch I thought I was feeling the first flutters, but when they began to come with regularity, the realness set in that I was at a different stage of being a woman.

My friend came over and we slowly drank wine and talked—her miscarriage (a couple years earlier), my miscarriage (current), the moments that blindsided each of us in a wash of grief, what the aftermath was like for her and what getting pregnant again was like. I was smack dab in the middle of my experience and found comfort in talking to friends who had been there and who had now had time to assimilate it within a zoomed-out picture of The Rest of Life.

My two young children, clad in neon swimsuits, danced around impatiently in the backyard, checking on the progress every now and then.  Our new inflatable pool—turquoise and gray with an attached blow-up slide—was being filled with the garden hose; it was taking forever for any noticeable progress.  It was mid-June and the Wisconsin weather was in the low 70’s; I wasn’t about to tell my kids that even when the pool had filled to an acceptable volume, the sun still had to heat the water, cold and sputtering from the spigot, and that it was likely to take days, not hours. 

Suspended above the Delaware River, I can no longer time my contractions. The fierce waves of pain sweep up my facility to do anything but breathe. Breathe I do, with an equally fierce grip on the vinyl door handle of my husband’s pickup truck—never more thankful for its heated leather seats. As my insides constrict, my fingers squeeze the handle tighter. When my muscles release their grip, I release mine, measuring my breath with a will resolute.

In high school, my philosophy teacher assigned each student a different question and corresponding primary sources for our term paper. He assigned me the question, “Are women free?” and handed me a Sandra Bartky article that outlined the fragmentation, domination, and objectification the female body endures.

We didn’t know the beauty we would find there. It wasn’t an obvious dazzling beauty. It needed to be unearthed, searched for. Our clothes stuck to us as we ambled off the plane. The heat and strong odors of others, of ourselves, pressed in on us. We cranked our windows down in the taxi as broken Soviet buildings rushed by. Their gray concrete stark against the sharp neon green of the trees and grass.

He poured his second, maybe third vodka tonic.  He didn’t even look at me as he eased his six-foot-something frame through the sliding glass doors onto our deck. His words grazed by me as he sat down in the folding chair placing his drink on the small table between us, next to his worn copy of Machiavelli’s, The Prince.