The Other Side of the Fence

Not long after my miscarriage my husband and I were running errands. We pulled up to a stoplight and watched an obese woman and her chubby child frantically scuffle across the crosswalk. The woman’s five-ish-year-old son seemed to resent being tethered to such a disaster . In the commotion, her parka shifted open and revealed something that made me and Eric simultaneously groan: her pregnancy. This disorganized, overweight lady yanked at her scowling son and growled at him to hurry up and she was pregnant. Eric said wryly, “I wonder if she derived her protein from legumes in order to conceive.” We both laughed hysterically at that moment and frankly, off and on since. It was the perfect comic relief to such a perplexing conundrum: how do some of us get pregnant and others don’t?  

Of course my commentary of this woman is judgemental. My knee-jerk reaction to most pregnant women these days includes an eye roll and lip curl. If I were more highly evolved I could recite the “correct” reasons for why I am not pregnant:  because God’s and my timing don’t often coincide. Because there is something I am meant to learn as I navigate this wilderness. Because it’s strengthening my marriage (it is!). But I am a lowly amoeba who is not highly evolved who still gains immense pleasure in making snap-judgements. Let’s face it, maybe the Crosswalk Crosser sat down with her doting husband one evening and discussed her maternal longing to expand their family. Maybe she really is eating protein-rich beans instead protein from hormone-pumped animals.  Maybe she was dragging her son across the street because they were late for the bus that would transport them to their volunteer shift at the local nursing home. But probably not. (See?? There I go judging again.)

My spheres of support overlap like a Venn Diagram. There are those of us who are trying to start families and those whose families are established. Somewhere in the middle, in the shaded area, reside those of us who have miscarried. We don’t belong to either category, wholly. I  draw support from both spheres, trusting my girlfriends who are moms when they tell me “it WILL happen,” and crying on the shoulders of girls like me who are desperate and yearning. It becomes excruciatingly difficult to adjust when a friend leaves one sphere to enter the other. They walk through the gate to the other side of the fence where children are skipping rope and other moms are sipping tea. They peak at us through the slats of the fence, rueful to leave us behind but elated to be standing on fertile ground.  

We all embarked upon the same journey, and there can be no fault placed upon those who arrived a bit earlier than the rest of us. For some reason their paths were free from detours and dead ends, unlike our own. Inevitably you reach that fork in the road, that stopping point where you bid your friends adieu and watch them walk under the balloon arch down the gilded path stretched before them. And suddenly your path seems darker than ever before. Your footing is loose and the buzzards circle high above. Of course you really never say goodbye. You meet for coffee and discuss baby names and attend baby showers and pin things to your Baby Board on Pinterest because you believe that your paths will meet up again one day. One day you will sit around a table and exchange stories. One day you will be offered a cup of tea. 

We plow forward arm-in-arm like a chorus line. We bolster each other’s hope when our own is gone. We pass smelling salts under each other’s noses so we can be jarred out of paralysis. And we keep going.