A Big Misconception

I got an email from Joe Biden today. Well, me and millions of other people. I was sitting at my desk (Yes, you read that right: my desk. Somehow, for the past two days, I have hauled my sadsack self to the office. I don't know if the effort has been worth it, to be honest. I'm exhausted.) when I noticed the flashing red light of my BlackBerry signaling a new message to my webmail account. Since Monday, whenever that happens it feels like a beam from my own personal lighthouse. A lifeline, a message of comfort from a friend who knows what's going on. Something to hold onto. Something to help me breathe. But when I opened the message, it turned out to be from the VP-elect. The subject? "A Big Misconception."

Indeed.

This week has been like one of those disturbing, vivid dreams where people, places and events that shouldn't go together are suddenly intertwined, nothing makes sense and you can't wait to wake up. Except I can't. I feel doomed to spend the rest of my days in this time and place, mourning something too early to be a real baby but too late to be just another failed cycle. I am a zombie, a shell, a shadow that walks and talks and eats and types but doesn't really register feeling unless I'm crying or talking about my miscarriage.

And yet, it still hasn't really happened. One of the things you do not know until you go through this (because, really, they're not going to describe this to you when they tell you you're pregnant -- although, with miscarriage rates what they are, I'm thinking they'd be better off doing just that) is that the options you have when they discover that your fetus is not developing ("fetal demise" is what the report on the table in front of my doctor on Monday so delicately called it -- one of the many things I am sorry I saw that day) absolutely, horrifically suck. You can either stop your progesterone and wait for it to happen naturally, take a pill that essentially puts you into a violent form of labor to expel the pregnancy or have surgery in which they suck it out of you. Oh yeah, awesome choices. Just the kind of thing I wanted to be weighing this holiday season. Mistletoe, chestnuts roasting on an open fire and how to terminate a non-viable pregnancy.

The problem, I am learning, with conception is that it can end in misconception. And that feels so much heavier to bear, so much harder to ever get over, than no conception at all.