Chapter 2: Six Losses and One Promise
Ten years.
That was how long Daniel and I had been trying to become parents.
When we first got married, we thought the hardest part would be deciding when to start.
We had plans, of course.
We would spend a year enjoying married life, save enough money to feel comfortable, and then start trying for a baby.
We imagined a house with a little garden, a nursery painted in soft colors, and weekends spent visiting grandparents who would spoil our children rotten.
We had no idea how much of our future we were assuming.
Our first pregnancy happened sooner than expected.
I remember standing in our bathroom with the test in my hand, staring at the two lines until my eyes blurred.
Daniel was brushing his teeth when I walked out.
I didn't say anything.
I just held it up.
He looked at the test, then at me, then back at the test.
“Are you serious?””
I nodded.
He dropped his toothbrush into the sink and pulled me into his arms.
We laughed.
We cried.
He spent the rest of the evening reading about pregnancy, even though I was barely far enough along for the first appointment.
For the first time in my life, the future seemed to be waiting for us with open arms.
Then we lost the baby.
It happened so early that some people told us it was common, as though the word common could make it hurt less.
The doctor was kind.
Daniel was kind.
Everyone told me we could try again.
And eventually, we did.
The second loss was harder.
The third changed the way I looked at pregnant women in supermarkets.
By the fourth, I had stopped telling people when I was expecting.
I couldn't bear the questions afterward.
I couldn't bear the sympathetic expressions or the careful way people said they were sorry.
I especially couldn't bear the phrase, “At least you know you can get pregnant.””
As though pregnancy were the prize.
As though carrying a baby for a few weeks and then leaving the hospital without one was somehow a consolation.
Daniel never said things like that.
He would come home, take my hand, and sit beside me on the sofa.
Sometimes we talked.
Sometimes we didn't.
He learned which foods I could tolerate when I was pregnant and which smells made me nauseated.
He learned how to read my face when I was trying not to cry.
He learned to keep his phone charged because I might need him to come home early.
And I learned to recognize the particular silence that settled over him whenever someone announced a pregnancy.
We were happy for other people.
We truly were.
But happiness became complicated when it arrived in someone else's life so easily.
At baby showers, I smiled and bought presents.
At christenings, I held other people's children and told their parents how beautiful they were.
Then I went home and sometimes cried in the bathroom so Daniel wouldn't hear me.
He always heard me anyway.
Our fifth loss came after we had started believing that perhaps we had finally made it through the worst.
We had bought a few baby clothes.
Nothing extravagant.
A tiny white sleepsuit, a pair of socks, and a yellow blanket I found in a shop while we were out buying groceries.
I brought them home and placed them in a drawer.
I told myself that this time I was allowed to hope.
I was allowed to imagine a baby sleeping in our bedroom.
I was allowed to think about names.
When we lost that pregnancy, Daniel found me sitting on the floor beside the open drawer.
He didn't try to pull me away.
He sat down beside me and held my hand.
Neither of us spoke for a long time.
Then he said, “We don't have to decide anything today.””
I nodded.
I couldn't have answered him if I had wanted to.
Our sixth loss was different.
In 2019, I was twenty-two weeks pregnant.
For the first time, we had reached a point where I had started allowing myself to believe that our baby might actually come home with us.
We had appointments.
We had scans.
We had a due date on the calendar.
Daniel had started talking to my stomach when he thought I was asleep.
He would rest his hand there and tell the baby about ordinary things.
The traffic on his way home.
Something funny a colleague had said.
The ridiculous price of groceries.
Sometimes he would tell the baby about me.
“She worries about everything,” he whispered one night.
“But she's going to love you more than anything.””
I pretended to be asleep.
I wanted to remember the sound of his voice without having to look at him.
Then, at twenty-two weeks, everything fell apart.
I won't describe the hospital in detail.
I remember enough.
The lights.
The questions.
The doctor speaking carefully.
Daniel holding my hand so tightly that my fingers hurt.
And the moment someone asked whether I wanted to see our baby.
I said no.
I said it quickly.
Too quickly.
I couldn't imagine looking at the child I had carried for five months and then walking away without her.
I couldn't imagine seeing her tiny face and knowing that all the love I had saved for her would have nowhere to go.
So I refused.
Daniel said yes.
I remember looking at him when he answered.
He was crying, but his voice was steady.
He wanted to see her.
I didn't understand how he could bear it.
I didn't understand how he could walk behind that curtain and look at the child we had lost.
I only knew that I couldn't.
The nurse drew the curtain.
Daniel disappeared behind it.
Eleven feet from my bed.
That was all.
Eleven feet between us.
But for twenty minutes, it felt as though we were on opposite sides of a world neither of us knew how to cross.
I lay there with my face turned toward the wall.
I could hear the faint movement of people beyond the curtain.
I couldn't hear what Daniel said.
I couldn't see what he saw.
And I didn't ask.
When he came back, his eyes were red.
He sat beside me and reached for my hand.
“I just wanted to tell you—”
“Please don't.””
He stopped.
I remember the look on his face.
He wasn't angry.
He wasn't offended.
He looked as though I had closed a door on him.
But I was drowning in my own grief, and the thought of hearing anything about the baby was unbearable.
I turned my face away.
“Don't tell me what she looked like.””
Those were the words I said.
Three words that ended every attempt he ever made to tell me about that day.
Don't tell me.
Daniel lowered his head.
For a moment, I thought he would argue.
Instead, he squeezed my hand and whispered, “Okay.””
And he never started that conversation again.
We went home without our baby.
The tiny yellow blanket remained in the drawer.
The white sleepsuit stayed folded beside it.
Eventually, I stopped opening the drawer altogether.
We learned to live around the empty space.
We stopped talking about names.
We stopped imagining bedrooms.
We stopped making promises about next year.
And slowly, almost without noticing, Daniel and I became very good at surviving.
We were still married.
We still loved each other.
But there were parts of our grief we never shared because we had mistaken silence for protection.
Six years passed.
Then, last year, I saw two lines on another pregnancy test.
I sat on the bathroom floor for a long time.
I didn't call Daniel immediately.
I was afraid to speak the words aloud.
When I finally told him, he didn't celebrate.
He sat beside me, took the test from my hand, and closed his eyes.
“Are you sure you want to do this again?”” he asked.
I knew what he meant.
Not whether I wanted a baby.
Whether I could survive another loss.
I looked at him and said, “I don't know.””
He nodded.
“Neither do I.””
We agreed that this would be our last attempt.
We would love this baby.
We would do everything the doctors advised.
But we would stop building our entire lives around the possibility of becoming parents.
We would try to survive whatever happened.
For nine months, we barely touched the back bedroom.
Neither of us wanted to tempt fate.
Neither of us wanted to unpack the things we had put away.
And then our daughter was born.
Perfect.
Healthy.
Breathing.
With a small mark on her shoulder that made Daniel whisper, “No. That's not possible.””
Now, sitting beside me in that hospital room, he finally looked up from the baby.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
My heart began to pound.
“What?””
He glanced at the door, then down at our daughter.
His hand moved protectively over the blanket.
“It's about the baby we lost in 2019.””
I stopped breathing.
For six years, I had believed that part of our lives was buried.
I had believed Daniel had accepted my refusal to hear about her.
I had believed there was nothing left to tell.
May you like
But he looked at me with tears on his face and said the words I had spent years avoiding.
“She had the same mark.””
