Dreams and Visions: On Being a Man After 3 Miscarriages in 20 Months
By: The Good Men Project
Tags: Miscarriage, Parenting, Fatherhood, Dreams, Pregnancy

The Memories

May 2, 2008, a business convention on Paradise Island. It’s happy hour at a beachside cocktail party. The scene is like a movie set — perfect lighting, ocean as backdrop, Technicolor sunset. People are getting drunk, music pulses, the set appears wobbly. Laura grabs me like she’s seen a ghost, cups her hand over her belly, over our baby. Something’s not right. We slip out of the frame, walk back to our hotel room. The sun sets, the moon lifts, the ocean rises and falls and the sun comes up again and somewhere in this day, seemingly like any other, our first child is lost.

May 17, 2009, Cambridge MA, our apartment. My wife is sitting on the toilet bowl — gasping, pushing, sweating, crying. I’m kneeling beside her, her hand is wrapped around my forearm, squeezing. I’ve never seen someone in such agony. I want to devour her pain, chew it up, digest it — make it mine. But this pain is hers and I can do nothing but let her squeeze and cry and scream as this terrible and violent thing proceeds. I panic, grab the phone, tell her I’m calling 911. “No!” she screams. Her grip tightens around my arm, she leans forward, wincing, grunting — and this goes on and on until it gets worse. Finally the tissue falls from her body into the toilet. She stops crying. Silence. She cleans herself and walks from the bathroom to the couch. I have an image of her as she moves to the couch, beatific, cloaked in light, something that myths are made of. It’s odd, but that’s what I see. There is something heroic about what she has just been through. She’ll never see it that way. Some day I’ll share with her this story of heroism. But right now she is beaten. She sleeps. I watch over her, meek and humbled.

December 2, 2009, Cambridge MA, our apartment. It’s the night of dress rehearsal for “Christmas Belles,” a yuletide comedy in which I play a gruff but loveable department store Santa who’s passing a kidney stone. As I’m about to leave for rehearsal, the phone rings. I let it go to voice mail. It’s the doctor with the latest test results. His voice is monotone, matter of fact. He runs through a series of numbers. I know what these numbers mean, where they need to be. They’re not even close. The pregnancy is over. As the message ends, Laura arrives home from work. I tell her the news. She doesn’t cry. She’s pissed off, yells “Shit!” She sits in the living room chair. I tell her I’m going to rehearsal. It’s the night before opening night and I really need to be there. She looks at me, says nothing, just stares. Silence follows silence, as if she’s waiting for me to understand something.

“No,” she says.

“I’ll be back in a few hours” I grab my coat.

“You can’t be serious.” She’s on the verge of tears. “You’re going to leave me here alone?” The tears come. “This makes no sense.” She’s sobbing. “Please, just stay with me.”

Something inside me opens and I think I’m going to cry. The room compresses. The air thins. My vision swirls. I stop breathing. Then, as quickly as it came, the opening disappears, blocked off like a plaque filled artery.

“I have no choice. I have a responsibility to my fellow actors.”

I don’t wait for her reaction. I rush out the door, run down the stairs and out into the cold December night. I jump into the front seat of the car. My breath convulses. Clouds of warm steam fill the frigid air. I grab my cell phone, punch in some numbers, a voice answers,

“Hello.” It’s Greg, the director of the play.

“Greg, it’s Dave,”

“Hey Dave, you okay?”

“N-n-no,” I stammer. “My wife is…” inside me, a reopening. “My wife is — I got a call from the Doctor…these numbers he gave me…they weren’t…right,” a further opening, “my wife is having another…” as I say the word “miscarriage” I begin to choke up, “Greg, I don’t think I can –

“Dave, I’m so sorry.”

“I can’t go — ” a tear escapes, warm against my cheek, a cold trail left behind.

“I can’t leave her tonight.”

“Of course not Dave. Stay home. We’ll be fine.”

I run back up to the apartment, four flights of stairs up-up-up and through the front door and back into the living room and Laura hasn’t moved from the chair and she’s still upset until she sees the tears welling in my eyes and she softens. I tell her how much I hate this, that I don’t want to go through it again, don’t want her to have to go through it again, it hurts too much. I drop to my knees, collapse into her arms, and I cry. Laura holds my head in her lap and tells me it will be okay. Everything inside me begins to slow down. I begin to breathe again. I feel sheltered, like a child protected, my wife above me, below me, surrounding me. I lift my head, look at Laura. I want so much for her to be a mother. I lay my head back on her lap. I’m so tired.

I didn’t go to dress rehearsal that night. But the following night, and for five shows a week over the next three weeks, I take to the stage as the kidney stone passing Santa. My stage wife, Frankie, is nine months pregnant with our second set of twins, contractions following her throughout the play. In the play’s final moments Frankie goes into labor and the two of us walk off stage together to go to the hospital. The play closes with a cast and audience Christmas Carol sing-a-long. And then it’s over, all conflicts resolved, all angers and hurts buried. Reviews praise the onstage chemistry between Mr. and Mrs. Claus. It’s all so beautiful and harmonious and staggeringly normal.