My Lost Boy
When I suddenly birthed a child at home, my husband followed instructions from a nurse on the phone, moving me and the baby to our bed and settling us and the umbilical cord on clean towels. I was in shock and no help at all.
“It’s a boy,” he whispered, shocked as well, as we waited for the ambulance.
In the hospital, I asked my obstetrician to bring the baby to me. He did not. He would not veer from a certainty that it made no sense for me to see a six-month fetus weighing only two-and-a-half pounds, whose life would be fraught with problems had he lived.
He would not tell me what they did with my baby, with Kennedy—that’s what I’d planned to call him (or her), in honor of JFK who only months before had been assassinated.
How could this happen? I asked. What did I do wrong? I had just felt him bouncing around inside me. I was only twenty years old, healthy.
“These things just happen,” he answered. There was no ultrasound yet, no device that would have forecast trouble, only platitudes meant to soothe a distraught girl.
As I left the hospital a week later, the doctor handed me a round packet of tiny pills to be taken each day with strict adherence. The age of simple, reliable birth control had arrived. “No more pregnancies for two or three years,” he said. “Your body has to heal and grow strong. You need to take care of yourself and your husband and Andy.”
Andy. My eight-month-old son.
A year earlier we had moved from Philadelphia to the Washington DC area for a business opportunity that excited my husband. I hadn’t wanted to go. I didn’t want to leave my mother, who, at 40, was coping with brain cancer; our parting had been wrenching and most of me was still there, in her heart and household.
Our new apartment was in a modern high-rise in Hyattsville, Maryland, the only sign of life on an abandoned stretch of Route 1, the wretched, meandering road that preceded Interstate 95 as a means to travel from Maine to Florida. The University of Maryland was about three miles north of us. A mile south was the District line. We crossed it every weekend to visit federal monuments, the White House, the Capitol, Smithsonian museums, a harbinger of what would become, over the next forty years, a life brimming with adventure and learning.
As I struggled to adapt to my stark new environment, these expeditions distracted me, provided a respite from loneliness. Often, we went to the zoo, pushing Andy’s stroller among exotic caged creatures and diplomatic families wearing vivid saris and dashikis, turbans and veils. I would remember those days a decade later upon discovering “Woman at the Washington Zoo” by poet Randall Jarrell.
The saris go by me from the embassies.
Cloth from the moon.
Cloth from another planet.
And I would borrow his title for a play about a young woman lost in futility.
You know what I was.
You see what I am: change me, change me!
A week after my “spontaneous abortion,” my husband gave me a cobalt blue Chevy Nova convertible for my twenty-first birthday, hoping that would cheer me. But I could not stop thinking about my lost boy. There had been no ritual to mark his death, no urn of ashes, no teddy bear in a grave that we could visit. In my mind, he wandered alone in infinity.
Driving aimlessly in my little Nova one day, I began to cry. I cried that night and the next day and every day. My alarmed husband called my doctor, who referred us to a psychologist. “You should both go,” he told us, “because you both lost a child.”
After the first visit, my husband declared himself okay and never returned, but I was drawn to the comfort of Mrs. Osterman’s lovely office and her concern for me. I so hungered for the warmth of my large extended family back in Philadelphia.
We talked about my lost little boy, my valiant mother, my childhood. She counselled me on motherhood and wifedom and steered us toward a community of young families where I would find friends and Andy would have playmates.
With that move, I began to feel capable again.
My equilibrium returned.
The crying time ended.
Andy thrived.