Building a Home 

Angela Abbott 

There is no word for the absence of you. There is no definition to hold my grief. There is no term like “miscarriage” that would bond me with strangers who have experienced this same thing.  

I still remember my doctor’s smile that day, walking into our room, me in my hospital gown, my husband in scrubs over his clothes. Both of us in hairnets. How the doctor’s eyes shined like nickel when he told me we had an 85% chance of success. How he handed me a picture of you and told me you resembled a snowman—you who were just a batch of cells of mine and my husband’s combined. You were hatching. This was good.  

When I walked back into that room with the coordinating laboratory, it smelled pungently sterile. I could feel the fullness of my bladder—something they suggest so they could better see my uterus. I could feel the cold metal stirrups on the soles of my feet. But what I felt more than anything was dull-witted hope. After two years of failed medicated and timed intercourse, after 3 failed IUIs, this IVF transfer was finally going to make me a mother.  

I held my husband’s hand as the doctor carefully placed the speculum into my faulty womb and threaded a catheter into my uterus. The embryologist had me verify that the contents in the test tube were mine. Once verified, they connected the embryo to the catheter and we watched on a screen as it made its home inside me. A slight puff of air as the catheter released the embryo-- a tiny speck landing on the walls of its new home. A home I had been trying to build for a baby for the past two years.  

But the embryo didn’t stick.  

I didn’t find out officially, until after the two-week wait was over. For two weeks, I held hope in my body with the vibrancy of a sunflower, strong and bold. I imagined I felt implantation cramping. My breasts were tender. Surely this was it. Unfortunately, the progesterone injections that accompany IVF treatments mimic the symptoms of early pregnancy.   

On day seven, I took an at home pregnancy test and it was negative. I remember my body feeling the weight of my heart, this bloody organ beating and dripping down into the pit of my empty belly. On day eight, I took another test. Maybe yesterday’s was wrong. Maybe it was a late implantation.  I continued to torture myself in this manner every day leading up to my blood draw at the clinic that would test for pregnancy.  

I cried walking into the clinic. Just one more puncture to my veins for no reason. I knew I wasn’t pregnant, but I had to come do the blood test. It was protocol. Perhaps it was a surprise, a few hours later, that I still had tears to release when they called me to inform me that it didn’t work. I lived in that river of grief for months.  

Wading in that water, there would be more opportunities missed and more embryos lost. After some time, we transferred two embryos. And though we lost one of those, the other became the baby I so longed for. Even though IVF eventually worked for us, and I now have a beautiful son, whom I love with the agency of seismic shifts and tectonic plates, I still grieve my losses. And I wonder, who else out there grieves their losses too. Who else struggles to name this undefined sadness of a life that could have been? 

There is no word for the absence of you. For the hollowness my body feels, still, for you. I often think of all of the children I could have had. I would have made them such a happy home.