An Exact Replica Of A Figment Of My Imagination Part 4

By the end of my first pregnancy I'd felt very tender toward Pudding - to my made-up companionable Pudding, an infant who would of course love us the minute he saw us, who loved us already, who contained within him not only infancy but babyhood and toddlerhood, who already listened to our voices, who was impatient to meet us (so why was he taking his time?). I stroked my stomach and told him stories; when he kicked, I poked him back. We went to the pool together, me swimming in the chlorinated munic.i.p.al water of Bergerac, he swimming inside me, both incredulous at how the French could gossip while doing the backstroke. We went to the gym together, where the French not only gossiped and kissed each other in the squat rack, but tucked their shirts into their exercise pants. I ate so that he could eat: I announced what was on the menu.

You don't need much to hang a personality on someone you haven't met: a name, some knowledge of the parents, a gender. You can spin anything you want out of those things.

But it wasn't all so easy. Every now and then, like any pregnant woman, I would panic. When did I last feel this baby move? When did I last feel this baby move? Then I would lie on the sofa, and put my hands on my stomach, and wait to feel a kick, and then another. Both Dr. Baltimore and Dr. Bergerac had sonograms in their offices, and so for the first six months we saw Pudding on the Big Screen every month. Yes, I did worry, sometimes. Then I would lie on the sofa, and put my hands on my stomach, and wait to feel a kick, and then another. Both Dr. Baltimore and Dr. Bergerac had sonograms in their offices, and so for the first six months we saw Pudding on the Big Screen every month. Yes, I did worry, sometimes.

But mostly I didn't.

This is one of the most painful things for me to remember. I was smug. I felt sorry for women with complicated pregnancies and gloated that I wasn't one of them. I believed that the pregnancy would continue to be a delight. I imagined that traveling with him afterward, at four weeks old, to England and then to America, would be only an adventure, a story I would tell him for the rest of his life.

I believed he was perfect.

I don't know whether my faith is explained by hormones or misplaced trust in medical science. I just believed he was perfect. I believed I understood him.

Of course that wasn't true of my second pregnancy, when I was certain every other moment that something was going terribly wrong. I was neurotic about food; I washed my hands like an insane person. Among my many worries was that I would feel unconnected to this second occupant and that this indifference would travel through the placenta and warp the developing psyche. But I turned out to feel another sort of closeness. Pregnant with Pudding, I often didn't even realize how big I'd gotten; we communicated via dream telegraph. During my second pregnancy, I was by necessity obsessed with the physical, and this baby - who was in there, anyhow? - was a great in utero kicker and squirmer. Once the kid was big enough for me to feel, I would think once a day, panicked, When's the last time I felt the baby move? When's the last time I felt the baby move? And then I'd palm my stomach. Thump, thump, thump. What a good baby, what a wonderful obliging baby, was there something And then I'd palm my stomach. Thump, thump, thump. What a good baby, what a wonderful obliging baby, was there something wrong wrong with that baby, to make it shift so? Was that a kick or a shudder or head banging? You couldn't deny it: there was a baby in there. Even so, I sometimes wondered whether I was making it up. with that baby, to make it shift so? Was that a kick or a shudder or head banging? You couldn't deny it: there was a baby in there. Even so, I sometimes wondered whether I was making it up.

"Shh," I'd say to my stomach, "you're all right," and to Edward, "Who's in there, do you think? It could be anyone anyone."

"Not anyone, anyone," he'd say, looking a little troubled.

I taught my cla.s.ses and grew subtly stouter but said nothing. It seemed as though something terrible would happen if people knew. By which I mean: not that we would be tempting fate, but that I would have to acknowledge that the pregnancy was real, and if I did that, I was sure, I would take to my bed until spring. I told a handful of friends in October, and a handful of relatives at Thanksgiving.

Lib insisted I was having a girl. Edward, who had correctly and with great certainty predicted Pudding's gender, agreed. I had no idea. When I was four months in, Ann declared, no room for argument, that I was pregnant with a boy, and listen: her husband's daughter was pregnant, too, and Ann had said Josephine was going to have a boy, and the first ultrasound had the temerity to disagree with Ann's prediction, but Ann wouldn't budge, and then the second ultrasound said, All right, yes, a boy.

This perturbed Edward. "I thought I knew," he said. "Why'd Ann have to say that?"

At the hardware store a woman behind the counter said, "So do you know for sure you're having a boy?" but a pedicurist the same day shook her head and said, Girl, and wasn't a pedicurist almost a medical professional? It amused me to spend so much time pondering a question that could be at any time answered with reasonable certainty. By the last month of pregnancy I had my amniotic fluid checked by ultrasound twice weekly, not to mention plenty of other diagnostic tools. But I never bent.

Maybe I had just acquired new superst.i.tions, and given them disguises.

We'd planned for Pudding in stories, plane tickets to see family, and tiny French outfits. Then I was pregnant again and we counted on nothing, and so we prepared for the future by taking cla.s.ses. We signed up for four:

1. A four-week childbirth cla.s.s through my ob-gyn practice, taught by one of my favorite people there, the nurse coordinator. Of course I already knew what to expect of such a cla.s.s. I watched TV, didn't I? We'd sit on the floor in the bobsled position, surrounded by other couples, and Edward would be told to tell me to breathe.

We never left our chairs, and in fact we knew most of what was taught, having been through childbirth before. I wanted to raise my hand and interrupt the lovely nurse every other sentence to say: "You mean if, if, not when." not when."

2. An infant car seat installation cla.s.s. We were the only ones who showed up. The instructor was a thin blond woman, I think in her late forties, who had four sons, aged four, seven, seventeen, and twenty-five. I was dying to know her story, but I didn't ask. Her teaching style appealed to us, because like auto safety professionals everywhere her message was: YOU COULD EASILY GET DECAPITATED OR DECAPITATE SOMEONE ELSE! But! DECAPITATION IS EASY TO PREVENT IF YOU AREN'T DUMB AND CARELESS LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD. The worst could happen, here's how to minimize it. That's what we wanted.

We started the cla.s.s with a short test, which included the question "What is an accident?"

The answer she was looking for: an accident is force times ma.s.s. That is, she wanted to impress upon us that in an accident, loose objects in the car - water bottles, spare change, and so forth - could become imbedded in, or pa.s.s through, your child. Everything should be locked in the trunk, though purses were fine as long as they were zipped shut and seat-belted in.

We'd already had our seat installed at the local firehouse by two policemen who'd struggled with the job. One had the sort of authoritative, well-tended mustache that only police or firemen can carry off; the other was tall and curly-haired. Together they crawled into the backseat of our car and frowned. "This is a hard car," one had said, and I theorized that the Cadillac Catera - my parents had given it to us when they'd bought a new Subaru - had not been designed for the childbearing demographic. The policemen pushed and pulled and used a wedge of foam noodles duct-taped together, and then, as they showed us how to buckle a baby doll into the removable seat, told us not to move the base if we could avoid it. We told them we were taking a cla.s.s in a few days, but we wouldn't let the teacher move it. "You're taking a cla.s.s with Cindy?" one of the policemen said. He looked frankly a little frightened.

Cindy, it turned out, had taught the policemen how to install seats, and she was skeptical about the foam noodles. "Right," she said. "Let's see what one woman can accomplish compared to two men." In three minutes she'd reinstalled the seat without the noodles, and then she taught Edward.

"Can I keep this?" she asked, slapping her palm with the noodle wedge like an old-fashioned movie policeman with his nightstick. "I'm going to see those guys next week at a safety event, and I'd like to give them this as a present."

3. An infant care cla.s.s at the local hospital. In truth, neither Edward nor I knew anything about babies. Surely most of it was on-the-job training, but some advice on, say, diaper changing and bathing would help. For the first three hours of this session, the labor and delivery nurse who taught it explained the various things that could make your newborn baby look unsightly - stork bites; tarry black stool; rashes of all kinds; thick, greasy, channel-swimming fat; back hair; lumps from vacuum deliveries; dents from forceps deliveries.

Then we got on the issue of circ.u.mcision.

Perhaps the only real conversation Edward and I have ever had on the subject of religion came after our wedding. We'd been married with dueling officiants, now the village priest and his sonorous voice and official vows, now the American rabbi and the smashed gla.s.s and cries of mazel tov. I had been late to the service. To fill time, the church organist played first "If I Were a Rich Man" and then "Jesus Christ Superstar." In other words, it had taken some work to appeal to both of our families.

"My mother says the next thing to worry about is christenings and circ.u.mcisions," I said to him.

"No to both," he said, and we solemnly shook hands on it.

So I didn't say anything at all about it when the topic came up: we knew what we'd do. The nurse, who'd already distinguished herself by saying that the administration of eye salve was mandated in "all forty-eight states," was clearly completely and totally against circ.u.mcision but knew that she couldn't say so. Well, not in so many words. "The United States," she said, "is the only so-called civilized country that regularly circ.u.mcises. So think about that."

"It seems," said one thoughtful young husband, "like a lot of people say that you should circ.u.mcise a boy so he'll look like his father."

"Yes!" said the nurse. "And you know what? How many men are h.o.m.ophobic? Let's face it: all of them! So what are the chances you'll be hanging around naked with your kid anyhow?"

Apparently I made a noise that was translatable as: lady, that is eighteen kinds of bats.h.i.t.

"You don't agree?" she asked me.

Now I should say I'd already gotten in trouble because she'd earlier heard me making fun of the swaddled infant she'd drawn on the whiteboard. Also, when she'd said the thing about forty-eight states, I'd turned to Edward, and said, "That's not right," just so that he, a foreigner, would not be confused, I swear that's the only reason.

What I'm saying is I was already not Nurse Bats.h.i.t's favorite student.

"Well," I stuttered, "I mean, I don't know, it's not, it's just, I don't think - listen, you don't need to convince me anyhow: I'm married to a European."

"I have a European parent," she said, in a voice that suggested that I meant European European to be a euphemism for to be a euphemism for nudist: nudist: she understood, but this really wasn't the place to discuss it. she understood, but this really wasn't the place to discuss it.

I'm glad I wasn't being graded.

4. An infant CPR cla.s.s. This took place in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the public library and was the most oversubscribed cla.s.s of all, as well as the most motley: there were two other heavily pregnant women, a bunch of day care workers, a few other couples, and some EMTs brushing up on their skills. The teacher was a pepper pot of a woman with six kids. She'd brought two of them with her, a pair of mismatched nine-year-old fraternal twin boys.

The rescue mannequins were the usual beige objects that looked as though they'd died of heroin overdoses, even the two infant dummies. There weren't enough to go around, so to make up for the lack, the teacher had brought a variety of dolls. For instance, Elmo. And Kermit the Frog. And the green Teletubby, the Cat in the Hat, a Rugrat, a character I'd never heard of called Doug, Raggedy Ann, and a Cabbage Patch doll. The history of beloved commercial dolls. She gave us pieces of plastic to lay over the mouths - or muzzles, or whatever you call the thing through which a Teletubby takes its nourishment - dental dams, essentially, to make safe the practice of artificial respiration on toys. The man next to us had the green Teletubby. He was the only person there who was learning for a specific, already earthbound person: his son, he said happily in a Chinese accent as thick as his crew cut, was five days old. You would have easily picked him out as the new father, he was so tender with the Teletubby, so cautious as he supported its head and adjusted the bit of plastic wrap.

The twins stood in when we learned about older children.

"Here's where you press," the instructor said, indicating the spot on the littler twin. He had blond ringlets and a potbelly.

"And then they throw up!" he said.

"Yes, sometimes," she said.

"And then they eat eat it!" it!"

"That doesn't happen," his mother said, frowning.

"Who wants to save me?" the taller twin asked the students politely, but we were all a little shy about rescuing a perfectly safe boy, right in sight of his mother.

I made sure I got my hands on one of the actual dummies, the kind with a balloon down its throat, whose chest rose when you blew into the mouth: I needed the physical rea.s.surance. I put my hand across its torso. As long as I breathed, the dying plastic baby breathed. When I stopped, it stopped.

"Listen," the woman announced suddenly, in the voice I recognized from fourth grade, a room full of kids working on projects, a teacher with a point: listen up, people. listen up, people. "Listen, children don't die. They rarely die." "Listen, children don't die. They rarely die."

She said this to calm us. If you think that children rarely die, then it's easier to save them. I dandled the plastic baby on my knee and bit my lip.

My notes from that cla.s.s say: WORRY IN THIS ORDER.

A ir irB reathing reathingC irculation irculation

And that of course is why we were taking all those courses: We wanted to be told, Worry in this order. We were delighted to know the damage a single loose almond in the cab of a car could do in the event of an accident, because then we could remove that almond and be vigilant about future dropped almonds. We wanted to hear all the details of a caesarean just in case; we wanted to know ahead of time how common vacuum-a.s.sisted births were. Once, we had belonged to the school of Cross That Bridge When We Come to It. Now we wanted all bridges mapped, the safety of their struts, their likelihood of washing out, their vulnerability to blackguards, angry natives, cougars.

Here is the worst thing that happened during my second pregnancy.

Edward had gone back to England for a month so that he could come back to America. I went to the doctor because I was worried about some minor pregnancy symptom. The ob-gyn was a nice bespectacled woman in her fifties, who I'd never seen before. Earlier in the pregnancy a different doctor had said, "Now, this is just about the time when you can hear a heartbeat," and she'd put the monitor on my stomach and found nothing and we'd been rushed into the sonogram room, where all was well. Now, weeks later, the bespectacled doctor could not find a heartbeat.

At first that was fine. I lay back and let her feel around and remembered the earlier impossible-to-find heartbeat.

"There it is!" the bespectacled doctor said, and then "No, that's you." She took hold of my wrist to feel my pulse, slower than a baby's. Every now and then we heard a thud thud through the monitor, and she'd pincer my wrist and shake her head: me again. I I had a heartbeat. had a heartbeat.

After a while, I thought, Well. What if this is it? What do I do next? Call Edward in England, of course, but then what? Do I go home and get drunk? Drive like h.e.l.l in the direction of my nearest good friend? Throw myself into the Hudson?

She said, "It's no good. Now your heart is beating so fast, I won't be able to tell the difference."

I was rushed to the sonogram room. "Yup, there," said the beautiful sonographer, nodding at the screen. Her name was Barb, and I loved her. The bespectacled doctor (who of course knew my history from my chart) put her hands on her head and walked in the several small circles of relief that Edward would have completed if he were there.

Poor woman. She'd been panicking as much as I had.

Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can't out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.

So at the end of February, when I was seven months pregnant, we took the train from Albany to New Orleans, where I'd been invited to give a reading. Saratoga Springs was still packed in graying snow, left over from a Valentine's Day blizzard, and my pregnancy was no longer a secret from strangers, who cooed over my stomach, and said, "First child? You must be so excited!" We booked a tiny room with folding bunk beds for the train ride - the very definition of h.e.l.l for some people, I know, but it was fantastic. Our across-the-corridor neighbor was an elderly English Franciscan monk and train buff, exactly the sort of person you can get to know only on a long train trip. We took all of our lousy, happy Amtrak meals with him.

In Tuscaloosa, at a pause, we stepped onto the platform and sniffed at the sunrise. We were riding into spring. This visit had originally been planned in the innocent April of 2005, for that October, when I would have been three months pregnant with Pudding. In Paris, just after the Gulf Coast's calamity, I had to explain it to the beautiful woman in the Air France office near the Jardins du Luxembourg: New Orleans was under water. Everything was canceled. She smiled sympathetically but would not refund the ticket. The college asked me again for the spring of 2006, but I had to write back with my regrets: I planned to be heavily pregnant or giving birth for the entire spring.

What would it be like, postdiluvian us in postdiluvian New Orleans?

On our first full day our hostess took us on what she called the Devastation Tour of the city: the haunted Lower Ninth Ward, where one woman stood on the porch of the only renovated house for blocks, her moving van parked out front. We saw the house of the filmmaker Helen Hill, who'd been shot to death by an intruder while her husband scooped up their baby and ran to safety; we looked at some levees, which seemed to have been stapled back together and left to rust; we pa.s.sed by other people on similar tours. Everywhere you could see protoplasmic high-water marks on houses, some low enough that you'd know that only the things in the bas.e.m.e.nt were ruined, some so high you wondered how it was that the entire neighborhood had not been washed away. Other houses still had the international orange tattoos left after the storm: date searched; number of people saved; number of people who, being dead, were merely discovered. We ended up at the new Whole Foods near the studio apartment that had been rented for us, goggle-eyed at all that disorienting bounty. Who would need to buy, in such a world, a precooked vegan meatloaf?

"I don't think they're done finding bodies," our hostess told us. She'd just gone on antianxiety medication so that she could bear living in the city she loved.

Spring had arrived just ahead of us, in the form of actual blossoms - magnolias - and the weird kudzu of flung-from-floats Mardi Gras beads in the trees. The city was all blue skies and light breezes and raw nerves and melancholy. Most everyone we met was on edge, some so heartsick we worried, even if we'd never met them before. They seemed frozen. Something had happened. It had been a year and a half, and if you weren't in the middle of it you might lose patience: New Orleans, why can't you get over it? We were very sorry for you for a while. Now there are other things to be sad about. It's not your time anymore. Pull yourself together.

Of course it felt familiar, as wretchedly presumptuous as that sounds. I'd spent the fall and winter feeling only the most cautious of emotions. A gleam of hope, a spike of fear, slantwise guilty grief. One day's worth of feeling at a time. Surely grand emotion is more than twenty-four hours' worth, grief compounded with interest, joy magnified by antic.i.p.ated returns. In New Orleans, I found it extraordinary to be surrounded by great sadness. The people we saw, old friends and strangers, had left and come back, and now they were waiting for the next disaster, the next murder, the next hurricane, the next levee failure, the loss of their home, the revocation of their homeowner's insurance, and still of course at the same time they had to hope. Hadn't they come back for that reason, because they hoped?

Me, too: same place, remembering the disaster, trying to believe it would not come for me again.

At a reception that week, I was chatting with the exceptionally lovely, soft-spoken woman who'd donated the money for the program that had brought me there. We sat in folding chairs against a wall, a few feet from the buffet table. Just small talk. She asked me how my pregnancy was going. Then she said, "I was so sorry when I heard about your first child. My first child was stillborn, too."

My heart kicked on like a furnace. Suddenly tears were pouring down my face.

"Oh no!" said the woman. "I didn't mean for that to happen!"

I laughed and grabbed some napkins from the table and tried to explain myself, though even now it's hard to find the words. What came over me was grat.i.tude and an entirely inappropriate love. I didn't know the woman, but I loved her. I'd felt the same thing meeting another couple on campus, a professor and his wife who'd written me when Pudding died to send condolences and to say that they'd had a daughter who was stillborn nearly thirty years before.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of a sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

Twice now I have heard the story of someone who knows someone who's had a stillborn child since Pudding has died, and it's all I can do not to book a flight immediately, to show up somewhere I'm not wanted, just so that I can say, It happened to me, too, It happened to me, too, because it meant so much to me to hear it. because it meant so much to me to hear it. It happened to me, too, It happened to me, too, meant: meant: It's not your fault It's not your fault. And You are not a freak of nature You are not a freak of nature. And This does not have to be a secret This does not have to be a secret.

That's how it works. When a baby dies, other dead children become suddenly visible: Daughters and sons. First cousins. The neighbor kid. The first child. The last child. Your older brother. Some of their names have been forgotten; some never had names in the first place. They disappeared under heaps of advice. Don't dwell. Have another child, a makeup baby. Life is for the living. But then another baby dies, and here they are again, in stories, and you will love them all, and - if you are the mother of a dead child yourself - they will keep coming to you. A couple I know just lost their baby. A couple I know just lost their baby. And you will know that your lost child has appeared somewhere else in the world. And you will know that your lost child has appeared somewhere else in the world. I know a couple . . . I know a couple . . .

All those dead children. Who knows what they want?

In our better moments, we surely understand that the dead do not need anything. Afterlife, no afterlife: the dead have their needs taken care of. Oh, but isn't wanting things something else again, and don't we talk about it all the time. It's what he would have wanted. Her last wishes. It's what he would have wanted. Her last wishes. Thank G.o.d for the dead; thank G.o.d someone is capable of making a decision in the worst of times: Thank G.o.d for the dead; thank G.o.d someone is capable of making a decision in the worst of times: He would have liked it that way. He would have liked it that way.

But a baby. Who's to say? Babies are born needing everything. They're a state of emergency. That's what they're for. Dead, there's nothing we can do for them, and we don't know what they'd want, we can't even guess. I can pretend that I knew Pudding. No, I did know him, not with my brain but with my body, and yet I know nothing about him, not even the simplest thing: I have no idea of what he'd want. And so in my grief I understand that mourning is a kind of ventriloquism; we put words into the mouths of our bereavers, but of course it's all entirely about us, our wants, our needs, the dead are satisfied, we are greedy, greedy, greedy, unseemly, self-obsessed. If your child did not survive his birth, everyone can see that clearly. I want. I need. Not him. No pretending.

I thought stillbirth was a thing of history, and then it happened to me, and yet now when I hear of a baby dying I'm just as incredulous. You mean they You mean they still still haven't figured this out? haven't figured this out? I want to hear about every dead baby, everywhere in the world. I want to know their names, Christopher, Strick, Jonathan. I want their mothers to know about Pudding. I want to hear about every dead baby, everywhere in the world. I want to know their names, Christopher, Strick, Jonathan. I want their mothers to know about Pudding.

The dead don't need anything. The rest of us could use some company.

When I was about thirty-six weeks pregnant the second time, Edward mentioned that his grandmother had been named Mabel. I'd known this, of course, but forgotten.

"Mabel," I said. "Mabel. Mabel!"

We'd scarcely discussed names at all. In the back of our heads, we remembered the boy names we'd come up with for Pudding, both of us leaning toward the names we'd rejected early in the process, like Moses and George. For five minutes we'd discussed girl names and come up with Lucy, Beatrix, and Penelope. That was all we could manage. We didn't joke about names the way we had the first time - Fatty Harvey, Phineas T. Harvey, Charles Laughton Harvey. We didn't joke much at all. All of the jokes we'd made when I was pregnant with Pudding had to be retired, and it was hard to come up with new ones.

But now Mabel Mabel was in my head, and I was a little in love with it. I called Ann and Lib and got their reactions. (They loved it, or at least said they did. Lib declared that she would call our baby Mabel no matter the gender.) was in my head, and I was a little in love with it. I called Ann and Lib and got their reactions. (They loved it, or at least said they did. Lib declared that she would call our baby Mabel no matter the gender.) Mabel, Mabel, I thought. I pictured a little girl named Mabel - not necessarily our little girl named Mabel, but an ordinary everyday Mabel. You had to love a little girl named Mabel. I hadn't felt this way about any of the other little-girl names. I'd never felt this about any of the little-boy names of a year before, not even my favorite of the lot: Oscar. Sometimes I said to Edward, in a voice full of meaning, "Mabel." I thought. I pictured a little girl named Mabel - not necessarily our little girl named Mabel, but an ordinary everyday Mabel. You had to love a little girl named Mabel. I hadn't felt this way about any of the other little-girl names. I'd never felt this about any of the little-boy names of a year before, not even my favorite of the lot: Oscar. Sometimes I said to Edward, in a voice full of meaning, "Mabel."

"Maybe," he said.

I rubbed my stomach. "Mabel?" I said. "Do I love 'Mabel' because you're a Mabel?"

Thump thump, went the obliging, enigmatic baby.

Over the past year and over my second pregnancy, of course I thought about Pudding all the time, every day, possibly every waking hour. (It's possible I still do think of him every waking hour, and if I were the kind of new mother who kept track of things - diapers, feedings, naps - I could mark down thoughts of first child thoughts of first child as well.) But mostly I didn't think about the details of his death. If I climbed into that pit, I'd never crawl out, I'd have been at the ob-gyn practice every single day, begging Dr. Knoeller for an ultrasound, a sedative, an emergency C-section. I wasn't counting my chickens, this one chicken, this essential chicken - but I wasn't imagining heart-stopping scenarios, either. as well.) But mostly I didn't think about the details of his death. If I climbed into that pit, I'd never crawl out, I'd have been at the ob-gyn practice every single day, begging Dr. Knoeller for an ultrasound, a sedative, an emergency C-section. I wasn't counting my chickens, this one chicken, this essential chicken - but I wasn't imagining heart-stopping scenarios, either.

Then it was early April.