I Was a Mother Once, For 9 Weeks and Five Days

I was a mother once, for nine weeks and five days anyway.

Or  seven weeks and five days if you count from the date the doctors plucked my eggs from my uterus and fertilized them in a Petri dish with my husband’s sperm, and then re-deposited “the most promising looking one” back inside me two days later.  (Pregnancy, I learned then, is medically dated from the date of your last period, the “start of your last cycle,” not the date of conception.  In this case, since the doctors themselves presided over the moment of conception, I know that my first and only offspring sprung into existence exactly 14 days after my last cycle commenced.)

Or maybe I was technically a mother for only six weeks and five days, if you don’t count the last week, the seven days during which my body became a maternal mausoleum, a secret graveyard holding fast to the little embryo whose heart had stopped beating, the doctors guessed, two days before the ultrasound that confirmed it had gone quiet.  One hundred and sixty eight hours, approximately, from the time my “missed miscarriage” (when the fetus dies in utero but the mother’s body does not spontaneously miscarry) began to the time the same doctor who had, almost two months earlier, removed my egg for fertilization, now began to administer anaesthesia through an IV in my arm, so I’d be unconscious during the egg’s second, and final, removal.

I can’t say I acquired a great wealth of wisdom during my almost-ten weeks of motherhood.  But I did learn a few unexpected things (beyond the meanings of all the acronyms on the “over 40 IVF online listserv” I had joined, being 41 and new to the processes both of trying to get pregnant and facing infertility.  Acronyms like TTC, ET, 2WW, and PUPO, or “pregnant until proven otherwise,” really just a kinder interpretation of the two week wait during IVF, when you know you have an embyo inside you but you don't know it it has implanted or gone still).

I learned―the night after the ultrasound that confirmed the fetus’s heart had stopped, as my husband lay his cheek against my stomach and cried silently and the banal love-song coming from the television made my chest burst with grief like when I was a teenager mourning a crush-gone-bad, only it now felt a thousand times worse―that motherhood means a whole new way to have a broken heart.