During the ultrasound appointment, where I spot a chart that names me gravida 4—doctor-speak for the heaviness of my two liveborn girls, past miscarriage, and bulging uterus—and where the doctor rubs his hands and chuckles Ten weeks! We’re gonna see a big baby! before his smile vanishes and he asks if I might be mistaken about the conception date, the doctor also says, after this disaster, I could wait a full cycle and try again, and I nod and thank him, but I know I won’t wait
because I’m racing menopause, racing the dwindling eggs in my ovaries, and so, as soon as my just-emptied body tells me it’s ovulating, I read Lydia and Miriam to sleep and have sex with my husband, and a 5.1 earthquake strikes right as we finish, rattling alphabet books on the nightstand, a print of cattle on the wall above us, the flesh on our early-forties bodies, and we both believe it’s a sign from the universe, Oklahoma’s earthquake-creating frackers, or maybe God,
who soaked a scrap of lambswool but not the ground under it at a sign-request from Gideon, namesake of the name I plan to give a child if cells knit into a child, because it slant-rhymes with Lydia and Miriam, because, despite my enthusiasm for unicorns, pigtails, and ceramic teacups, I believe—thanks to internalized patriarchy plus my desire to relive the childhood of my eleven-years-buried younger brother—all my pregnancies are boys until they’re declared female or dead,
and that sign signals baby Gideon himself, and first a pregnancy, one of those magic-quick-to-come pregnancies that erase previous heartbreak, a pregnancy I, who took four couch-clinging months to conceive after I quit being gravida 2, suppose would be filled with equal parts anxiety and laughter, and then carsickness! fall-on-the-sidewalk dizziness! no period! positive test! and I name myself gravida 5, no! gravida 5.1! gravida so buoyant heaviness is irrelevant, gravida that shakes
like the earth under Gideon when he, with the confidence of wet wool, feigned a multitude with three hundred by smashing pitchers, waving torches, blowing trumpets, and shouting, but before I take progesterone, prescription for multiple miscarriers, I request viability-checking bloodwork, sign-trusting yet afraid of courting side effects for a pregnancy unreal as Gideon’s army, afraid because doom-scrolling informed me the hormone can trap blastocysts, embryos, feti, dead and rotting
instead of keeping a live baby live, and so I enter the testing lab, let an inexperienced phlebotomist puncture my arm, while ten feet away, a basketball-bellied young woman answers her own tester’s How are ya today? with Well I’m definitely pregnant, and tired of it, and I try not to hate her because I’ve been there, but I can’t quite manage it, and dread rises for twenty-four sleep-free hours until MyChart says I also am definitely pregnant, but with numbers so low
there’s no hope, so I shut myself in my bathroom, collapse by the toilet, and cry softly enough I won’t alarm my toddlers, cry softly enough I could hear them crying, then I strap both girls into car seats and drive to the pharmacy, pay sixty bucks, risk the rot, press white capsules into my vaginal wall until pink crotch-burning discharge coats my panties, curse desperation and earthquakes until chunky clots come as relief, but then months pass, and I believe again in the power
of my 5.1 sign, because when I think miscarriage, I almost never think earthquake, only stress-eating chips before that ten-week ultrasound, only grasping my girls’ warm bodies afterwards and breathing You’re miracles, only trembling face down on church carpet after gravida 2, only passing gravida 4 tissue into sweatpants while doped up and watching magic tricks on TV, and I’m able to ignore my ovaries, enjoy my unpregnant middle-aged body, hug my miracles and breathe.
