No one is lounging on my bladder. 

I can eat salsa, chocolate cake, and deep-fried okra. I can chug Dr. Pepper then sleep upside down if I care to, and stomach acid won’t slide up my throat.

Miriam, my seventeen-month-old, still smells like baby. 

After the ten-week ultrasound that revealed no heartbeat, no growth beyond poppyseed blastocyst, my post-Roe-Oklahoma doctor offered me not only the choice to head back into the snow-closed town and wait it out, self-monitoring for the fever, foul-smelling discharge, and severe abdominal pain that signal sepsis, but also a D&C, also misoprostol from the Walmart pharmacy, for a condition he jargoned onto my chart as “missed abortion.” 

I won’t have to explain to Miriam, lover of pink and turquoise breakaway necklaces, climber of giant plastic tube slides, grunter who understands everything but refuses to speak, that she’ll have to surrender her prime claim on my lap and arms. 

Because my belly grew though my poppyseed didn’t, because I experienced nausea, acid reflux, sore nipples, weeping at commercials, the works, my husband sat in a vinyl hospital chair and shared the new-grandchild news with his father, stuck in a bed with a fall-risk alarm on Christmas. When I saw the ultrasound screen, my father-in-law was better, back home, and the holiday, in my memory (what else is a past day but memory?), even now feels brightened by hope. 

Unlike after my first miscarriage, I can mope in bed without worrying I’ll stay there until I die. 

Though three-and-half-year-old Lydia had chosen the outfit she’d wear to meet the baby—jelly sandals, tiara, the bunny dress she wore to meet Miriam, but bigger—and she’d decided the baby was a boy, saying solemnly, “He will be my husband,” she’s coping far better than I feared right after I told her, selfishly early, I was pregnant. 

Unlike after my first miscarriage, I’m not staring at the sticker-coated seat across from Lydia at her activity table, wondering if my daughter will grow up alone. 

I can breastfeed Miriam for two full years without the terrors (for me) of tandem nursing. I’ve stopped imagining a grumpy toddler pushing a newborn off my nipple, wishing to drain her new sibling’s sustenance from my chest. 

Because of my trip to the doctor, because of the invention of the ultrasound, I know that when, days before my scheduled D&C, I feel my vagina open for something orange-sized, and something orange-shaped splats on the bathroom floor with the sound I’d expect from a moldy orange, I’m passing amniotic sac, malformed placenta, likely my poppyseed, but not the wrinkled, rotting body of a twelve-week fetus. 

My poppyseed stopped developing so early, so visibly pre-nose, pre-belly, pre-limbs, I have no need, and no ability, to picture a gold-brown-haired someone in heaven. 

I’ve stopped imagining myself trying to explain to my not-yet-two, possibly still not-talking baby that Mama can’t nurse her because her belly is big, because her nipples hurt. Because a not-yetsibling’s physical needs outweigh Miriam’s emotional needs. Because Mama has changed. 

The truth: I didn’t tell Lydia I was pregnant. Bed-fuzzed blond hair framed by laundry room doorway, she informed me I was having a boy a full week before my positive test, and later I gleefully confirmed we might very possibly get a baby. My missed miscarriage gave me six weeks to believe I’d experienced something like an angelic annunciation.  

Unlike after my first miscarriage, I’m not waking to a new ring in my name, realizing Sarah Beth Childers peed parallel lines, stroked newborn onesies, and then bled the pregnancy away. 

Lydia has barely cried at all, just asked dully, “The baby isn’t coming true?” and told her Sunday school teachers, preschool teachers, pediatrician, “Mama was pregnant, but the baby is dead, and now he’s in heaven,” quoting God knows who. She says this only when I’m not around, as if she knows the topic would hurt me. 

When Miriam points to the back door and grunts for a walk, her carrier fits against my flattened abdomen. I stride coatless through forty-five-degree air, forget to shoe my baby, the evening feels so balmy after subzero weeks. I pause at an oak to let Miriam stroke its bark, but she’s not interested. She grunts and points down the sidewalk. Keep walking, Mama. Her body fills the place my belly would have been as she hums, kicking night air with bare feet.