N. West Moss - Flesh & Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life: A Memoir

Flesh & Blood

Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life

N. West Moss

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2021

For my mother
and her mother
and her mother
and her mother

I was six years old when Grandma Hastings died, at the end of the year she came to live with us. The night before her funeral, my mother rolled my hair around plastic curlers, which pressed painfully into my scalp as I tried to sleep. My father said that at Grandmas funeral I cried like an adult, real sobs of comprehending grief. My mother remembers that I went from ashtray to ashtray at the church gathering spent matches, then sat cross-legged under a table eating the burnt match heads, acting out some inexplicable ritual of mourning, the sulfur crumbling on my tongue. Ashes to ashes.

Even before I got married and put her wedding ring permanently on my finger, Grandma Hastings was with me. For a lifetime now Ive thought of her as I fell asleep at night. When my mother reads to me, I hear my grandmothers soft voice. Grandma Hastings is with me when I write, when I mourn the loss of my own unborn children, when I walk in the woods, when I visit New Orleans. She is with me, hardly perceptible but there like the air, like the unnoticed but vital pull of gravity.

We do not always choose who walks with us, who we will find ourselves leaning on in times of duress. I only understand this in retrospect, long after the story Im about to tell, long after the illness, diagnosis, and recovery are behind me. I woke up one morning and thought: Grandma Hastings has been beside me all this while. How much harder this would have been without her.

I have a writing room, an office called Beside the Point. Its up in the attic where the world cant interrupt me. There is a chair there that I bought at a thrift store for $9.99. It is large and comfortable and piled with books and papers, but now and then I clear it off as an invitation for Grandma Hastings, a woman who briefly, when I was almost six years old, opened up worlds for me. I like to imagine her sitting with me while I work.

exsanguinate (ek-sanggwi-nt): 1. To remove or withdraw the circulating blood; to make bloodless

TheFreeDictionary.com

At fifty-two I am old to still be bleeding so much, but my body is a stranger to me. The blood flows, insistent as a river, dragging me from my bed at night, over and over. Messes to clean up in the dark. My strength pouring out of me. For months and months and months, I have been bleeding a lot. How can I have this much blood? How can there be more?

When will it end?

Will it ever end?

Already an author, Ive decided to take an advanced writing class at the school in New Jersey where I am an adjunct professor, and I wear a pretty dress because I am happy to be in this class with a teacher I love, happy to be writing.

The dress is from Old Navy and is white with tiny flowers scattered over it. Because of all the blood, I am also wearing a super plus tampon, and a maxi pad, the biggest they make. My body and I are two different entities now, and I dont know what to expect, like its an unreliable child Im bringing along who might need snacks or to be reprimanded, might be charming or throw a tantrum. All I am sure of is this body is unpredictable.

So, beneath my dress I have my gauzy armor in place when the professor says, after several hours of class, Lets take a ten-minute break, and classmates begin to rustle around me, stretching and gathering up their papers.

Time slows as I stand up and blood just spills out of me, right through the super plus tampon, right over the sides of the enormous pad. It travels down the length of my thighs, over the hills of my knees, past my shins and the knobs of my ankles, and within less than a second, it starts to puddle beneath the arches of my feet inside my shoes.

Im sure that everyone has seen and is horrified. (I find out later that no one noticed anythinga lesson Ive had to learn over and over again, that no one is ever looking at me, as much as I dread and hope that they are.) I take my bag and walk quickly, without making a noise, to the nearest bathroom (which happens to belong to the dean of the college). I go as fast as a person can with her legs pressed together. Im shaking. My feet are squishing in the blood thats filling my shoes.

On the toilet I feel clots coming out of me and it reminds me of that big second-trimester miscarriage from years ago. But now theres no cramping, no panting. The blood clots are so large, though, that I can feel them like islands in a river. There is an enormous amount of bloodan alarming amount. There is blood all over my legs. Blood on the floor.

I spit on wads of toilet paper and scrub my ankles and thighs. I bunch up the toilet paper and then paper towels between my legs and wash my shoes in the sink, and then I get on my hands and knees and clean the floor, trembling, quiet as a mouse.

Because this is the deans bathroom, and because this is all happening at a school where I slid from visiting professor to lecturer to adjunct, and where Id like a real, permanent job one day (that I wont ever get), the complexity of the situation dumbfounds me, telescopes away from me into outer space.

It occurs to me as I frantically clean that I have spent a lot of my life cleaning up after myself in fear and shame. I think too about how my uterus and I have been at odds for forever. It has given me a lot of work and mess and worry over the decades, and for what? No children to show for the years of late-night trips back and forth to the bathroom, for the in-the-dark sinks full of cold water, for all the ruined mattresses, thrown away underwear, interrupted sleep.

A tear falls into the blood on the floor and makes a little clear spot through which I can see the white tile. I feel too old for this. I feel too old for everything. It would be nice to lie down on the cool tile floor, I think, press my cheek against its chilly face, to just give up and rest. Soldiering on feels beyond my capacity. Horizontal seems much more peaceful than vertical, and I feel the floor pulling me down. But no. As my shaking hands wipe up blood from the tile, my mind begins to plan what to do next.

Plan, plan, plan.

I left my phone at home (god, Im disorganized), so I cant call my husband, and I wont go back into class now and ask for help. Its too embarrassing and frightening with my legs all bloody, and if I go in now and make a scene, Ill never be able to look at any of them again, and this teacher means a lot to me.

Plan, plan, plan.

No to the classroom. No to calling my husband. Maybe I should go home and wait for Craig there, or should I go straight to the hospital? I might be bleeding out. Thats possible. Ive never gone to the emergency room before, but yes, it dawns on me that being home in an empty house is a bad idea if this is as bad as I suspect it might be. I probably