Happy Birthday, Harry Houdini!

By Amelia Saint
Listen to the story.

One morning, I went into my settings and changed Siri’s voice to female. Then I asked: “Hey Siri, do I have to go to the doctor when I’m having a miscarriage?”

“What causes a miscarriage?”

“How big is a six-week-old fetus?”

Usually, I have my Siri set to the British male voice because I like the way he says “boulevard,” but there are some questions that only your mother or Female Siri can answer.

Two weeks earlier I thought I had a stomach bug. I spent the afternoon in bed watching Hellraiser. That should have tipped me off that it wasn’t a bug. A flood of hormones was already changing my body and my brain. We all do our own strange little things when we’re pregnant. Some women cry or clean or eat rare steaks. I watch gory movies and eat a lot of mustard. We had been trying, or at least not not trying, so the mustard cravings weren’t entirely unexpected. A few days later I took a test and it was positive. For a week and a half, I lived like a pregnant woman. I cut out coffee and booze and soft cheese and sushi and runny eggs. Then, I woke up to cramps and bleeding on the morning of my 34thbirthday.

The only people who called me on my birthday were the same people who had received a message with a picture of my positive pregnancy test: Mom, Dad, sister and mother-in-law. So I had to have this conversation more than once.

“Hello… Oh, thanks I’m OK… Um, it’s not going too well, actually. I’m having a miscarriage… Yeah, I’m sure… Well, it was too early to count on anyway… Thanks, but I’m fine. Really.”

It was the same with everyone. They say, “I’m sorry.” I say, “I’m fine.” I try to sound happy, which somehow makes us all even more sad.

The night before, I had started referring to my fetus as Harry Houdini. It happened in the stupid and confusing way that all inside jokes happen. My husband, son and I were sitting around the table each having our own one-sided conversation. I was talking about the fetus. My husband was talking about the movie we were going to see that night. And my son was trying to recall the cast of Matilda. Like the three narcissists that we are, we each thought the others were repeatedly trying to jump into our monologues, so when my son said, “I want to call him Harry Houdini,” I thought he was talking about the fetus.

“You want to call the baby Harry Houdini?” I said. “I guess that works. He’s going to have to escape eventually.”

Of course, my son wasn’t talking about the fetus. He was trying to come up with the name of the actor who played Matilda’s greedy dad. It was Danny Devito, not Harry Houdini. But I liked it. It was funny and not at all sentimental, and that’s just the type of thing I go for.

Twelve hours later, Harry Houdini began his daring escape.

According to Siri, somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. This was my fourth pregnancy. Statistically speaking, I should have had at least three babies; but I only had one. My husband asked what causes it, “Is it just too fucked up to live so your body gets rid of it?”

He tells me now that he definitely didn’t say “too fucked up to live.” And he is probably right because that sounds more like something I would say. But that was the gist of it.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Once again, I turned to Siri for answers. According to Siri’s findings, 50 to 70 percent of first trimester miscarriages are caused by chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus. Why does that make me feel better? Do I want it to be the fetus’s fault so I can stop beating myself up for drinking a couple of Diet Cokes?

My husband said, “It isn’t real for me until the baby is here.” It became real for me the instant I found out. After a visit to my OB, my husband took me out to lunch for my birthday. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate anyway because I didn’t want him to worry. I did insist that we not go to my favorite restaurant because I knew that I would ever after associate their dumplings with my miscarriage. And I really like those dumplings.

Six weeks after conception, Harry Houdini had visible dimples where eyes, nose, mouth and ears would be. His heart was beating. His brain and lungs were forming. He was the size of a black-eyed pea.

I passed the fetus the day after my birthday. I had been scrutinizing the toilet bowl, worried I would miss it. But I didn’t miss it. It floated near the top of the water, still inside its ruptured sac. It was small and bloody and utterly dead, but it was vaguely recognizable: a tiny head attached to a tiny spine with four little primordial nubs that would have been limbs. I knelt over the bowl and fought the urge to reach in and scoop it out.

What was I supposed to do with my little Harry Houdini? If you’re religious, you would pray. If you’re sentimental, you would cry. If you’re really steel, you would collect and refrigerate the tissue for lab work. But I’m not quite any of those things, so I just looked at it for a while, then flushed.

The babies we never get to have aren’t supposed to count. The common wisdom is to keep your pregnancies secret until you reach your second trimester and the risk of miscarriage drops significantly. That way you can pretend it never even happened. Harry Houdini who? And when people see you crying on your birthday, you can lie and say, “You can’t see it, but I’ve got a really bad ingrown toenail,” because that is an acceptable reason to cry on your birthday. No one need ever suspect that for a few weeks you had something inside you that could have been brilliant and kind and beautiful, that could have been someone you love more than yourself, that could have grown to be a friend you would respect and admire for the rest of your life. No one has to know that, for a while, that little bean you surrendered to the sewer already was all those things. No one has to say they’re sorry. No one has to ask if you’re OK. No one has to be uncomfortable in the presence of your sadness. Because it is first and foremost your duty as a woman not to bother anyone.

I’m the type who pokes at my bruises until they stop hurting. That’s what I’m doing now, with all of you, and that’s what I was doing that morning when I knelt on my bathroom floor until my legs fell asleep, looking at little Harry Houdini. It hurt. It might have been easier not to look, not to see what I was losing. But seeing him, recognizing his budding human form, eventually made it hurt less because it made it OK for me to grieve. He was a real, once-living thing, and it is perfectly alright to feel sad when you say goodbye to a once-living thing.

In the years since, I have had another pregnancy and another baby: Warren, a wild and joyous little person who made our family complete. But I will always carry the babies I didn’t have. And every birthday I’ll share with little my Harry Houdini, who made his escape without fanfare.

Originally told live at Beacon Story Lab in Sioux City, Iowa and published at eepurl.com. Founded by award-winning journalist Ally Karsyn, Beacon Story Lab creates more courageous, compassionate and connected communities through the healing art of storytelling.