Dec 14, 2017
Unholy Night
To all the women, everywhere, for whom Christmas is not “the season to be jolly,” for a reason that only we can ever totally comprehend…
I made eye contact with the jewelry counter clerk cautiously. Knowing I was about to give her a Christmas Eve story she would not tell her grandchildren someday.
But there was so much blood. So much that I was afraid I’d leave a puddle if I stood in one place too long.
And I could not find my husband. It was a Sears. A small town one in Flagstaff, Arizona, but still, a large building teeming with last minute shoppers.
My doctor had told us to go shopping, maybe. To “help things along.” So we’d gone to walk the mall a bit. And in Sears, he had, as many men do, headed off to check out all the newest Craftsman tools, leaving me to wander through women’s wear.
No one had explained that this might happen. A sudden gush that stopped me in my tracks.
I could only think of one thing to do — when I finally could think.
I was grateful when the clerk turned her gaze away from the person she was waiting on and gave me her full attention when I said, “Please…I need help,” in a way that I knew another woman would almost instantly “feel.”
Quietly, steadily, sadly. Sort of the way you might tell someone you only had a few days left to live, maybe. Which was, in fact, how I felt.
The clerk very politely and professionally excused herself from the potential sale discussion and led me to one side.
“I’m having a miscarriage,” I said, as softly but urgently as possible. “And it’s just…well, there’s a lot of blood, and I can’t find my husband and — ”
“Just hang on one second,” the clerk said, rushing over to another clerk.
She was back in just about one second as promised, purse in hand.
“What’s his name?” she asked, shoving a pencil and piece of paper into my hands.
Once I’d written his name, she handed off the slip of paper to the other clerk with an order to have him paged and sent to the only hospital in Flagstaff.
“I’ll drive you. He’ll catch up later,” she said.
“I’ll ruin your car seats.”
“No, you won’t. Can you walk a little bit more?”
I had to, so I did. And as we sped toward the hospital with me perched on an old blanket from her trunk, I told her about the razor sharp pains that sent us on the 120-mile drive down from the Hopi reservation to see our obstetrician.
We’d made that trip at least once a month for years like most of the Native people in the area. Flagstaff is the largest town near the reservation, the only one with all the amenities.
We were married there, in fact. And had planned to have our first child there. The hospital on the mesas was notoriously dicey.
But something had still gone terribly wrong.
When I explained how I’d been encouraged to make that mall walk after the pains suddenly subsided, my angel of mercy gave a little “tsk” of disapproval and said, “Well, right now you just keep still. We’re almost there.”
I got the feeling she knew more about my ordeal than she might be willing to express. Except through her extraordinary kindness.
So I closed my eyes and concentrated on trying to Kegel enough to slow the flow, which only caused more gushing.
At the emergency room check-in window, a lethargic clerk slid a clipboard toward me and asked for my insurance card, ID, the usual. Her oft-repeated instructions offered in monotone. Rote. Remote.
When I explained what was happening, she retrieved the clip board and said, “Then you need to go to Maternity.”
I sputtered, “But I can’t—where is — can someone take me?”
She pointed to a breezeway not too far from us.
“It’s just down that way.”
Maternity was, of course, the last place I wanted to go under the circumstances. And I also knew full well that more walking was the wrong thing to do. But arguing would just waste more time. And blood.
So off I toddled. And sure enough, a few steps down that breezeway, I became light headed. And started to see swirling “stars.”
So I rushed into the first rest room I saw sat on the toilet and pulled the Emergency chain on the wall by the door.
A high-pitched alarm went off. And two nurses soon appeared in the doorway — I’d left the door unlocked.
“I’m bleeding really bad,” I told them.
One smirked, the other sighed. Apparently profuse bleeding was not an emergency to either of them. But it had gotten their attention.
And Sears had gotten my husband’s. He was in the waiting room off the Maternity Ward admissions area soon after they hauled me there.
Waiting along with him were several other husbands. Smiling husbands. Nervous husbands. Doting husbands leading anxious, laboring mothers-to-be up to the check-in window.
Their babies were about to arrive. Ours had been dead for a couple of weeks. No heartbeat, no movement during the last ultrasound.
They make you carry it, you see. Until your body decides to expel the little corpse. Mine had waited until Christmas Eve to let go.
And so I had gone through the motions of life. Teaching other people’s children on the Hopi rez, where there are soooo many children. Waiting for mine to detach and slip away.
No one said it would be almost exactly like giving birth to a live child. In the movies, women just go to the bathroom and come back looking sad.
I had real labor pains. Endured in the maternity ward, next to other women who would later receive their squalling offspring stuffed into big red Santa hats. Surrounded by cooing relatives and proud papas.
They kept my room dark, afterwards. Lights off, draperies closed.
I curled up in a ball and listened to a Desperado movie. Not the Richard Rodriguez one, one of a series of Westerns that starred that guy from the Madonna video. Alex MacArthur was his name. Remember?
Silly plots. Handsome kid. I peeked up at him from time to time. Eye candy. A momentary distraction.
Otherwise, I was numb. And angry with God for doing this to me on the night his own Son was born.
I could hear the canned carols. The nurses congratulating the new moms as they wheeled in the squalling new additions to the family. The commercials for Christmas sales. Fast talkers, offering once in a lifetime deals.
I sent my husband to get some sleep. He’d had a long day, too. And there was nothing he could do. No reason for him to stay all night watching me stare at the television screen.
He called to say he’d found a room at the Motel 6 we sometimes used when we got too tired for the long drive back to the rez. Stark. Utilitarian. Perfect for a night like this.
I finally slept. A deep sleep. Pitch black. No dreams. Until the door opened, and a cheery voice called, “Any babies in here?”
I let the drawn drapes and darkness speak for me. And the chart, which the nurse finally found when I didn’t respond.
“Oh, I’m…I’m sorry,” she said. I didn’t look.
Nope. No babies in here. To be lovingly carted back to the nursery. To give mommy some much needed rest.
I closed my eyes again. I needed rest, too. But I knew no one would think so. I hadn’t had a baby. I’d lost one. Early on.
I’d already heard all the cliches:
“Everyone has one.”
“It’s God’s will.”
“Something was wrong with it, so you’re probably lucky.”
That had not stopped me from staring longingly at every child and pregnant woman I saw. Or from thinking, callously and selfishly, about all those emaciated African women on the news with little emaciated babies clinging to their deflated breasts.
They had no food, but they had babies. What was wrong with me?
Christmas was not Christmas that year, of course. I was surrounded by children running from house to house on the hill where my husband’s family homes sit side by side.
But two years later, the promised one, the one everyone told me we would have, crawled along with them. Gumming colorful Christmas cookies gleefully as all her Hopi relations dandled her on their knees.
I couldn’t find the woman who had saved me two Christmases before, when I went back to Sears hoping to let her see the baby. But the people at the same jewelry counter thought she was absolutely beautiful.
She was. Is. Thirty Christmases have passed — amazing. And all wonderful.
Save for the one fleeting moment every year when I remember the one who didn’t live to see Christmas all those many years ago.
And send up a prayer.
Cynthia Dagnal-Myron is an award-winning former features reporter for both the Chicago Sun Times and Arizona Daily Star and author of three books. Her writing has appeared in Salon, the Huffington Post, Patheos, Rolling Stone, Orion, Working Mother, and other publications.
