I had a spontaneous abortion once. I had missed two periods. And I was sad, very sad, for rather a long time. Not because a "baby" died, because I knew it wasn't a baby. For one thing, I picked the clot up out of the toilet and looked at it, and it was not a baby by any stretch of the most self-dramatizing imagination. It looked like a bit of gristle, or fat, in a blood clot.
The beginning of wisdom, as someone once said, is getting things in their proper categories.
Whatwas sad about it was that that pregnancy had been planned, and I wished those cells had turned into a baby, and I was disappointed. The disappointment was real, it gave me a sense of loss. There was no baby lost, only the expectation of one. If I had thought I would never get pregnant again, I would have been even more disappointed.
One must try to be sane, and not romanticize oneself, I think. Life presents almost more real deaths, of real people, than one can bear. |
