Forgetting to Be Afraid by Wendy Davis

Author:Wendy Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.

—MAYA ANGELOU

MEMORIES LIVE IN THE BODY, and in the mind, but some of my most precious and sacred ones live also in a small wooden box: a memory box for a very much loved and very much wanted child, Tate Elise, the daughter we lost before memories of her could even be made.

In the fall of 1996, Jeff and I were greeted with welcome news. I was pregnant, for the fourth time.

My third pregnancy, in 1994 during my first year of practicing law after my yearlong clerkship for Judge Buchmeyer, had ended very sadly. Neither Jeff nor I had thought about or planned on having another child. Dru was six and Amber was twelve, and we had moved into that phase beyond the complications of toddlerhood and into the complexities of Amber’s approaching adolescence. But I’d always wanted another baby after we’d had Dru—it had been such a joy to raise her in a stable environment and to be able to give her the kind of home life and childhood I’d been unable to give Amber, and I so wanted that experience again. Though it was a surprise, I was very excited and sure that I was carrying a boy; almost immediately Jeff and I began referring to “him” as “Baby Lucas.”

But problems began to arise sometime just past the midway mark of my first trimester, when a sonogram revealed that the placental sac had collapsed. That day in our doctor’s office, Jeff holding my hand as we looked at the sonogram screen, searching for our baby and seeing only the odd-shaped sac with no sign of life there, was a devastating one. Our “Lucas” had implanted in a fallopian tube, rather than in my uterus. Fallopian pregnancies, also known as ectopic pregnancies, are unsustainable and not viable. My doctor advised us that it would be dangerous to my health to continue the pregnancy. To do so would result in the rupturing of my fallopian tube. The only medical option was to have surgery to terminate the pregnancy and remove the affected fallopian tube—which in Texas is technically considered an abortion, and doctors have to report it as such. I was heartbroken. Within the next forty-eight hours, I was scheduled for surgery to remove the tube; all our dreams—mine, Jeff’s, Amber’s and Dru’s—of an addition to our family were brought to a close.

We all grieved the loss, but I grieved most deeply—a sadness and an emptiness took root in me where Baby Lucas had been. In time I returned to the demands of my law practice and lost myself in the daily joys and distractions of raising our two girls, but my renewed hopes and desires for another child never diminished. Soon Jeff and I made a conscious decision to let nature determine if we might once again receive such a blessing. We stopped taking any measures to prevent a pregnancy, and, knowing that with only one fallopian

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