The universe pulls a magic trick where, by some mysterious alchemy, nearly invisible ingredients combine in a metaphorical hat, and then, Presto! – a whole live person emerges! And we have seen this conjuring act so many times that we almost take it for granted, clapping politely, perhaps stifling a yawn. But it’s an absolute, bowl-me-over, unbelievable magic show each time it happens, and don’t you forget it.

In this metaphor, I am the hat, and my wife Molly is the magician’s assistant, receiving the cup of sperm from our sweet donor C. (bless his soul), holding it cradled in her hands like a baby bird to keep it warm.

We tried five times, following our donor around the world like groupies. Once in Palermo, in a rental flat that came with an industrial-sized box of earplugs. Once in a parked car in Williamsburg, where I waited with my feet up on the dashboard as guys passed me on their morning jogs, payot bouncing. Once in Berlin, twice in Baltimore.

Each new attempt, we tinker with our timing and execution, like witches adjusting a potion. Just a touch more eye of newt. And then – somehow – the right egg finds the right sperm on the right day, and like a rabbit from a hat, two lines appear on a pregnancy test.

Here I should reveal, for the sake of transparency, that I am not only a pregnant person, I am also a midwife. This matters because I want you to imagine, for the rest of this story, that I have a sort of angel/devil situation going on with my midwife self. On one shoulder, there sits the self who knows a lot about what’s happening (comforting!). But on the other shoulder, the self who knows all about what CAN happen is continuously whispering in my ear (terrifying!). Want a worry? Pick a card, any card! All the reassurance and grounding I work on with my clients is less than useless on myself.

Because of this, I spend most of my first trimester prepared for the worst. I prepare myself for the kind of miscarriage that comes on like a period. The kind where one day I might look down when I go to pee and see, with a sinking feeling, a smear of blood in my underwear. For three months I check the toilet paper at every pee, steeling myself for the interruption of red on white. In the 12th week I am finally relaxing a little.

And then.

We are, ridiculously, in Schwerin when it happens. On a one-night trip with my mother-in-law we have taken because we thought it would be fun. What fun! I am a little achy in the evening, so I go to sleep wishing I had a heating pad with me, but otherwise not really thinking about it. But at 5am I wake up wet, and, like a dream, like a bad dream, I realize that it’s blood. I stand in the white light of the bathroom feeling lost for a moment, at a fork in the road, feeling the paths diverge. The life that I went to sleep living last night appears to no longer be the life I am living this morning, like I have been unknowingly bumped into the grooves of another track. Going where?

I wake up Molly, show her my blood-stained boxers, and we search each other’s faces for the answer to the question – is this it?

I feel faint, dizzy, and sit down on the cold tile floor.

All the good my worrying did me! I had not prepared myself for this, for leaving bloody sheets and towels in my wake at this random hotel, as well as a large tip for the housekeeping staff, because oh my gosh, I’m so sorry about this, I did not want to leave the room like this. I wanted to take all my blood with me please, and our hopes and vision of the future, and our dreams about this very specific baby. Yes, I would have much preferred to leave literally nothing of myself behind in this room. Not a stray hair nor casually shed skin cell. If I could, I would gather it all back up into myself, mercurial, and leave here whole.

I still hold on to hope, all the way back to Berlin on the train, with Molly and her mom carefully distracting themselves next to me. I clutch a sieve we bought at the dollar store to me like a talisman. It’s to pee into in the train toilet, because the embryo hasn’t passed yet, and there is no way I can handle losing that to the Deutsche Bahn waste system.

But also, it hasn’t passed yet, and there has been no more bleeding, so maybe… maybe??? (I want you to hear the desperate hawk’s shriek of my heart here).

Later, in a dim room in the hospital, with the rough hands of an exceptionally unkind doctor manipulating the ultrasound wand inside me, I see our embryo, hovering there – still – on the black and white screen. Quiet. And I am quiet. I tell Molly.

The hope departs.

Here is a diptych of what happens next. On one panel, picture the small birth that is to come, and on the other, the hospital after.

The next morning, there has still been no more bleeding, but this isn’t cause for hope any longer. We decide to go to a birthday party (hey, it could be days yet! We have to get on with living!). We set off, picking up coffee and pastries that I won’t touch in the end. The contractions begin on the S-Bahn platform, a private, inward churn, and I race back home and into the shower like the bathtub is a boat that I’m going to try to ride this out in.

And it’s different than I expected for a pregnancy at this week. The pain is cervical. Wicked and aching and sharp. Molly joins me in my small world. I kneel, move, breathe. I am no longer a body piloted by a mind, but rather a small walnut of consciousness riding inside the storm-tossed cargo ship of my body.

I can do little but interpret the demands of my body and translate them for Molly in clipped monosyllables. A sip, ice, press there, no! Molly calls our midwife friend Antje.

We are suspended in time.

Now and again my stowaway consciousness notices things – things like how the sunshine is bright and autumnal, dappling my skin and the red carpet I am kneeling on. How I am making sounds that the midwife part of me recognizes as labor. How the pain goes up the hill to a place where it is all I can take, I feel, without dying from it, and then eventually comes slowly back down. Not to relief, but to somewhere I can exist – a survivable place.

The contractions are coming fast, almost without pause. My body is transversing a mountainous landscape. I notice that Molly is crying because teardrops make dark circles on her pants. But when I look up at her, she is smiling. “It’s ok,” I tell her, or she tells me, before I am tugged up the sharp peak again. Antje arrives, and suddenly there are extra hands. I move, I moan, I crawl. Blood begins to drip, bright glistening beads on the towel I kneel on. Ah. So beautiful in the sunlight. Glowing.

I am reminded of other losses, and other births as well, other hands holding mine, my role now reversed with theirs. Pregnancies so hard-won. The years it takes to stand at this precipice, navigating a maze of systems not built for the likes of us. How wonderful and frightening, how exhilarating and exhausting to forge our own paths, spooling out the thread behind us in case anyone should wish to follow.

Here in our bedroom, the hours pass, but we are outside of time. We are working resolutely towards an end rather than a beginning. I can tell it should have happened by now, and so I push against the pain. Clots come, bright and soft. We collect them in a bowl Antje brings from the kitchen, and then another. Finally, with Molly holding me up, I push with everything I can muster, push into the empty hopelessness of it, push myself to let go. With a pop and a small gush, the waters break. They flow down, bright and crystalline in the sunlight, to lay atop the blood in the bowl. I marvel. This liquid world. So clear.

Soon after, Molly spots our small embryo. I cradle them in my palm. Perfect. Our embryo! Made from invisible things, conjured from wishes, a magic trick. Our alchemy in its final, golden form. We gaze in reverence. Ah! It wasn’t for nothing, all this pain and heartbreak. It was for this. This quiet gift. Our traveler – come and gone. Molly and I press our brows together, her tears on my face.

We’ve come now to the hinge, and the opposite panel.

Here you can see how the bleeding doesn’t behave, but trickles on, like a stubbornly leaky faucet. The placenta doesn’t come on its own. Here are Antje and I exchanging the midwives’ look that means “too much blood loss” and “time to transfer.” Here is a gaggle of EMTs stomping around my bedroom in their boots. Here I am in the ambulance, holding Molly’s hand. Here we are at the hospital, and I am a haystack they are struggling to find a vein in. Here we go through what feel like miles of underground hallways, of which I see only the ceilings.

There are ultrasounds and doctors and fainting and rushing and a moment when I think, “Well, this isn’t good, we need to go faster. We are running out of time.”

And then there is surgery. On the other side of it, finally, an absence of pain, the bleeding stilled, and an emptiness. I am alone in my body again.

There are hospital meals of unforgiving bologna and dry bread.

There is the joke Molly makes when I look in the mirror and say, “I think I’m getting some color back in my face,” and she says, “What color, green?”  

It is November.

And our lives continue, go back to normal even. And yet there is a flicker at the edge of my vision of a different, parallel me, a mirror image: this is me carrying the heavy groceries upstairs, and that is me not doing so because I am pregnant. This is me having a third cup of coffee, and that is my pregnant self looking on, slightly scandalized. My alternate self accompanies me to my appointments, feels pangs of sympathy for my clients’ pregnancy symptoms and concerns. There are the discordant moments when I am making plans, and then we jolt apart, her and I, and I remember I am not on that timeline anymore.

My double – she peers at me sadly.

So.

Do we try again? We do. As soon as we are able, which isn’t all that soon considering (iron levels, international travel, work schedules: his and ours).

We three witches gather, wave our hands around, say some spells, peer inside the hat. What will happen next? There is a long pause, an in-drawn breath in which all possible futures hang. And then there they are – two solid, inarguable lines, a grooved track leading somewhere. But where to, this time?

Two months later, C. comes to Germany to bank sperm for us, even though I am already pregnant. Odd timing, I know, but I now feel that to handle the uncertainty of pregnancy, to do this tightrope walk of trust again, I need to have all resources at hand. I can’t bear to wait for our infrequent US trips to try again, should we need to. There is no ease of homegrown ingredients for us – this has been a group project from the start. And though he owes us nothing, certainly not all this effort, these funny and awkward moments he has spent in unfamiliar bathrooms and bedrooms, even mourning with us, C. is utterly steadfast. So here he is with us, and here we are again, in a different city, on an overnight trip, with a visitor, when I start to bleed.

We had gone to a museum to do touristy things once the deed was done at the sperm bank. I went to the bathroom, and this time, it is the old blood-on-the-toilet-paper routine after all.

I walk out of the bathroom towards Molly and C., watch them laughing about something together, like I am in a liminal space, outside of time. They are living our old life, still untouched by the wrecking ball I bring with me. I don’t want to disturb them, don’t want them to look at my face and see the shrieking hawk. Time stands still, just for a heartbeat or two. And then Molly does look at me, a question in her eyes. And, just like that, she knows, and the bubble of the old reality pops.

We call a cab and go straight to the hospital. No long, tense train ride for us this time. I can feel the blood leaking out of me, and I am thinking through whether I can stand to do this again, or whether we should just call it and settle into a life we fill with other purposes and satisfactions. Dogs, perhaps. Certainly, we will need fashionable sunglasses. Maybe I will start smoking again.

In the waiting room at the hospital, I am aware that I don’t feel the same as last time: I still feel pregnant. I parcel that small kernel of hope into a safe spot just out of sight, where it won’t dare to become too big and tempt fate. Where it can’t break me too much if it ends up being unfounded.

The doctor this time is so kind, so gentle. Looks at my bleeding, professionally noncommittal. But I can see she has a kernel of hope too.

Please.

Please.

Molly and I turn our eyes to the ultrasound.

We are searching the snow there hungrily for the flutter of a heart. And there it is! There! A steady flicker. Vital and insistent. “Here’s a strong heartbeat” says the doctor.

But wait – the camera pans, her hand shifts on the wand. Presto! A second sac comes into view. A lemniscate! My hawk heart wheeling wildly in the updraft.

Across the membrane: a second heartbeat. Another world unfolding.

 

Afterword

In writing about this experience of pregnancy loss, specifically as a queer person and a midwife serving our community, I am hoping to normalize a couple of things and spread information, so people know that support is out there for them.

Though we still don’t talk about it so much, miscarriage is a common pregnancy outcome and a part of the reproductive cycle – around one in 4 pregnancies will end in a loss. The vast majority of these are caused by infinitely small chromosomal or genetic variations that make it impossible for an embryo or fetus to continue developing and growing past a certain point. Many people will ask themselves what they did wrong to cause their miscarriage. Please know – the answer is almost always nothing. It was not in your hands. Here is a brief article about that: https://www.drkatewhite.com/doesnt-cause-miscarriage/

Losing a wanted pregnancy can be devastating, and because queer people often spend years investing (both in planning and financially) in family building journeys, it can also leave people with the feeling that they have lost more than the pregnancy. They may worry whether they can muster the financial or emotional resources needed to try again. They may face anxiety about whether all people involved wish to continue. And having already potentially experienced pathologization and medical trauma, possibly compounded by other intersecting forms of oppression, queer people may find themselves feeling stuck in a narrative that their miscarriage happened because they are somehow unfit for pregnancy or parenthood. This is NOT TRUE. 

Please know – there is support out there for you. You deserve sensitive care. Your midwife* can be a bridge to good services, and an advocate for you. The Queer Family Centers in Berlin can help you find specific resources that fit your needs. If you decide to try again, reach out early for midwifery* support, and know that you are not alone. 

 

Imogen Raye Minton (she/her) is one of the founding members of Cocoon, a queer-feminist midwifery* collective in Berlin. She is also a writer, and a parent of 2-year-old twins.