Three Weeks Pregnant

Published
by
jess
on February 8, 2010
in Uncategorized and pregnancy
. 0 Comments

by Leslie Contreras Schwartz

My right boot ruptures like a heart valve tearing,
tenderly and exact-a zipper splits while I think

of the being inside, housed in a pyramid
in the hushed, broad portion of myself that waits.

Sting hums in the abdomen, an invading horde
of hungry bees swelling to a foreign hive. Holding in

what must look like a just-discovered ruby,
stained with the soil of the body, rust-raw,

it climbs from the rooms of some god’s foggy breath,
as if to rise after the heat of a boiling rain that falls like a salve.

Yet who says I am ready to be someone’s mother?
What room of myself-O lord of seed and sinew-

will muscle, bone, blooming, find a place to reside?
What-part of me bubbles over, to disappear in the thirsty earth.

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is an MFA Poetry student in the Warren Wilson College program. She lives in Houston, Texas.

In My Innocence

Published
by
jess
on February 1, 2010
in miscarriage, motherhood and pregnancy
. 0 Comments

by Aida Zilelian

“I hope that when you have a daughter she is as horrible to you as you are to me!”

I shift in my seat on the living room couch and stare blankly at my mother. If I love her I don’t feel it. I am thirteen. I stare at her bulging belly; she is pregnant with my soon-to-be sister Ani. I can never remember what had transpired between us that afternoon, why she had said what she did, but I am convinced that hearing her utter those words somehow altered the future. The arguments that would erupt between us in the ten years that followed would be venomous, malevolent, and would leave me completely shaken.

***

I always make decisions with my gut.

“I’m going to start looking for an apartment,” I told my mother one quiet evening after dinner. I was twenty-three. I wanted a life I had tried forcing her to give me - a life that demanded unconditional freedom. She still ransacked my room, opened my mail, and eavesdropped on phone conversation until I had a private phone line installed in my bedroom. Not surprisingly, we fought. She accused me of abandoning her and disrupting the family unit. I moved out and she disowned me for a year, but I knew all along how necessary it was. I had also heard that a mother’s love is boundless.

***

“The embryo is intact,” my obgyn tells me.

***

I spent my 20’s trying to recapture a childhood I didn’t have; I had slumber parties with my girlfriends, stayed out late until dawn sometimes, I threw parties at my apartment - the thrill of freedom so exhilarating that it felt unreal. Strangely, I felt an innocence that accompanied the newness of my life, and I wasn’t willing to give it up until I met Brian. And then I realized I didn’t have to give up anything. He loved me and accepted me for who I was; he was warm and passionate, playful and at the same time responsible. When I married him I shook off the creeping sensation of adulthood by spinning it into my own new reality - I had found a playmate who wanted to share my carousing lifestyle with me. Even when we bought our apartment - an experience that Brian jokingly claimed “drained the adolescence right out” of him - it felt less that I was an adult, and more that we had a secure place to live and have dinner parties.

“I’m worried for you,” my mother told me when I was married after four years and not pregnant. “I’m worried that if you don’t have a baby you will regret it when it’s too late. Think of all your friends with babies and how you two will feel going to baby birthday parties with no baby of your own. It’s a sad thing.”

To me, a sad thing has always been not doing something out of fear when I know it’s what I want. It is why I left my mother’s apartment and why I married Brian. I had to stick my fingers in my ears and chant loudly, “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA,” to really know that I wanted a baby. Not because my mother wanted one, or because when we went over our friends Randy and Laura’s house their son Logan was precocious and alarmingly entertaining. When the decision came whether or not to have a baby, both Brian and I were perplexed.

“We couldn’t travel,” I told him grimly as I sipped my glass of wine.

“You’re not wrong,” he said, holding the same serious expression as mine.

“I don’t get how people just do it!” I said, feeling something akin to anger. “You can do your very best job and they could still turn out to be a crack addict.” I realized how cliché my argument seemed, but it was one of many on a long list that truly frightened me……

***

Magically, I was pregnant after one month. The exhilaration of that felt unreal as well; it had happened too easily.

It was right before my thirty-sixth birthday when my doctor confirmed the news. I had friends coming over that night and had taken the day off from work to cook for my dinner party.

“I’m bringing over a special treat,” one of my girlfriends told me, referring to the bottle of Patron tequila she always brought over for special occasions. I didn’t feel right telling her yet, or anyone else for that matter. I wanted a birthday party, not an “Aida’s pregnant” party.

“I’m actually on antibiotics for an upper respiratory infection,” I told her. “I can’t really drink.”

Everyone who came that night seemed to believe my lie, and they all crowded into the kitchen with their cigarettes because Brian had stressed to them how the smoke really affected my breathing. But I had a secret and I relished keeping it for the time being. Yes, I was sitting on my couch alone nursing a glass of club soda - but who cared? I already had fantasies of our son or daughter, three or four years old, sitting in bed with Brian on a Sunday morning, both of them engrossed in whatever cartoon they were watching on T.V. I had an image of what our child would look like, taking the best features of both Brian and I and synthesizing them into a little human being. He would have Brian’s big brown eyes, his graceful feet, his ability to not take everything seriously; he would have my passion for cooking, my thick brown hair and mischievousness. Admittedly, I wished for a boy. The idea of having a girl scared me. As the years had passed I remembered that afternoon with my mother when I was sitting on the couch, and felt cursed by the inevitability of her wish.

***

“You’re going to have to go get a sonogram. The bleeding could be nothing, but you should double-check.” Click.

***

My mother’s care for me seemed inspired by a checklist of responsibilities that she had conjured up - perhaps from her own mother: daily baths, packed lunches, nice clothes, pocket money, and maybe things that I was still unaware of. I knew the two traps that most mothers fell into: they either did the exact opposite of what their mothers had done, or they fatefully turned into what they feared the most - their own mother. I vacillated between this haunting anxiety and an extreme optimism where I reassured myself that I would take what I admired about my mother and practice it accordingly.

“You can still have a life after having a baby,” one of my girlfriends told me. “It’s what you make of it. Of course you can still have dinner parties and still do your writing. Everything just needs to be modified a little bit.” After my thirteen-year emancipation, I was worried that I would resent not having the freedom I had grown accustomed to. And although I was a woman I still didn’t feel like one. In my mind, I was a responsible pregnant teenager, who abstained from cigarettes and drinking during her pregnancy because she loved herself and her baby enough to keep both healthy. The reality was that I was in my mid-thirties, happily married, owned an apartment, worked a full-time job and was five weeks pregnant.

***

“Let me check the book,” my cousin Jacqueline told me. She had two young daughters and had miscarried once after they were born. “Would you be having your period right now if you weren’t pregnant?”

“No,” I said, cradling the phone between my ear and shoulder as I got dressed in the women’s locker room at my gym.

“Have you been overdoing the exercising?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ve been very careful. Just walking and lifting low weights.”

“Hmmm,” she said, and then paused. “What did your gynecologist say?”

“That I have to wait until Monday to get a sonogram.”

As I walked on the treadmill I saw an Indian woman sitting across from me, pedaling on a bike energetically, her pregnant belly bulging under her t-shirt. I approached her and asked her how many months along she was.

“Eight!” she said, wiping the sweat off her face with a towel. Hesitantly, I told her I was five weeks pregnant.

“That’s great!” she said. “Just keep at it with the gym. Go slow, though. And congratulations!” I suddenly felt renewed. It was just spotting, that’s all. I knew it was very common.

By the next morning I knew to call into work to say I wasn’t coming in. I made an emergency appointment with another gynecologist, since mine had not been very helpful about seeing me as soon as possible.

My mother called early afternoon. “What did the doctor say?”

“She said the embryo is still there, but that I have to rest.”

I laid in bed watching cooking shows, feeling the tugging sensation below my stomach turn into severe cramps. I sat on the toilet, trying to shake the draining feeling that began to overwhelm me. I sat, crying, not wanting to get up because I knew I would only have to return. I called Brian and told him to stay at work.

My mother called again. “What’s going on?” She was infamous for her follow-up phone calls - anything ranging from a new recipe I was trying out for dinner to whether or not I had remembered to rsvp for a relative’s wedding.

“What’s going on is that I’m having a fucking miscarriage!” I screamed into the phone. “And I want you to do me the goddam favor of not calling every half hour so I can tell you about it!” I hung up the phone sobbing.

“Are you happy?” I screamed at the phone. “Now we don’t get to find out if she’ll be as terrible to me as I was to you. Are you happy?” I knew I was yelling not at the mother I had now, but the other mother I was scared to forgive.

***           

At least I had the weekend to recover. There was no baby. No little boy or girl sitting in bed with Brian. Neither of them would look at me with the same large brown eyes.  

A week later Brian and I went to a nearby park where we took our dog Champ for long walks. We sat on a bench that overlooked the lake. Although it was April, we could still see our breath form little clouds in the air. I watched the geese padding around the edge of the grass. I grew quiet.

“Are you okay?” Brian asked. “What are you thinking?”

Now I knew what it felt like to want to hold onto something so desperately that it was consuming. I wondered if that was how my mother felt all those years fighting with me - if it was her way of trying to hold onto me for her own reasons that I could not understand.

“I’m thinking how strange it is. I’m thinking how I feel so changed, that I’m not the same person. I feel,” I said, trying to find the words, “that I have lost something. Not a baby only. It may sound terribly foolish coming from a grown woman, but I think that somehow I have lost my innocence.” He took my hand and squeezed it.

Prophetically, a little girl came towards us, wobbling on her bicycle. She looked behind her where a young man was standing, most likely her father. “You’re doing great!” he called out waving. “Keep going! I’m right behind you. I’m watching.”

I watched her as she pedaled away, her father following her with his eyes. It all seemed too easy. And I knew then that everything I had so desperately wanted in my life I had struggled for. I am waiting to find out if I am still willing for this struggle.

Aida Zilelian is a NYC teacher. Her work has been featured in Pen Pusher (UK), SN Review, Visions, Slushpile Magazine, Suss: Another Literary Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, and the upcoming issue of Halfway Down the Stairs. She has written two novels and is currently looking for representation.

Womanhood, Fertility, and Identity

Published
by
jess
on January 25, 2010
in adoption, family, fatherhood, infertility, motherhood, pregnancy and sex
. 1 Comment

by Jessica Powers

In college, my best friend once described her hips as “child-bearing hips.” She knew back then that she wanted children and, indeed, now has six beautiful and healthy daughters. 

Me? I didn’t even know what hips were. Literally. If somebody had provided me pictures of two headless bodies-one male, one female-I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish the outline of hips on the female body.

A boyfriend once pointed out a transvestite, then said, knowingly, “You can always tell the difference between a woman and a transvestite. A transvestite lacks hips.”

My response? “Huh?” The transvestite looked like a perfectly beautiful woman to me!

***

I was never one of those women whose overwhelming desire in life was to have children, what some childless men and women have sneeringly referred to as a breeder.

Motherhood was simply never one of my goals.

One of the reasons I left organized religion, in fact, was the emphasis it all too often places on motherhood. I always felt devalued as a woman in the Christian church, and it never comforted me to have my feminist concerns pooh-poohed with a well-meaning, but completely off the mark, comment like this: “But women are completely valued in the church. There’s nothing more important than motherhood. That’s the most important role in life, male or female.”

I heard a preacher one time say that he was sick and tired of hearing people say that God doesn’t value women. “God chose a woman to carry his only begotten son,” he said. “That should prove how valuable women are! They’re more valuable than men!” (I didn’t have the guts to raise my hand and ask if he actually thought God would have chosen a man to give birth to his only begotten son, which would have truly been a miracle….but I definitely thought about it.)

Whenever I heard the emphasis on motherhood in sermons, I wanted to ask: If women are valuable because they are mothers, what happens to a woman’s value if she’s infertile? Or if she can conceive, but her body is incapable of carrying a baby to term? If women are valued precisely because they are mothers, does a woman cease to be valuable if she is unable or unwilling to contribute to the ongoing human gene pool? And are women to be valued for nothing else? Can’t they be valued as scientists, artists, educators, and healers? What about being valued because we’re funny, smart, thoughtful, or we make a good friend?  

I never got around to asking those questions. I just stopped going to church. I was tired of crying all the time, tired of fighting people with stupid ideas about what constitutes a person’s value.

I’d go as far as to argue that this strong correlation between motherhood and saintliness, and the conflation of our value as women with our fertility, can be labeled as spiritual abuse.

A person is valuable because of who they are, not because of the fertility-related identity role(s) they assume in life, roles such as wife, mother, grandmother. A woman should never be valued simply because of her ability to conceive and bear a child, just like a man should never be valued simply because he produces viable sperm.

So why do so many women’s self-images founder on their ability to conceive and bear a child, to successfully raise functioning members of society-at-large?

***

I never thought of myself as a slow learner, but when it comes to parenthood, I’m definitely a late-bloomer.

Throughout my twenties, I was grateful that I didn’t have children. The life of an artist is hard enough without adding babies to the mix, I thought.

When I first got married in my mid-twenties, my husband (now ex) and I planned to remain blissfully childfree. I hadn’t anticipated, then, that my biological clock would kick in with a vengeance as I approached thirty. Suddenly, to my surprise, I wanted kids. Oh, not the goobery, snotty-faced, diaper-rashed babies that grow up into delightful, creative, intelligent young people; no, as I approached thirty, I suddenly realized that I’d be thrilled if my children could emerge from my womb, already 10 or 11 or 12 years old. Talking in complete sentences. Potty-trained. Relatively independent already. You know, little adults.

This was an impossible dream, of course, unless I was willing to adopt an older child and deal with the potentially debilitating emotional problems they might have-always a crapshoot.

In lieu of heading down that path just yet, my husband and I have recently been trying for the flesh-and-blood variety, a normal baby conceived in the normal way pushed out of a normal vagina at the normal age of 0 months’ old. I guess I’m willing to subject myself to sleepless nights, poopy diapers, and sore breasts so I can get that pre-teen, teenager, college-student, and adult child I long for down the road.

But even as I embrace my identity as a woman “TTC” (a popular internet acronym that stands for “trying to conceive”), I still vacillate in my desire for children and it has to do with that fragile thing called identity.

There is always one solid reason for me to give up on the idea of motherhood: my identity as an artist. I’ve worked hard to get to the place where I am. I write five or six hours every day, and then teach college writing classes and run my small literary press on top of that. Recently, I’ve started working as a writing coach, and offering private writing classes in my home for children, teenagers, and adults. I easily put in twelve hours a day. It’s hard to imagine how I’ll balance all of that with motherhood.

It’s when I contemplate the vast gulf between what I desire to do with my life and the reality of raising children that I begin to wonder if I really want them.

Yet just when I think I might be “okay” with foregoing the pleasures of parenting, I realize I’m still captive to the idea that being a woman means being a mother. Intellectually, I know that this is a false belief. Emotionally, somewhere deep inside of me, I still believe that to live a full life, experiencing the full range of human emotions, requires adopting the role of parenthood, however your children come into your life.

Why the hell do I continue to associate my value as a woman with my fertility?

And so, I’m on the verge of giving up, of saying, “No more. I don’t want to try to get pregnant any more. That doesn’t mean I’ll try to prevent pregnancy, but I don’t want my life to be dominated by cervical fluid, basal body temperature, and that period that comes late but inevitably comes.”

It’s true that I’ve only been trying for eight months but I’m already tired of the emotional roller-coaster. Twice, my period has been a week late. In those days when I think I might be pregnant, my mind jumps to sugary fantasies of what it’ll be like, and I’m overwhelmed by the I can’t wait-ness of it all.

And then the disappointment sets in when my basal body temperature drops, menstrual blood arrives, and I discover that I’m not, after all, pregnant.

I wonder how women do this over and over and over? You know, those women that try to conceive for years and years and years? Those women that go to heroic efforts, spend all sorts of time and money, all in their quest to have a child?

I don’t think I can keep it up.

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m willing to give up on the so-called “fullness of life experience” b.s. I was just blathering on about if it means some emotional sanity.

I’m fortunate. A few days ago, as we were having yet another discussion about my on-again off-again desire to get pregnant, my husband looked at me and said, “You are my world. I don’t need anything else.” And we once again talked about what we will do if we don’t get pregnant-move to South Africa or Mozambique, to the Caribbean, to Ecuador or Argentina or Brazil, or maybe to all of those places for a few years apiece. Or we could take in foreign-born foster children, generally teenagers by the time they make it here after spending years in refugee camps.

Without children, the world is our oyster.

But still, it all comes down to this crux issue: What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean for me to feel valuable as a person?

We all, we all, need to learn to value ourselves apart from these roles we assume in life. For me, that includes the role of artist. If I replace motherhood with artist, am I really any better off? I’m still valuing myself by something that is transitory, fleeting. We don’t achieve immortality through our art. Nor do we achieve it by bearing offspring.

As I move forward TTC, or not TTC, I hope I can learn to value myself as Jessica with no titles attached to my name.

***

Last November, I had a dream about motherhood and identity. In the dream, I was in a house, surrounded by women I know who have young children. I wandered from person to person, but I couldn’t relate to any of them. In fact, I felt inferior as I talked with them-there was a sense in which all of them had experienced a part of womanhood that I lacked, and so we couldn’t connect. I felt, well, robbed.  And even as I tried to interest them in non-motherhood-related topics, I realized what I was doing: they seemed to think I was inferior because I wasn’t a mother and so, subconsciously and nastily, I was trying to turn the tables by demonstrating that I’d had an interesting career and had traveled to so many exotic locales and done so many interesting things that they would never do, encumbered as they were with snot-faced babies and dirty diapers.

 Eventually, not liking that dynamic one tiny little bit, I separated myself from the mothers with babies and went to another part of the house. There, I was joined by my many African friends, and we discussed Africa, and politics, and health, and religion, and we ignored the issue of motherhood. Though many of my African friends are also parents, I felt none of the distance I’d felt from my mother-friends, who were treating me as though I was less of a woman because I wasn’t a mother.

I woke up and felt a moment of grief, like the dream was telling me I’d lost my chance at motherhood, that I’d traded it in for Africa and my writing.

On reflection later, I realized that of course, I have never given up my dream of motherhood-until the last few years, I didn’t have a spouse with whom I could have children. Instead, the dream was speaking to me about my hidden desire to be a mother as well as the obvious calling on my life to Africa and as a writer. My desire to have it all.

It was also reminding me of this unassailable truth: While all the other women in the room had chosen motherhood first-and let me add, they are all young women I admire, who have made the choices they wanted to make by choosing children over career, at least for the time being-I had chosen it second. And ultimately, I found myself in a room with the people I had chosen: Africans.

It was a revelation.

As I embark on this next stage of my life, trying to get pregnant, I’m constantly filled with doubts. Sometimes I wonder if motherhood is what God intends for me, or even if motherhood is something I want to add to my mixture of things I’ve already chosen (or that has chosen me)-Africa and writing. Sometimes I feel desperate to be pregnant, now, and sometimes, I secretly hope I’m not pregnant, so that nothing needs to change.  In fact, I worry about how motherhood will prevent me from doing the things I feel I’m supposed to do, in Africa, as a writer-those vague, hazy outline of things that make up my future. I’m still waiting for the clarion call from God, the angel of the Lord appearing to me in a dream, the way he did with Mary and Joseph, and telling me, “This is what you’re supposed to do. I’ve arranged everything for you. It won’t be easy but at least there’s no doubt about it.”

But that’s too easy and, in all likelihood, false. The path that God marked out for Mary and Joseph must have seemed hazy and uncertain to them. It is only clear in retrospect, when written about as a narrative, a narrative that brooks no other possible paths.

I wonder how fearful and frustrated Mary and Joseph must have felt as they walked down that road, wondering all the time if they could veer in a different direction, or if they even wanted to, or if this was really the path they were supposed to be on and if they weren’t just fooling themselves.

I wonder how much of this path I’m following I charted myself, and how much has been charted for me.

I suppose I’ll never know.

And, at least some of the time, I’m okay with that.

 

Jessica Powers is the author of The Confessional (Knopf, 2007), a novel that explores racial tension and school violence at an all-boys Catholic high school on the U.S.-Mexico border; editor of Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Becoming a Parent, editor of The Fertile Source, and publisher of Catalyst Book Press.

To Let Go

Published
by
jess
on January 18, 2010
in fatherhood, miscarriage and pregnancy
. 0 Comments

A short story by Jeff Bowles

     I can’t cry. The worst thing to ever happen to us and I can’t cry about it. I’m tired. My mind is shot. Jagged black spots flutter in my peripherals, my bowels gurgle, loud noises make me wince. I tell myself that sleep deprivation must be keeping the pain at bay. I still feel ashamed.

     I hate the hospital, hate the emergency room. I cuss every time I have to come. Before I met Stephanie, I’d only been here once. This is my sixth visit, and it’s all because of her. Abscessed teeth, Bronchitis, stuff you usually go to a doctor’s office for. The only good thing about the hospital is that they accept Stephanie’s crap insurance, worthless coverage that the state of Colorado hands out like “How was your visit?” questionnaire cards.

     I glance at Steph. She’s curled up on a double-wide chair. Her bare feet dig into the light-blue vinyl cushion, causing it to pucker and stutter and hiccup rudely. She rocks uncontrollably, twirling her red hair with a finger, breathing as if she were in a Lamaze class.

     “I’m sorry, baby,” I say. “I shouldn’t have stayed up all night. I do it too often. Maybe every weekend is too much-”

     “It’s okay.” It’s more of a coarse grunt than fluid speech.

     The cramps had begun in the afternoon, just before I was about to go to bed. We worried, began to panic as they intensified. I called a nurse hotline. The woman told us it was okay, that light cramps and a bit of spotting were normal. Then Stephanie started to bleed, and the cramps grew until her face paled and she had to bite her lip to keep from moaning.

     She’s not the only one in pain here, of course. A family huddles around a kid with a broken arm over by the soda machines. A woman in a neck brace behind us cries and wails. An obese man with an oxygen tank and wheelchair is being led past the security guard. If I weren’t so tired, all the pain and suffering gathered in this waiting room might really get to me. I usually have a hard time dealing with this kind of stuff. For an instant, I’m glad I haven’t slept.

     Calm, pulsing tones sound from the hospital’s speaker system. Another ambulance coming in; we’ll have to wait even longer. The sound forces my mind to sharpen. I glance at Steph.

     “You doin’ okay, baby?” Somehow I feel like I’m only pretending to care. “Do you need anything?”

     “It hurts.”

     “I know it does.”

     “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I didn’t eat…right or I got too wound up about…work.”

     I can’t tell if I’m imagining the faint sting behind my eyes. “It’s not your fault. Maybe it was me. I read that smoking does something to men genetically, you know, reproductively. Maybe that’s what did it.”

     She touches my hand, almost speaks, but her face suddenly contorts. She whimpers and her hand presses into her abdomen. It’s another two hours before we’re taken to a room.

#

     Finding a good ER doctor is like playing a game of Go Fish. You keep asking for hospitality or a bit of humanity and they keep sending you back to the deck. Sure, occasionally you’ll get a decent one. They’ll speak to you like you’re a human being instead of trying to rush you out the door. Still haven’t pegged our doctor tonight. He gave Steph pain killers, said comforting things. He said Steph might see some tissue but that it wouldn’t be the fetus. He let her wear her coat over the hospital gown when she said she was cold. He tried to comfort, but it didn’t seem to register in him that we might have actually wanted a baby.

     The doctor ordered a vaginal ultrasound because Steph wasn’t far enough along for the other kind. A nurse led her from our room ten minutes ago. I wasn’t allowed to come with.

     I have no hope, no illusions. I know it’s over and done with. It’s been a weird two months. Stephanie had time to come to terms with it. It was in her body; it was a part of her. I was just the guy being asked to rub feet and prepare meals. It was never real. That’s it. I can’t cry because it was never real. It was a game of pretend, like playing dress-up. I was never going to be a father. It’s time to take off our mommy and daddy clothes and go home.

     This notion is comforting. My mind tosses it back and forth, allowing it to strengthen and fade along with the waves of fatigue. There’s no shame in feeling nothing if you were never attached to begin with.

     The curtain parts to reveal the nurse. She says something I don’t catch. Steph follows and replies, “Thank you.”

     She doesn’t seem sad. She looks at me and gives a bitter smile. She still clutches her abdomen, but I think she might actually be okay. I think that maybe neither of us will be in much pain.

     Then the nurse lets go of the curtain, leaves, and Stephanie’s face changes. Her smile vanishes, trembling slightly before it does. Her eyebrows lift, her free hand passes through her hair. She starts to cry.

     “I’m so sorry,” she whimpers. “I couldn’t leave it there on the floor. It was ours. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”

     She climbs into the hospital bed, won’t stop repeating herself. I slide my chair closer and wrap my arms around her. She lays her head against my chest.

     “It isn’t your fault,” I say. “These things happen. Maybe…maybe it was just a bad pregnancy. Maybe it never really had a chance.”

     “I know I did it. I ate wrong, too many sweets. I forgot my thyroid pill for a couple nights. I didn’t take my prenatals as much as I should have.”

     “Babe, please stop.”

     She sobs for a time. I can feel that stinging behind my eyes again, but that’s all. She speaks again.

     “I couldn’t leave it on the floor.”

     “Couldn’t leave what on the floor, baby?”

     Steph wipes her eyes. “She put that thing inside me. It was so cold. It hurt. There was nothing left. I didn’t see the monitor, but she said there was nothing left. She pulled it out and went to get me some pads. I looked on the floor and…”

     She begins to cry again. She tries to speak through it, but I can’t understand her.

     “Slow down,” I say. “What happened?”

     “It was on the floor. Just lying there. Bloody. Small. I wrapped it in a napkin and stuffed it in my coat before she came back. I didn’t know what else to do. They would have just mopped it up.”

     I suddenly feel so tired, like I’ve been awake for weeks.

     I brush her cheek. “Baby, he said you might see some things, but that it wouldn’t be-”

     “It was our baby. I know it was. It’s still in my pocket. I don’t know what to do with it.”

     The stinging intensifies, but still, nothing. I want so badly to feel and to let that feeling out. I want to be miserable with her. I want a connection. A jagged black spot flutters in the corner of my vision, my bowels gurgle, I just want to sleep.

     “What do we do with it?” she asks.

     I’m silent for a moment, but I don’t need the time to think.

     “Throw it away.”

     She raises her head. “What?”

     “Throw it away. It’s not the baby. It isn’t anything. Don’t do this to yourself.”

     She stares at me. She isn’t angry or offended. She isn’t accepting and she doesn’t say no. She stares long, unblinking.

     I shrug. “What are we going to do with it, Steph? We can’t take it home. That’s not good. That’s not healthy. Throw it away.”

     She finally blinks, reaches into her coat pocket and pulls out the waded napkin.

     I don’t look at it. I take it, stand, and walk to the garbage can. I don’t pause or think or let it bother me. I let it fall, hear the light rasp as it makes contact with the plastic bag. I move back to my seat and don’t feel any different. Still tired, still pent up, still ashamed of both.

     Stephanie’s stopped crying. I can’t tell if she’s angry. Can’t tell if she ever will be, if she’ll ever resent me, if she’ll ever forgive me. For now, at least, she isn’t crying. I take comfort in that.

     The doctor enters. We tie up the loose ends. Follow up information is given and discharge papers are filled out. Stephanie asks if she should see her doctor, have a pelvic exam. He says she could, but that he doesn’t think there’s any danger. It’s all gone. He’s sure of it.

     Steph changes back into her clothes and we stand to leave. As I make my way to the curtain, I look at the garbage can. I start to wonder if Stephanie was right. I start to wonder what kind of boy or girl it would’ve been, what kind of man or woman. I think of all that potential nestled against the plastic sack, cradled next to Styrofoam cups and discarded Kleenex. I think these things to force the tears, but I’m not surprised when they don’t come. Maybe that’s the good part of not sleeping. I don’t have the choice to feel or not to feel. I’ll cry. Tomorrow I’ll cry. Tonight I’m that man who rubs feet and prepares meals. Tonight I’ll sleep.

 
Jeff Bowles is currently pursuing a BA in English from the University of Colorado Denver. He spends his nights writing creatively and his days preparing for a hopefully not too boring career as a technical writer.

Empty-Handed

Published
by
jess
on January 13, 2010
in infertility
. 0 Comments

by Donna Vorreyer

Each flea-market stall smells like cedar,
and mothballs, the only exception
the ammonia-sharp tables of Depression
glass gleaming in the early morning sun.
My friends and I come once a month

to saunter through relics of the past, spot
pieces of our childhoods for sale, search for
things we did not know we wanted. Everyone
here hunts for that hidden desire. A burly
woman in a too-tight cardigan beams at antique

gumball machines. A small blond boy and his
sunburned father study bobble-head dolls and
baseball cards. We are not immune. Sally buys
small wooden tables and old china, Diane
salt and pepper shakers, tiny juice glasses.

My treasures are less predictable - croquet
balls with chipped paint one weekend, a bowl
that reminds me of my grandmother the next.
Today I spend hours on my hands and knees
sifting through boxes of old hardware - doorknobs

of textured metal and burled wood, keys to
unknown closets rusting on wrought iron rings,
things that open, close, have weight to them.
Most of the time, it is all just useless junk:
oil lamps with fractured bowls, rotary phones

with lists of emergency numbers for a town
I’ll never live in. A vendor selling lace and linens
nurses her tiny baby in the shade of a quilt.
This is what I really want, but I can’t have it.
The doctors say that I am useless too.

 

Donna Vorreyer lives in the Chicago area where she teaches middle school and tries to convince teenagers that words matter. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Cider Press Review, Apt, New York Quarterly, Boxcar Poetry Review, Autumn Sky Poetry, and After Hours. “Empty-Handed” is part of her first chapbook Womb/Seed/Fruit, which will be published by Finishing Line Press in June 2010. Visit her on the web at http://djvorreyer.wordpress.com

Esther Chavez Cano: “Because I Am A Woman”

Published
by
jess
on January 4, 2010
in Uncategorized, family and sex
. 0 Comments

by Bobby Byrd

Esther Chávez Cano died in Juárez on Christmas Day. She was 76 years old. She was a hero, a fronteriza woman who in the early 1990s in Juárez saw the continuing tragedy of women being killed and decided to do something about it. With much help she started Casa Amiga near downtown Juárez. At the time it was one of only six rape crisis centers in Mexico and the only one on the U.S./Mexico Border. She brought international attention to the continuing murders of women in Juárez and the uncaring and apathetic response by the Mexican government on all levels–city, state and federal–to these murders. Indeed, as we now know, law enforcement was more concerned with supporting the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. than it was with investigating and prosecuting the murders of women. If anything, the authorities wanted to keep activists like Esther quiet because she brought attention to the vacuum of justice in Juárez. She has received many awards for her work, as the number of obituaries state, but she never veered from the task at hand–helping the women of Juárez.

In 2002, when Cinco Puntos Press was putting together the anthology PURO BORDER: DISPATCHES, GRAFFITI AND SNAPSHOTS FROM THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER, three of us–novelist Jessica Powers, who worked for us at the time, Lee Byrd and I—walked over the bridge and went to visit Esther at Casa Amiga. She was a diminutive and very hospitable woman with a quiet way about her but she had a presence that commanded respect. Her work at Casa Amiga was self-evident–women and children were coming and going, and some were staying, being protected inside the walls of the center from husbands or boyfriends who would harm them if they had the chance. Indeed, in December 2001 her receptionist, who had come to the center as a client, was killed by her husband in front of Casa Amiga. When we asked her why she started Casa Amiga, she replied quietly–

“Because I am a woman, because I felt helpless and because I have a conscience.”

Below I am pasting the mostly unedited notes that Lee took during that visit that I found in our archives (Lee also took the photograph above), and below that I am pasting an article by Tessie Borden that originally appeared in the Arizona Republic and that we republished in PURO BORDER. But first, Casa Amiga as always needs financial help. Those who wish to help may do so by making a donation to their account:

**BANCO SANTANDER**
No. Cuenta: 65-50227820-0
CLABE 014164655022782007
Titular CASA AMIGA CENTRO DE CRISIS AC
1427 Suc. Plaza las Torres
Cd. Juárez, Chih. C.P. 32575

Notes from Esther Chávez Cano Interview, June 24, 2002

(taken by Lee Byrd)

There is terrible violence against women right now in Juarez. She will give us her list of the names of murdered women with pleasure. She gathered the list from reading the newspapers. She only includes the names of murdered women, not of children, or of people who have disappeared. We asked if she thought the authorities had a bigger list and she said it will do no good to check with the authorities. The authorities will not give us access to names. Everyone who has a list has gathered their information from the newspapers. But what of the women who never get mentioned in the newspapers?

She said, Here is an example of a girl who has disappeared and of what has happened with the mother. She shows us a photo of a girl, Brenda Esther Afrara Luna, who disappeared two years ago when she was 15. Several months ago (time is uncertain), the mother was told by the authorities that her daughter has been found. But the mother went and looked and it wasn’t her daughter. Then they told her again they had found her. It was not the body of her daughter, but the body was wearing her daughter’s dress. It was very confusing. Esther said there are many cases like this. The mother in this case has endured a lot of domestic violence herself.

Casa de Amiga was started on February 9, 1999, about three and a half years ago. Esther is the founder. We asked her why she started it. She said because she’s a woman, because she felt helpless, and because she has a conscience. It was funded initially with $31,000 from FEMAP. Last week they received $25,000 from the U.S. embassy [see article below]. It is earmarked for a project to provide therapy for women who suffered incest, rape or violence as children.

Casa de Amiga is the only center of its kind all along the border, the only one in Juarez. There is nothing for battered women.

She mentioned that there have been two deaths in Chihuahua that have similar M.O.s. [to the women being killed in Juarez.] Why is it different here, we asked. Why is there more violence [than the rest of Mexico]? This is the border, she said, with its traffic of drugs, its maquiladoras. Poor people come here to seek opportunities, they want to cross the river to live the American dream. In this city there are 500 gangs. There are no opportunities here, conditions are very poor. Have you been to Anapra? It’s a terrible place.

The police hate her. They don’t ignore her. “I would like it if they would ignore me,” she said. They campaign against her. One year and seven months ago, they began their campaign. Governor Patricio doesn’t like her: according to him, she doesn’t do anything right—she’s a terrible director, she steals the money, she herself is a violent woman. And so the stories go. When Esther began talking about the women, Patricio tried to silence her.

In this building, last December 21, 2001, her own receptionist was killed by her husband. This receptionist had four kids, eight years on down, and she was a wonderful worker, good, hard-working, prudent. The husband came to Casa de Amigo to kill her here. From jail, the husband has called for custody of the kids.

When we expressed dismay over this, she said that last week, she had to go rescue a woman who was impregnated by her father. She was 19 and had been raped by him for the last 8 years. She’d had two children. One, a little boy, died of malnourishment. The other, a little girl of 3.5 years, was asked by Esther what had name was. The girl said she had no name. When Esther took the 19 year old woman away, the father went to the Human Rights Agency and demanded that his daughter come back and they agreed to his demands.

There is another girl now who is 11 years old and in the fifth grade. She’s 7 months pregnant. Some woman, a neighbor maybe, took her to a man and he raped her. The father and mother of this girl are separated and she is treated like a puppet.

“JUAREZ CENTER FIGHTS FOR FORGOTTEN WOMEN”

By Tessie Borden
Arizona Republic Mexico City Bureau
Feb. 26, 2002 12:00:00

JUAREZ, Mexico — It’s 9:30 a.m., and Esther Chavez Cano’s daily personal war with the unwanted problems of this largest of the border cities has begun.

She rushes into her office at Casa Amiga, the rape crisis center that grew out of the violence that has claimed the lives of more than 200 young women here in the past nine years. Close behind is a staff member describing this morning’s emergency: a neighbor found two girls, 8 and 10, wandering in the city’s El Chamizal park the previous night. They told the woman they were running away from their father’s beatings.

Chavez Cano immediately calls the local district attorney’s office, and one gets the feeling she has done this hundreds of times. In a firm but friendly tone, she calls on the attorneys there to take charge of the children and investigate what they say.

“The authorities just don’t do anything,” she whispers while on hold.

Chavez Cano’s Casa Amiga is the only center of its kind on the Mexican side of the 1,950-mile line that separates the country from the United States. Established in February 1999, it receives funding from both U.S. and Mexican organizations.

Chavez Cano, 66, a diminutive, retired accountant whose mild manner causes listeners to lean in just to hear her, is perhaps the most outspoken and militant voice here on violence against women.

In 1993, she noticed a trend among crimes committed in Juarez: dozens of young women were turning up slain in the surrounding desert. The bodies showed evidence of beatings, rape and strangulation. Many of the women fit a distinct profile: tall and thin, with long, dark hair and medium skin, between ages 11 and 25. Often, they came from the ranks of workers who yearly swell Juarez’s population from other parts of rural Mexico to work at border assembly plants, or maquiladoras.

Prodding the police

“They try to pretend these are not serial crimes,” Chavez Cano said of the local authorities. “It just brings your rage out. It makes you boil.”

Chavez Cano and others formed the Liga 8 de Marzo, an awareness group that collected data about the slayings and prodded police to give the murder investigations high priority - often by picketing the police station, holding crosses bearing names of victims.

No one agrees on the exact number of killings that are related. Chavez Cano says about 230 women have been found in the past nine years, the most recent in November when eight bodies were discovered in a shallow pit. Some slayings have been traced to jealous husbands or drug traffickers. But a large number share characteristics that make investigators believe a serial killer and perhaps copycats are at work.

After raising awareness of the problem to a national level, Chavez Cano decided someone should work to prevent the deaths, rather than just clean up after the murderers.

Help from elsewhere

With start-up money from the Maryland-based International Trauma Resource Center, the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Mexican Federation of Private Health and Community Development Associations, Chavez Cano opened Casa Amiga near the city center. A paid staff of four and an army of volunteers served 318 clients in Casa Amiga’s first year, providing a 24-hour hotline, counseling and group therapy.

Last year, the center added three staff members and served 5,803 clients, of which 1,172 were new cases.

Chavez Cano now worries about a troubling side issue: child sexual abuse and incest. Fifty-seven of her clients in the first year were raped children. So among her most successful programs is a puppet show that teaches children about “bad” touching and instructs them, in a gentle way, to respect their bodies.
The center takes most of her attention, but Chavez Cano does not let the police off easy when it comes to the slayings of women in the desert. They, in turn, have lashed out at her.

An attitude of disdain

Arturo Chavez Rascón, Chihuahua state’s former attorney general, came in for some of her sharpest barbs because of his comments implying the victims contributed to their own deaths through their dress or lifestyle. It’s an attitude shared by police officers on the beat, who Chavez Cano says discourage families from associating with Casa Amiga.

The center used to receive about $3,000 a month from Juarez for rent and salaries, but that stipend has been cut, Cano said. Now, the center relies on money it gets from donations and showings around Mexico of the hit play The Vagina Monologues.

Tragedy close to home

Recently, the center suffered a blow of a different kind.

In December, Maria Luisa Carsoli Berumen, an abused mother who had become a client and then a staff member at the center, was killed in front of Casa Amiga, witnesses say, by her husband, Ricardo Medina Acosta. The two had had a long and violent history that led to Carsoli Berumen leaving him. A court granted custody of their four children to Medina Acosta. She stayed in town, planning to wait until after the Christmas holidays to resume the custody fight.

On the morning of Dec. 21, the pair argued and struggled outside the center, and she was stabbed twice in the chest as she tried to flee. A black bow at the door expresses the staff’s grief. No one has been in arrested in Carsoli Berumen’s death.

Fighting for respect

“The death of Maria Luisa forces us to work more intensely to instill respect in children, men and women, and to sensitize the authorities to the grave risk for families and all of society that domestic violence represents,” Chavez Cano wrote in a column in the local newspaper.

“Rest in peace, Maria Luisa, and watch over your children so they remain united and sheltered by your loved ones who lament your absence.”

Editor note: Likewise, may Esther Chavez Cano rest in peace after her many years of good work protecting women from violence and murder.

 

Bobby Byrd is a small press publisher (Cinco Puntos Press) and poet. His latest work of poetry, White Panties, Dead Friends, and Other Bits & Pieces of Love, was published in 2006. He is currently editing Lone Star Noir, an anthology of noir stories set in Texas, forthcoming from Akashic Books.

Waiting to Take the Pregnancy Test, Dreaming When the Moon is Full, Letter at Nine Weeks

Published
by
jess
on December 28, 2009
in breastfeeding, family, miscarriage, motherhood, pregnancy and sex
. 0 Comments

3 Poems

by Wendy Wisner

Waiting to Take the Pregnancy Test

A yellow taxi, bright as blood,
stops behind the oak tree,
picks up no one, and slides away.

Every thirty seconds, an airplane
grazes the yolk yellow house
across the street.  Blue jays

spill from rusty maples-
swarms of them, hollow bodies.
I wish we bore our young

as birds do, outside the body.
Humans like to look
at what they make while they make it.

Each brief morning,
I gaze through the red veil
of my curtains.  I make a world.

In the afternoon I lose it.

Dreaming When the Moon is Full

My father picks me up in the old Datsun,
seats still sticky from the apple juice
I spilled as a baby.  My sister is a child
in her mint green T and it isn’t weird
when I bury my head in her chest.
It’s mushy there, like leaky down pillows
and she tells me everything will be fine
the way I told her on the phone last night
everything will be fine because the moon is full.
Then my father drops me off at your childhood
home.  Your mother’s hair is long and gold
like Rapunzel’s and she says it’s okay
if you and I sleep in the wild woods
of the unfinished attic.  As we climb
the stairs, I cup my hand on the small
of your back, rake my fingers through your
corn husk hair.  Even in the dream
I cannot give you a child, but you rock
and cradle me on the sawdust floor,
my body floppy as a doll.  Over and over
you forgive me, mouth sealed to my milky chest,
stars knocking like dice against the skylights.

Letter at Nine Weeks*

First the book said my womb was a plum,
then a small pear, a navel orange,
now a grapefruit, and this morning, you pushing
your almond body against the edges
of mine, drool blooming so thick and sticky
on my pillow I feared it was blood, I said to you
I want the world, I want it just a little.
                           

Danny wakes, and we sleep,
my body splayed out, ripe, taking up space,
you stuck to me, secret as a silkworm.
The blender whirs, the phone rings.
Birds screech, but I am strapped
to this bed, not dreaming, not thinking, you gently sucking.

*”Letter At Nine Weeks” previously appeared in a chapbook published by The Zen Center of NY in October 2009.

 

Wendy Wisner’s first book of poems, Epicenter, was published by CW Books in 2004.  Her poems have appeared in The Spoon River Review, Rhino, Natural Bridge, The Bellevue Literary Review, online at Verse Daily, and elsewhere.  Wendy previously taught writing and literature at Hunter College; she is now a La Leche League leader and is pursuing her Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) certification.  Visit Wendy on the web at www.wendywisner.com.

Review of Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict

Published
by
jess
on December 21, 2009
in abortion, birth, pregnancy and sex
. 0 Comments

Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict

by Irene Vilar (www.irenevilar.com)

Other Press, 2009, $15.95

 

Review by Jessica Powers

 

Irene Vilar’s second memoir explores a part of her life that she left out of her first memoir entirely—the fifteen abortions she had over the course of fifteen years.

 

Twelve of those abortions were pregnancies with the same man, a former professor, a man more than thirty years older, who became her lover when she was still a teenager. Ultimately, he became her husband and, as she refers to him, her “master.” She wanted a baby every time she conceived—an average of every 8 months, with the exception of a year and a half when she was working on her first memoir and remembered to take birth control pills—but knew that she had to choose between her life and her love. “Pregnant, my life felt less-sub-human,” she writes. Yet from the beginning, her husband had told her how “women’s desires for children killed each one of his love stories” (p. 51). Vilar knew that if she ever decided not to terminate one of her pregnancies, she would be terminating the relationship instead. “If you are grown up enough to have a child, you are just as fit to be a single mother,” he told her. “But I will not be a victim of your displacement” (83).

 

She saw each pregnancy as a “death sentence” for the relationship but also “a chance to rise above it, and above him” (79). Yet each time, she chose to end the pregnancy instead of the relationship. Vilar suggests she was addicted to abortion, but I would argue she was addicted to this particular man, a cruel master who cared more for his own comfort than for the woman he spent so many years “loving.” On the other hand, if she was addicted to the man, she never would have jeopardized the relationship so often by becoming pregnant, so perhaps she is on target when she admits that the cycle of pregnancy-and-abortion fed some destructive need. She felt validated, even “aroused,” by each pregnancy, panicked by the possible demise of her relationship, and simultaneously relieved and empty whenever she had an abortion.

 

Throughout the story, Vilar explores the ways her mother’s suicide when she was 8 left her feeling abandoned and homeless, linking that incident to her own struggles as an adult. She talks about her family’s propensity to addiction—her mother’s addiction to Valium, her father’s addiction to gambling and alcohol, her brothers’ addictions to heroin, and her own to abortion. She explores the damage done to her psyche at a young age but she fails to link her feelings of abandonment to her willingness to submit herself—body, mind, and soul—to a man in his fifties when she was only 17. She fails to acknowledge the betrayal of the feminist movement, which has fought (and continues to fight) for women’s right to an “out” when they find themselves with an untenable pregnancy but which has never provided a sufficient structure for dealing with the psychological and physiological damage of abortion, particularly repeat abortions. And what of the many doctors, family members, and friends who sat back and watched as Vilar tried to destroy her own body? Vilar lets them off the hook without much protest.

 

Vilar’s story is not one for the faint-hearted, nor is it for adamant pro-life or pro-choice advocates. The questions surrounding Vilar’s multiple pregnancies, her legal right to choose, her recognition of and desire for the many lives conceived within her womb but whose voices were silenced before they were even heard are necessarily messy questions.  Vilar’s life is a chaotic, disordered one and she doesn’t shy away from showing just how confused she was for most of her adult life. One of the truths her story demonstrates is that by insisting on the right to “sex on demand” with whomever and whenever we want, protected from all physical consequences like pregnancy, we have forgotten that sex carries with it incredible power, a power which can be abused and a power which can be destructive. Vilar’s husband was guilty of abusing that power. Whether Vilar was ever conscious of abusing that power is hard to say; it’s certainly possible to question whether a 17-year-old girl, suffering from scars related to her mother’s suicide, separated from her surviving parent by thousands of miles, and involved in relationship with a man old enough to be her father, can exercise a completely conscious right to choose.

 

Ultimately, the line separating Vilar’s belief in her right to choose and her recognition of the life within is very, very thin—almost non-existent. When she is pregnant for the sixteenth time, a pregnancy she carries to term, she describes the ultrasound of her daughter taken eighteen weeks before she was born. “The ultrasound images show clearly a miniature head tilted back, an arm raised up, with the hand pointing back toward the face. It would have been possible and permissible to end her life at this point” (208).

 

Thus Vilar ends the final chapter of her book, completely blurring the line between pro-life and pro-choice politics as she recognizes her daughter’s existence and acknowledges the many times she had, in the past, exercised her right to choose.

Military Abortion Bans

Published
by
jess
on December 20, 2009
in abortion
. 0 Comments

Religion Dispatches has published an interesting article on military policies on pregnancy and abortion leading single female members of the military who have an unplanned pregnancy to choose between ending their career or self-aborting. Read it here.

Miscarriage (III)

Published
by
jess
on December 14, 2009
in family and miscarriage
. 0 Comments

–after Hayek’s Frida

by Robin Silbergleid

1.

 
Here again:: 
                Three women:
fancy drinks with a pink parasols,
endless pots of Chinese tea.

The air around me smells
of nausea and nameless grief.
(Garlic, I think, ginger).  Now
again, she begins

and the words
mother     baby     hospital
and the words, they
collect on the table
like used dishes, and I am there
thirty years ago, three pounds
(smaller than a Sunday chicken)
eight ounces
 
and here all at once,
birthday for a child who shouldn’t have been:

my mother gowned
in a sterile room, a doll’s bottle
in her shaking hand, seven weeks
early and none too soon
 
and here, now, my mother
with her grownup girl, me
drinking pink drinks
because I’m alive
and, oh,
            oh, oh–
 

2.  Once I collected fortunes
and favorite numbers, thirty
and the year of the rat, used
tissues lint my pockets
 
and my mother and my aunt
who won’t stop talking
I wanted to tell you I’m sorry
about the baby, sorry you lost           

and the baby who won’t be
sits heavy in my pelvis
the placenta that tried so hard still
pumping blood to his stumped cells
 
I’ve been dreaming
 
of this for years–
                            it all bleeds together–
 
           Frida Kahlo, the actress, me
           writhing (how many miscarriages?)
           a crimson tub, a blood-stained sheet. 
           This thing that hasn’t happened yet–
           (he came out of me in pieces)

an image from a painting, a movie set,
the diary of a woman between.

 
Robin Silbergleid is the author of the chapbook Pas de Deux: Prose  and Other Poems (Basilisk, 2006). Her poems and essays have appeared in journals including Dislocate, Crab Orchard Review, The Truth About the Fact and The Cream City Review, for which she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  A survivor of pregnancy loss and single mother to a spirited five-year-old, Robin is a regular contributor to the online journal Exhale. She is current assistant professor of English at Michigan State University. The Fertile Source published her poem “A Poem For My Son On His Due Date” in September.