That Was The Worst Christmas Ever

On time, grief and holding hope in the heart...

For my documentary project Fallow, I named a photograph after Sufjan Stevens’ song, That was the Worst Christmas Ever.

That Was The Worst Christmas Ever. From my series, Fallow. Photo credit: me.

In the scene, snow lies like crisp Irish linen across a southern Ontario farm field outside of Marsville. Like the flour my mom would sprinkle across parchment paper before pounding out the dough. The hue is interrupted only by the bare arms of trees that mark the long approach of some rural driveway even before you reach it. The poppy red of the barn is a shock. Like blood on snow. You cannot miss it against all that white. The warning red of a neon exit sign.

Ontario plays host to innumerable red barns. On long winter drives, the crimson dots of them always remind me of when I’ve miscarried. The first time, we were on our way to meet friends of the man I was seeing. It was May and I had to pee. He stopped at some gas station with a diner attached to it. In the low light of the bathroom stall, I spy a circle of rust the size of a small coin on the underwear that wraps my ankles.

When I exit the washroom, he is buying coffees to go. In the car, we phone his friends to cancel the dinner and drive straight to Women’s College Hospital. A male doctor who must have entered medical school in puberty slides fingers inside me and palpates my tummy. He mouthes words meant to feel like so many cotton balls held to a wound. This happens. Your uterus is still closed and intact. Go home and put your feet up. If you don’t stop bleeding, come back.

We pull into the driveway of the old duplex my twin and I bought in Toronto’s Broadview/Danforth area by pooling an unexpected windfall together, years before the Toronto housing market snorted cocaine up its nose. That house in Greektown becomes a secondary womb we share. She lives above while I carve space below on the main floor. We congregate on the back deck and certain evenings around her kitchen table to smoke and play cards. She paints the ceiling of the screened addition at the back a deep indigo and stencils golden stars into it.

Downstairs, an ancient maple tree is framed by the front window. The bedroom walls are the colour of a Christmas poinsetta like the hue my pubic hairs keep painting upon the canvas of the pads between my legs. We stuff pillows beneath my knees to raise my legs, but the bleeding and pain keeps cranking like stereo volume.

Amid this scene, my father telephones. My eldest sister has been in a car accident in England. He can tell something is off from my silence, broken only by muffled whimpering. My nails dig into my partner’s palm. Through the landline, I hear my father pause. What’s wrong? he asks. I tell him for the first time in my life I am pregnant, but we might be losing the baby. It’s the end of my first trimester. The week before we called both sets of parents to arrange dinner out for the six of us, the seven of us. To break the news that they will all be grandparents. The dinner never materializes. Instead, I whisper words to him like I’m ten years old again, kneeling in a confessional trying to formulate an apology in the words spilling from my mouth. My Da doesn’t hesitate.

Kindness, concern, compassion are cushions he pushes through the receiver to staunch the heartache. His words brush the freckles on my cheeks and nose like eyelashes, gentle as the butterfly kisses he gave us as kids. Pain sears my abdomen and I recall the electric knife he’d wield to carve turkey at the holiday dinner. Our heads wrapped in a rainbow of thin, paper crowns from the Christmas Firecrackers we waited all year to pull.

After the call, we drive back to Women’s College. I am now delirious with pain. My twin and her partner accompany us. Days after, she tells me she could hear my screams. Everyone could. The sound of them alternately amplifies and muffles through the swinging of doors, permeating three sets of hospital walls to where she sits with multiple other humans feeling helpless and forlorn. I am conscious of medical staff entering and leaving the room but their bodies are a blur like we’re in some long exposure photograph by Alexey Titarenko. An older female gynecologist loosens and removes the speculum. She mutters something about tissue being stuck. She does not say the word fetus. I will not make the connection until days later. She removes ‘blockages’ as I writhe, curse her and apologize, curse and apologize. My heart and blood spill all over the paper sheet, smearing the steel surface beneath.

Sometimes gaps in memory are tiny presents left under a tree. I don’t recall screaming. In my hippocampus are woolen pockets I unbutton and open. One contains the way the nurses call the man beside me my husband. To quiet and comfort me, my broken body is given a generous dose of painkiller. My head bobs like a helium balloon. I am a kite soaring and dipping high above me as someone pushes me to the hospital bed. My partner cradles our coats in his arms like the baby we won’t have. He’s offered a chair that collapses into a long cot. He makes several attempts to flatten it. Each time he lifts his leg to stretch out, it flops back into chair position.

Higher than Apollo 8, I howl hysterically with laughter. It’s like watching a scene from those old black and white Laurel and Hardy movies my dad rented along with a portable screen from the Kitchener Public Library for birthday parties. All our friends cross-legged on the basement shag rug, giggling and licking butter and salt off our fingers. Behind us, the lights dimmed, enormous wheels of celluloid are joined to each other like mother and child. A long umbilical cord feeds images to us from one spool into the other as the film unfurls. That’s how I felt before the shot of Demoral, splayed on the table wearing socks and nothing else under the hospital gown. Like I was unraveling.

As my partner fiddles with the cot, a nurse hands me a pan she explains is for ‘catching tissue’ when I need to relieve myself overnight. I pee four times in wee hours and search the stainless-steel kidney, expecting to see my fetus curled there like a comma, something to give me pause. A tiny, perfect form the size of a lime with an oversized thimble of a head and growing buds for limbs. Overnight, the intravenous high continues. Perhaps the singular benefit of critical, grievous pain is that it acts like a bottle of white-out. The fact the gynecologist removed the ruined remains of what was once my fetus from my body hours before is erased from my mind. Our brains protect us in endless myriad ways.

That May we weren’t even trying for a baby. I initially booked an abortion, then changed my mind. I’d been living with endometriosis for five years. When laparoscopic surgery confirmed my diagnosis, I was single and 26. My doctor informed me getting pregnant and staying pregnant may be difficult. Neither is the decision to keep the pregnancy arrived at easily. Its subsequent loss felt like some bittersweet cocktail of relief and sorrow. He and I were so new to each other then, our fledgling relationship a handful of months old. Still trying to decide if the two we comprised might prove sustainable before adding a third party to the mix.

When the hospital technician performs an ultrasound the next morning to determine if I need a D&C, my break with reality continues. I ask her several times if she can see the fetus. She blushes and will not meet my eyes. Her silence is an elephant hugging and crushing my chest. I throw a quizzical look at the man I have only just begun to love. Tears slide quietly down his cheeks. She can’t leave the room quick enough. As she exits, he crouches at my bedside holding my knees. He promises that if I want to try for another baby, he is willing.

Bewildered, I shake my head. The painkiller begins to dissipate. My heart has navigated to my mouth and the atria and ventricles pulsate against my tongue so violently, I’m afraid it might knock my teeth out. The blood it’s pumping chokes my throat. This wasn’t planned, I whisper. My lips feel numb. None of this was planned. Let’s give each other more time. Just the two of us together. We kiss and I dress.

The Worst Christmas Ever unfolds almost six years later. We are finally pregnant a second time. This ecstasy follows years of failed attempts announced by menstruation that often arrived before my monthly clinical confirmation by phone. The sing-song tone in the voicemail of the receptionist’s message is new. At the fertility clinic in Hamilton, we hold hands and hear a very faint heartbeat. I feel that confetti might burst out of every orifice: ears, nose, the corners of my eyes, like microscopic bits of joy escaping. The nurse hands me a warm, wet towel to wipe the gel from my stomach. I lift my hips to zip up my jeans. I am beaming enough to give the sun solid competition. We are instructed to return two weeks later on December 24 for a second ultrasound before the clinic closes briefly for the holidays.

Driving back to the clinic they day before Christmas, slush greases the backroads and our hearts spin and slide with the back of the Subaru. We are giddy. My fingers move to my belly. His reach to crank a tune. Fred Eaglesmith croons about water in the fuel and we both bellow baby I’m sure on thin ice now in gleeful chorus. The car still smells of the Scotch pine we sawed down at the Blackberry Bog Tree Farm along the 6^th line the week before. We lay the pine on a long, wooden toboggan, held mittened hands and pulled the candy-cane coloured cord. The tree mimicked our joy, its long green needles bouncing behind us. We thrust its crown up between our seats over the stickshift just to close the hatch.

The car veers off Highway 6 South towards Freelton so we can hit Dundas via backroads. We are en route to McMaster University whose medical school runs the clinic. I inhale the scent of sap and recall how he carried the pine like a bride over the threshold of the farmhouse entrance. I positioned the old wrought iron stand the Mennonites sold me upon the centre of an oval rug woven from strips of cotton. We tightened the bolts tight against the pine’s bark and to the frayed edges of our hopes so they’d all stay upright.

At the clinic no heartbeat is detected. We stand at reception frozen like snow people, carrotless and missing an eye. Broken twigs for arms. They offer me Misoprostol to help things along because I haven’t yet begun to bleed. I refuse, preferring to let nature take its own course.

On the drive home, the radio remains off, deafening us. I thank the sun for hiding behind clouds. Snow begins to descend in wild, wet drops, crying the tears we cannot make. Our hearts are two paper bags placed upright in puddles. We are afraid to lift them, conscious if we do, the bottoms will break and everything we carry in them will spill out.

The snow picks up now, sensing the need to blanket us. We are stuck inside a snowglobe. Under glass and unable to breathe. Our tiny world has been turned upside down and the flakes refuse to settle. They fly in endless chaos suffocating us.

The next morning, all the gifts under the tree stay wrapped. We cancel family visits. Dinner. Our mouths open only to gasp at air. We wander wordlessly within the fieldstone farmhouse, its foot-deep walls and windowsills an extra buffer from the world. The headless turkey hides in the fridge. Buttered toast is all the energy our bodies can muster. We move like stop motion animation figures. Our own Island of Misfit Toys. Touch is inadvertent and awkward. Flimsy hugs, thin as Tengujo. Neither substance nor warmth. Like being sent a war telegram. Grief. Stop. Our fingers lightly staccato the morse for S.O.S. upon each other’s shoulders. The crackling static of failed transmissions. Joy here. Over. The pregnancy is lost but nothing physically loosens within me. My womb refuses to accept the fact and menstruate.

The day after Boxing Day, I return to the clinic for Misoprostol, deciding I’d rather endure the physical stage of loss now than after I return to work. The drug makes my body feel like tectonic plates being pulled apart. Slowly at first, but ultimately a widening chasm. My partner props pillows and proffers water bottles and hot tea. Lying supine feels worse. I move to sit on the toilet off the tiny bedroom. The sloped ceilings match our drooping spirits. I make primal sounds and request a wooden chair from downstairs. He places its apron away from me and I grip its back and bite into the top rail, moaning. I bleed and bellow, snot and tears baptizing my arms as I lean my head against the cross rail. Through the skylight, a velvet trio of dark firs sway and keen with me.

That was the Worst Christmas Ever.

This month marks twenty Decembers later and still my body remembers. In the days and months that follow I yearn to slap the faces of people who assure me that Time heals all wounds. Nothing anyone says comforts me. I am bereft.

The week before Winter Solstice, my teen stands tiptoe on the stool to place a large straw star atop our tree. Each December, I tell my kid there are three stars shining in the night sky. Three little dreams I once held in my belly shining over the best gift the cosmos gave me whose long limbs dance down the stool, whose eyes turn and twinkle at me like the blue lights stringing the tree.

People say what we see dotting the sky is the light of stars that have already expired. I know this to be true. It’s this weird magical mystery to do with time and the speed of light in space. Somewhere in those cosmic frozen fields, the starlight I once carried within died, but on it shines. On and on. Three stars long dead, still sparkling.

Their atoms formed tiny clumps but then turned back to stardust. The psithurism of trees whispered them higher until they floated through the Earth’s atmosphere like paper flying up a chimney flue, rocketing with the sparks of the woodfire back into the night ascending above the falling flakes and past the clouds that birthed this frozen precipitation.

Stephen King once described grief like it’s the drunken guest at the party who keeps coming back for one more goodbye hug. That tracks. And if this is a time of year you mourn the loss of someone you love, here’s the only wisdom I can offer two decades later: Time doesn’t heal all wounds, not completely, but at least a scab forms. It’s glossy at first. Still tender to the touch. Then the scab hardens over time. The crusty bit even falls off. One day you find you’re not even looking or picking at it and it’s shed itself. You can still see the marks where the wound once wept, blistered and gaping like some horribly sad mouth. Now it’s this tiny memento of skin. A miniscule memorial to what you suffered. Not raw like that first gash. At some point, fingers can move across it like reading a book in Braille. Your fingers. Anyone’s.

In Celtic culture, wounds are deemed necessary. They allow us to turn ourselves inside out. In mythological tales, this is akin to shapeshifting. We take on new form. A chance to change and grow. Evolve.

Two decades later, I see an older reflection in the bubbled glass of the front window. Outside, snow pinpricks the night. At the kitchen table, my kid paints a D and D figure and hums a familiar melody. After 20 years, I do feel transformed. I am still shifting the shape of me, trying to discern what I have become. What form I might yet take. Twilight nears with the coming year. The dog needs out and I join him. At the edge of the back deck, I tilt my head to the stars and stick my tongue out as flakes kiss the closed lids of my eyes. I cannot tell if my cheekbones are wet from tears or hexagonal prisms of crystallized water. Through the walls, Sufjan Stevens sounds muffled like my head is under water.

It’s the song my song of a child hums…

Incarnation, three stars
Delivering signs and dusting from their eyes