Her relationship with Kirk was an affair, plain and simple. Secretly she’d hoped something more would come from it but it never did. Kirk showed his true colors when Michelle told him she was pregnant; the pregnancy was unintentional; she’d been on the pill but sometimes, as they say, shit happens. Kirk didn’t want to get married and, worse still, didn’t want to have anything to do with her or the child and promptly fled the state. Michelle had been too crushed to pursue any legal remedy that would help her financially.
When Michelle found out she was pregnant she was thrilled. Her outlook began to change when her parents weren’t as enthused about the pregnancy. “You aren’t going to have it, are you?” her mother asked . By then, Michelle had moved out of her parents’ house and was living in an apartment in Jersey City. Michelle was stunned by her mother’s use of the word it in reference to what would be her first grandchild. It was then that Michelle saw her parents for what they were and she realized something for the first time: her parents never really wanted her. She realized she’d been a burden on them, that her own arrival had been unexpected, but back in those dim days before abortion was legal there wasn’t much they could have done about it. They’d put up a good front, had provided food and shelter for her and that was the extent of it. Emotionally they had been distant and unavailable.
No wonder Michelle had sought solace in all things artistic. It was in the arts that she found love and acceptance and nurturing. Something that was absent at home.
That phone conversation had been the second to the last one she’d ever had with her mother. It had ended in harsh words and tears and Michelle called back a few days later in a desperate attempt to prove to herself that her mother really wasn’t the cold, callous person she was, that she really didn’t mean the things she’d said. (“A baby is going to destroy your future, Michelle. You need to focus on your career when you’re in your twenties, and a baby is just going to take all of your focus away from that and then where will you be? A common housewife with no use and no skills except for breeding.”)
But her mother had meant what she’d said.
Everything changed after that turning point. As her pregnancy moved along, Michelle’s entire outlook on life changed. She saw life as a precious thing that you only get one chance to make the best of making yourself and your loved ones happy. She hadn’t really been happy growing up, she hadn’t been happy that she made the decision to forsake pursuing a career in art, and she wasn’t happy working as a Junior Executive for All Nation. When Michelle found out she was going to have a girl, her heart swelled. Her daughter was not going to undergo what she’d went through. Her little girl was going to be loved, nurtured and taken care of. She was going to grow up loving life, and she wanted to share her daughter’s joy when she discovered new things for the first time. Knowing that she was going to bring forth new life in the form of her daughter, whom she named the day she found out she was going to have her, changed Michelle’s entire outlook on life forever.
She continued going to work and she cut back on her hours. Her supervisor was very understanding and gracious, telling her she could have three months of maternity time after the baby was born. As the months passed she felt joyous as her belly swelled. She began shopping for maternity clothes with her girlfriends from the office and buying things for the baby that she would set up in her one bedroom apartment. When she first saw Alanis’s heartbeat through the ultrasound she remembered the sense of awe that came over her. She remembered learning from the technician during her eight-week visit that he believed she was having a girl. One of her close friends at the time, Catherine Berman, was concerned about Michelle’s ability to support herself as a single mother but Michelle already had it planned out. “I’ll be fine,” she’d said. And she would have been. Everything would have been fine. After Alanis was born she would have plenty of money saved, would have paid maternity leave, and that would give her enough time to seek residence outside the city and set up roots somewhere else, out in the country, away from the urban jungle. She wanted to raise her daughter in more tranquil, peaceful settings, somewhere where she could still make a decent living and still raise Alanis without having to worry about the two of them becoming a victim of a violent crime or being too far from her daughter’s daycare provider.
She lost Alanis in her seventh month.
Even now she still remembered that awful day, and reliving it brought back the tears every time. The abdominal cramping that woke her out of a sound sleep at three a.m.; the heavy vaginal bleeding that soaked through the first tampon she applied within an hour. Even then she didn’t want to believe it was happening, kept telling herself that this just wasn’t happening even as her rational side kept telling her it was. She remembered dialing 911 with shaky hands, remembered being strapped to the gurney when the ambulance arrived. She remembered taking her purse with her before they left, not knowing when she’d be back, hoping against all odds that the doctors would fix it. She remembered being hooked up to IVs and strapped to monitors. She remembered the dread that filled her as the contractions started, as the doctors worked feverishly to save her baby as the night wore on. She kept hoping the nightmare would go away, kept telling herself she would do anything to save her child. She remembered the doctors telling her the next morning that despite all their efforts the condition was advancing, that they were going to induce labor; she remembered thinking no, this isn’t right! This isn’t happening!; she remembered the intense pain, the gut wrenching cramps in her lower belly; she remembered the warmth that spread through her lower body as Alanis was expelled from between her legs, remembered the flow of blood and amniotic fluid and her loud sobs as she saw her child, forever a seventh-month old fetus, so tiny, so little, a beautiful little face, eyes closed forever, adorable feet and hands, skin pale and gray; a tiny baby who never took a breath or opened her eyes or felt her mother’s loving touch.
She remembered being allowed to cradle Alanis to her breast. She remembered the medical personnel leaving the delivery room to give her some time alone with her baby. And what she saw when she looked down at that stillborn baby broke her heart so badly that it never completely healed. She still felt the pain, even now after all this time had passed. She remembered crying, holding Alanis to her tightly, unmindful now of her nakedness and the blood caking her inner thighs. All she wanted to experience was the feel of Alanis’s tiny body against hers, the feel of her skin against hers. She remembered caressing the oh-so-tiny fingers, kissing them, sobbing uncontrollably, not believing that this nightmare could happen to her and not knowing how she was ever going to get through her life now that the only thing she had ever really loved—for she had loved Alanis even before the moment when she first learned she was pregnant—was now gone from her. Forever.
At some point the medical personnel had come back to the room and gently taken Alanis from her and Michelle didn’t remember much after that.
The next few days were a blur. She was in the hospital for two nights. She remembered being monitored by the nurses. She remembered speaking with a grief counselor. And she remembered empathetically nodding her head when she was asked if she would like memorial photographs of Alanis before she was cremated. In fact, she was overwhelmed at the thought. She remembered going home in a cab, bundled up in a set of spare clothes her friend Catherine had brought for her, clutching the envelope of photos in her hand as the cab made its way over the Hudson River to her apartment in Jersey City. And then she remembered the arrival of her daughter’s ashes and picking out the nice little urn where they continued to rest on a bookshelf along with one of the photos from the batch of memorial photos. They still sat on the top shelf in the living room of the house she shared with Donald and not a day passed when she didn’t think about Alanis, and how much her daughter meant to her and how much she still loved her.