Miscarriage of Justice

WARNING:  Some graphic imagery of the experience of a miscarriage.  

Miscarriage:  failure to attain the just, right, or desired result/end; he expulsion of a fetus before it is viable, especially between the third and seventh months of pregnancy

Miscarriage of justice:  
primarily is the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. "Miscarriage of justice" is sometimes synonymous with wrongful conviction, referring to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed trial.

Before I was pregnant with my second child, I'd suffered two miscarriages.  Just weeks into each pregnancy (the first at five weeks, the second at ten) seemingly no different than the one that had delivered its promise of a baby, my body, ripe and pumping with hormones and an increased blood supply, began to tear the walls down.  My heart skipped a beat and then a small cramp.  I felt nervous and my palms began to sweat.  I believe I was holding my breath.  I didn't want to look, to check.  A small cramp was not entirely uncommon or unexpected.  My body was trying to tell me something I did not want to know.  I knew it and still didn't want to listen.

The cramping began to increase and I was hot.  My skin, plump and swollen, got cold and clammy.  My breasts and nipples already longing to nurture that baby were so sensitive to the touch that it seemed just my clothes were too much.  I felt the longing, the begging, and the pleading.  "Please don't let this be." And then the resolve.  There was blood.  Blood everywhere and I was alone and even when people came to my call, I was alone.  The first time in France in my in-laws' upstairs bathroom on New Year's Eve.  The second time in the apartment I shared with my soon-to-be husband and our first child just weeks shy of the end of the first trimester.  I was at a loss for words.  Everything everyone said to comfort me sounded muffled.  I didn't want them to talk to me.  I wanted them to listen.  To listen to the sound of the moment and it was deafeningly quiet.  It was so real that try as I might to escape in my mind, I was pulled back into the present with each tiny contraction.  A friend of mine, one of my very best, who is also a healer had once said to me, 'we cannot expand and grow all the time.  Sometimes we have to contract.'  That thought kept coming to mind.  I can't say why, but it somehow gave me comfort and the space to accept what was to be.

We wanted another child, a partner and friend for our first, and after meeting with my doctor and receiving the appropriate shots (I have Rh negative (Rhesus negative) blood which means that my blood is most likely not compatible with the blood of the baby and certain precautions have to be taken), we decided to try again.  My husband was hopeful and to some degree disconnected from the emotional and spiritual effort it was going to take to get back out there.  Encouraged by the all clear from my doctor, he was eager to start the baby-making!  I was more apprehensive.  The losses had been traumatic, terrifying, and exhaustively lonely.  I did indeed want to have another baby but was so scared to lose another.  The sense memories, smells, tingles, ringing in my ears, the muscle memory of loss pulled tightly at my core.  My heart and gut wrenched, my palms became sweaty, I was nervous and easily agitated and very short tempered.

I didn't watch either of the videos.  We came home from the day-late Independence Day fireworks to our cable, phone, and internet service not working.  It turned out to be a blessing.  As I did a quick review of the latest on social media on my phone I saw the first hashtag:  #ripaltonsterling.  It wasn't difficult to put the pieces together to see what had happened.  I knew better than to even try to watch the video on my phone.  Already I was shaking.  My heart and gut wrenched and my palms were sweaty.  I looked to posts from my 'woke' friends.  I was in a panic.  Piecing together small details--selling CDs, concealed carry state, gun in his pocket, point blank range, black, black, black, black, black.  I knew guys who sold CDs on the street.  Hell, I'd bought some back in the day when I didn't know better and could scarcely afford a good meal let alone my favorite music.

Like with the first cramp suffered in the upstairs bathroom, I stood alone.  I didn't even want to say the words out loud.  I looked down.  Blood.  Real, thick, dark.  Pulled into the present.  This is happening.  From the bathroom, "Honey, something is wrong."  And now from the bedroom, barely whispered, "They killed another black man on the street."  The depth of our disconnect even more expanded, there was no answer.  "A man.  Selling CDs.  Pinned down and shot at point blank range."  My husband looked up. "No.  Can't be.  How they can do that?"  Nervous, easily agitated, short tempered.  I had to move, walk around.  I knew not to try to watch the video, the video!  I knew that I was suddenly very alone.

Retreating to my bed, to sleep, seemed the best option and I took some melatonin to disappear and went in.  When I woke up to the news of the murder of Philando Castile, a young, black man who'd been shot and killed in the driver seat of his car as he'd reached for his permit to show the officer who'd demanded it, I blanched.  That his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and his child had also been in the car and that his girlfriend had live streamed his death, dropped me to the floor.  Again, I did not watch the video but saw a still.  The blood.  The thick, dark blood on a white t-shirt on a man sitting in the driver's seat of his car.  The scene was haunting, surreal.

I looked down and took stock of my surroundings.  That hyper-awareness that trauma brings.  I see the floor, the walls, my feet.  There is so much blood.  I smell the food cooking downstairs.  I see the whites of my eyes gleaming with tears and fear.  I see blood.  A miscarriage.  A failure to achieve a desired end.  I'm still standing.  I sit and try to breathe deeper breaths than the shallow, panicked wisps that are leaking out of me like cold winter smoke rings.  All the moments I've ever looked at my feet, my hands, my face, the floor, the wall come rushing to me.  I am pulled back to the present.

They have killed another black man in the street.  There was no trial, no accusation (none formal at least).  This was not justice.  It is not just.  There has been a rush to find fault in these two men as has been done countless times before.  I have taken stock of my surroundings.  I stare down at my hands and at my feet.  I see the walls, the floor.  This has all happened before and before me and before them and before all of us.  That in a public court of opinion these men cannot be found innocent of a crime they did not commit because by being black they are guilty.  There is a lot of talk about it.  Too much for me right now because I need the sound of the moment in its deafening quiet.  I need there to be listening.

When we'd passed fifteen weeks during my pregnancy with the little one I felt safe enough to tell people that we were pregnant, but the panic never stopped. I checked between my legs daily.  I responded to gas, fullness, fatigue with worry and panic.  I prayed and chanted and mantra-d from point to point.  I was afraid and I was hopeful.  We can do this, I thought.  We have before.  She wants to stay with us.  She wants to be our baby.  The gods are shining on us.  They want her to be ours too.  But until she was in my arms, peering up at me with those shiny, black eyes, I was prepared for the worst. Prepared to lose her, prepared to suffer and hurt and feel anguish in silence.  Silence because looking at me in my hurt was too much for most to bear.

It is hard to watch someone in excruciating pain.  It is hard to watch them writhe and twist and ache so deeply internally that their body contorts, the way they appear on the outside is hideous to behold, their faces change, their destinies are missed, their paths misdirected.  We fear pain like the dark hand of misfortune.  We don't want it to touch us too so we turn from it, intellectualize it, talk and talk and talk about it, analyze it, describe it, try to work around it but it can only be confronted deep inside.  It is bloody and dark and thick.  It is slow and gruesome and sudden.  It throbs and burns and pulls.  And then gives release.  

The tiny space within me that I keep my deepest fears and secrets burst at the seams and I cried for days, endlessly.  I'd heard that the little four year in the car, in the back seat, where I now strapped my two children, tried to comfort her mother as her father lay dying in the driver's seat.  I'd heard that Diamond Reynolds was taken into custody and I wondered where her tiny girl was taken.  I wept at the thought of the rushing, the fast moving, the approach with with Alton Sterling was met in those last moments.  Wondered if he said to himself, 'this is just like that guy...' before someone put a gun to his chest.  I could not stop crying as I thought about all the blood and its metallic smell, its dankness, its thick, tacky swell as it flowed from the body.  I would wipe my eyes and more tears would come thinking of the moments in stillness when even though there was sound and screaming and fury, for a split second the dead silence of that present moment froze the world.  *gasp* And then it was done.

I remember the heaviness of the blood, the weight on my shoulders, the pulling in my heart, believing I could never recover from a loss like this.  One that had been a secret, one that was private, one that was mine to mull and cultivate.  And I came to see, I have to tell you.  I have to tell you that these are not just stories on white paper.  They are not clean or neat or easily filed.  They are real life.  The just, right, desired end was that I would bear another child and bring her into this world and love her and have every right to share with her and show her and celebrate with her the beauty of this human experience.  I hope I can.  The just, right, desired end would be that two men, black men, who had every right, so it is said, to share and celebrate the beauty of our shared human experience would not be dead because they'd been unfairly tried and convicted because they were black.

It's incredible this life.  And heartbreaking.  Black lives matter. Too.  



(c)  Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama in the Jungle:  Back to the Suburban Grind.