losses

My grandmother's second child, a boy, was stillborn. She never talked about him and my own mother (who was born 11 months after her older brother's death) had so completely forgotten about him that when my younger brother was born, she accidently gave him the same name as the child that had died.

My other grandmother lost baby after baby after baby. The only one to survive past infancy was my father, and she never quite got over the fear that she would lose him too. I would sit on her couch, a crocheted blanket wrapped around me, uncomprehending, as she told me again and again of the other children, the missing children, the ones who had vanished so completely that they might as well never have existed.

I suppose that it's only very recently that we've accepted the idea that every -- or almost every -- baby that's born is supposed to survive. And it's that belief that makes it seem not only sad, but somehow wrong or unnatural, when a mother ends up with empty arms.