“Each of these poems exists… because a child does not”
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
In an otherwise silly (but interesting!) Los Angeles Times story about scandal in the scrapbooking world is a brief paragraph that illustrates, by way of a miscarriage, scrapbooking’s new directions:
Contes met one young woman who scrapped about her miscarriage. The woman printed a photo of herself for the page, adding stickers, stamps and Coldplay lyrics: “Come on, my star is fading and I swerve out of control. I know I’m dead on the surface but I’m screaming underneath.”
The woman’s homage to her miscarriage reminded me that there is in fact genre of poem addressed to miscarriages, abortions, and other unborn children. Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Mother” is one of the most famous examples. (One of the most illuminating studies of it is Barbara Johnson’s essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” from which the title of this post comes.) I have some vague memory of Christina Rossetti having written another; I think I’ll do some looking around to find it.
