This Lovely Life 7 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

There is a kind of stillness peculiar to winter in a city to which you don’t mean to come, and in which you don’t mean to stay. Your only memories of that place will always be of the snow, the sooty roads, the strange white emptiness of the downtown streets, and your own breath cold in the house in the early morning.

Helena, Montana is like this for me. Ben and I moved to the little city on the high desert plains a week after our wedding. We got jobs with the five-month agrarian-schedule State Legislature, parting ways on the first day in the pink-paneled Capitol rotunda: he off to a party staff job and I to the steno pool, where housewives, college girls, and retired schoolteachers spent snowy, sub-zero days in a windowless turret, typing out verbatim minutes to the public testimony we staffed each morning.

I thought I was pregnant that month. I had just gone on birth control and I didn’t understand how it might change the cramps, scents, and blood of my cycle. Every anxious morning, after waiting to see if I would throw up, I was the scribe for a parade of foster kids, ex-con moms, and parents whose children suffered from schizophrenia, spina bifida, and other ailments whose severity warranted a line item in the Health and Human Services budget.

Every child wheeled into or conjured up in that committee room might have been my own: spacey and drugged, mute with pain, no bigger than the palm of its parent. I still can’t forget the baby with fused, red lines for eyes, her red-haired mother and oil-field worker father come West from Sidney to ask the legislators to approve money that let them keep their daughter comfortable at home until she died.

The father looked like a prophet: wild dark hair, clear eyes; young, but very old. The mother stood beside him rocking their baby, whose cascade of tubes pinned its body to a whirring, wheeled machine.

When he stepped away from the microphone, the room was silent. Aides ushered them quickly from the podium and up to the offices for a private meeting with their legislators, and you could see in their eyes how odd this all was: to be honored, for once, for a fate that made them so lonely.

For years, I have remembered and prayed for that young family. I have imagined that in hearing their testimony over and over again, in real life and then in stuttered, grainy repetition as I typed their words into the record, that I had touched an edge of what they felt.

I don’t yet have children. I have just reached the age at which a first tier of friends has begun to reckon with the fact that pregnancy may not be easy or guaranteed. Part of the terror of this predicament is the sense that it is all a gamble: the lucky will receive a child; the others will not. There is little thought to the odds that any number of us may receive or lose a child who is not perfect.

This Lovely Life: A Memoir of Premature Motherhood is about those odds, and about the unspoken fact that many contemporary women desiring a pregnancy labor, quite literally, under the illusion “that we can want—and get—things on our own terms, no matter what.”

It’s a significant book, one of the first to offer a glimpse from the other side of the madcap, hormonal adventures chronicled across the “repro lit” genre. Although author Vicki Forman barely mentions that her second pregnancy was born of fertility treatments, the few phrases revealing this provide a delicate frame to a story that no woman wants to imagine as her own.

In a stark prelude to the night on which she gives birth, at twenty-three weeks, to twins who are “at the very edge of viability,” Forman asks the existential question of the ages, one that will haunt her and her husband through the twins’ brief lives:

“It’s human nature to seek pleasure and avoid suffering, but what happens when suffering finds you?”

Even as the contractions wrack her body, she begs the doctors to let her babies go, knowing, as might many older, well-educated and well-informed mothers-to-be, “about morbidity and mortality; I knew these babies could not possibly survive or be normal if they did.” But state law required that infants born with signs of life be resuscitated.

Forman offers her story through clean, quiet observations. Her cadences are sharp and oddly clinical at times, as if she is writing in a language that is not her own. In some ways, this is true. In grief, “[t]he world receded,” she remembers. “So much was unfamiliar that if I was asked my name, I had to think for long moments.”

She does not shy from describing her terror that she and husband would not helm a family similar to that of her own parents’, a middle-class, Ivy League-educated clan “where normal was nothing short of perfect.” She admits her descent into a religion of blind prayers, of lighting candles and kneeling before the hospital chapel altar, even after a splintered religious upbringing and adulthood as “an atheistic-religious mongrel.”

Forman says that that ultimately, she found her forgiveness. She does not say to whom or for what this forgiveness is given. But it is linked inextricably to her sense of redemption and her ability to “let go of [her] need to be the only one responsible.”

As such, it is a kind of caritas, unexpected and full-bodied, yet allowing all that is beloved to be sheared from the body, as well. It is a kind of prophecy, a steadied gaze that sees the world, as much as was the testimony of the clear-eyed young man turned father and prophet, and the calm of his red-haired wife all those winters ago.

Their red-eyed daughter is gone now; she was probably gone that May when Ben and I drove away from Helena, the snow burning off the valley and the summer fires’ smoke just tingeing the air. I might have been thinking of her mother and father that day, as I am thinking of them this morning, knowing now that the life they lived bravely is perhaps a better prayer than anything I might offer up on their behalf.