The second positive pregnancy test—the one where you know it wasn’t a fluke, that it really stuck this time—came a few days after the first one, on my 35th birthday.
“How many babies are we talking?”
We wouldn’t know for a few weeks yet. Not until we were knee-deep into that bloody obstacle course of the first trimester. The one so many couples navigate alone. Because everyone does it alone. Because you can’t really believe it yet. Because yelling “false alarm” is too painful.
But not us.
We’d let our parents know nearly two years into this journey that a team of specialists had joined us in bed. Surgeries, pills, shots. Yoga, meditation, exercise. No sugar, no caffeine, no additives.
“Why do you eat like that? When you finally give me grandbabies you won’t get away with that.”
Clued in to the shame they inflicted, our mothers and fathers grew silent and joined the growing horde under our sheets. Then the unimaginable happened—success.
Joyous words tinged with fear spat back at us over the phone line.
“Congratulations—how do you feel?”
“Such great news—and when is the ultrasound?”
“They’re tears of joy, kiddo—you don’t worry about anything. Not a thing.”
Two days later, my father-in-law made his own call. The second opinion on the positive test—the one where you know it wasn’t a fluke, that what is supposed to only happen to other people has happened to you.
Stage four, esophageal. Six to nine months.
A team of specialists and well-wishers moved into his living room. Pills, radiation, chemo. Prayer, meditation, rest. No spices, no alcohol, no additives.
“Why do you put yourself through this?”
Because, given the option, he’d decided to take the nine months.
My father-in-law and I stood in opposite doorways, a portal of mortality stretched between us. He stepped forward and lost weight, I stepped forward and found it. His hair thinned with the next step, mine thickened and curled. Another step and his appetite waned, mine surged.
Our teams of specialists ran commentary.
“Not just one—twins!”
“Inoperable. Metastasized. Spread.”
As the second trimester rolled around, my husband and I flew west to visit his family. My father-in-law and I compared bumps. My sister-in-law fetched us chairs.
“Hello,” my father-in-law said to me, to the three of us living in my body.
“Hello,” I said to him, to the many of them living in his.
We crossed paths in the middle of the mortality portal, in a place where time warped—like seconds expanding to hours as the here-and-now obliterated anticipation. As if the blurry world had gone crystal clear, the wind in your face after jumping from the plane, because the moment filled every crevice with a certainty that made the future redundant.
Bedrest came to each of us with my third trimester. The specialists hovered. Preventive care made up of overnight stays for monitoring, shots for encouraging growth, pills for delaying labor. Palliative care made up of hospice stays for stabilization, shots for discouraging growth, pills for delaying pain. Each of us buying time.
We turned to look over our shoulders from opposite ends of the portal.
My water broke painlessly at two in the morning.
“Do I have time for a quick shower?” my husband asked. He would be forty soon. He had never felt hurried toward parenthood.
“Sure.” I was naïve.
Weakened by bedrest, my body collapsed to the floor with the next contraction before he reached for a towel. We rushed past the hospital bag forgotten by the door and tumbled into the car he drove like a mad man through an unexpected storm. We’d had abundant time to prepare. And yet.
Two creatures wiggled out of my body eleven hours later, bursting through the door of the portal and toppling one over the other. We counted fingers and toes before noticing that no pause had pulsed between pregnancy and parenthood.
My husband called his father.
“What did he say?”
“Wonderful. He said it was just wonderful.”
“And?”
“And that it’s his funeral and I’m not invited because I have my own family to tend.”
My father-in-law passed out of the portal the next day. We’d had abundant time to prepare. And yet.
We piled in my bendy hospital bed—my husband, our twins and I—and held tight. Back home, the anticipated bumps of new family life became an unfathomable reality. In the dark wee hours, when tiny wiggling bodies found a way to touch crown to crown and all was quiet, punctuated by fulfilled promise, I missed him—my father-in-law. That night, I rubbed hands over my swollen cheeks—and saw him.
His right finger hovered over the crib as he rocked forward then back on feet tucked side-by-side. His dark eyes, fixed on the tiny ones lost to sleep, sparkled like the Leprechauns of his homeland as he whispered.
“Wonderful. Just wonderful.”
I would tell my two-year olds about their grandfather’s visit—myth-making, they presumed. Or maybe not. Maybe they understood, as I did, that this man had already loved them so much that he ran back through the portal for one last peek. But he couldn’t stay.
“Momma, do you think that Grandpa had to die to make space in the world for us?”
“Maybe, my love. Just maybe.”
I do not tell my children about the portal. And the unbearable beauty of now. They are figuring it out. As we all do. And yet.
Andrea Hussong is a new author and long-time writer of blended fact and fiction for readers of all ages. By day she is an academic psychologist in North Carolina where she also pursues the journeys of our lives in a different way.