between listening to wpr and the moth, i have been thinking alot the last few days about telling my story... it is not a story that is rare or out of the ordinary but it is uniquelly mine. I was the mother of three children, i had been married seven years, i was at least 120 lbs overweight. in the last year i had suffered a mis carriage and experienced the death of my grandmother, an experience that is a story in itself. that is a story about how to convince an elderly person to extend their own life unnaturally for the comfort of the people around them. its not a pleasant story, but neither is my story. less than a year after i miscarried the 1st time i found myself pregnant again, great! love it. always thought we would have a big family. but every weird wrong thing that could happen during my last pregnancy did. i spotted from my anus, having torn something but it would be okay. i became so constipated that i was in pain and had to stay home. for three days i drank myself till i thought well if it doesnt come out the bottom maybe it will float to the top. but i was pregnant and that was great. until the weekend when something caused alarm, i dont remember what it was but it made me intensely nervous and despite the midwife on the phone telling me it would all be okay, i didnt believe her. it didnt help that she had told me it would all be okay last time and i had miscarried before i got to the office on the next monday morning. so i went to work on monday and what ever had alarmed me had passed but i decided to go to the dr because i just didnt feel right about all of this, and they were all happy and cheery and they put the heart monitor on my belly and nothing. just my heart beat. but i thought i felt the baby moving and she was telling me this is normal, so i didnt panic yet. and she decides to take me in for an ultra sound. and the little screen comes up and no one says anything because there is nothing on the screen. and i looked at the tech and said something like... i have three kids i have seen these before thats not good , i want my husband now. and they left the room and i called my husband and i had to tell him to come to the dr. because we had lost the baby. and they take me back to their little room and i sit their alone while i wait for him. and the midwife comes in and tell me that i have two really shitty options. well she didnt say it that way but they were. i can have a d and c where they tear the baby up that i just saw not moving on the screen and vacuum it out, or i can deliver the baby in the maternity ward. we choose to deliver and are told to go home because the hospital is too busy and that we can go in tomorrow. we go home, i dont remember if we tried to make krumkake that night or one of the nights after we got home, but when ever we did it, we were both so dazed we forgot to time every single batch, and you are making batches like every thirty seconds.... so we go in the next day and i immediately notice the butterfly on my door. that is like the big nurse warning light... dead baby ahead. and they assign me a grief nurse and explain that i am going to bascially go through an abbreviated version of giving birth, abbreviated because i was only 20 weeks so the baby would be smaller. they hooked me up to some pitosin and an epidural. and we waited and waited and waited. me and pete. i felt nothing, we cried alot. and when it was time, they delivered this tiny tiny baby. and we held it, and you couldnt tell if  it was a boy or a girl. and we had it with us for a long time, and we talked to our baby and they took pictures of it. and when it was time for the baby to go to the morgue my husband being the fabulous dad that he is took the baby to the morgue... and when he came back the focus was on getting me up and going to the bathroom before i went to bed so my attention was on this tiny wisp of a nurse who was going to help me to the bathroom, and my trying not to crush her. and i slept in  the sleeper bed next to pete that night, because i decided these nurses no longer had the power to tell me what to do after i pooped for them. and we were woken up a couple of times by these totally unproductive high pitched screams and i would look at pete and say something like dang they should really shut up , what they are doing isnt helping anyway. and at like 3 am we decided we wanted to go home and we couldnt, and then pete got sick and he was sick for what felt like hours, in the bathroom and going and going and going.... and the next morning when we got up, we packed up our stuff and the big purple box they were sending us home wth and the nurse ladys phone number and we went to the funeral home, to figure out how we wanted to deal with the remains of this life that never really got started, that had just captured our hearts and crushed our souls in a matter of a few days. and then we went out for lunch... and i only remember selected things after that about our daughters short life.... being told we had probably lost her 3 weeks before, and the movement i swore i was feeling up to the ultrasound was nothing.... being told that the certificate that i had filed to make her a citizen in the eyes of the state wasnt valid because i wasnt far enough along when we lost her.... finding out that she was a she and mailing out cards with her name on them... Xenia Ruth Deladis Bernstein. and then 6 months later around the time she would have been born, having the guts to go to the cemetary and lay her to rest in the plot where the babies are buried. She was buried with our other baby that we miscarried, a baby I imagine as a boy named Gabriel) so that she could be with God. when we buried her, we did it like we did everything else in her life. no one else from the family just me and pete, keeping one another strong.