Last night I lit a candle.

In the darkness of the study and with a soft sigh in the air, I lit a candle on the windowsill and let the light reflect.

It all started last week.

I hadn't heard from the clinic in London after sending off my precious envelope, so I decide to take matters into my own hands. I ring them only to be told that I need to obtain my medical records in Sweden before they can continue-since I have had (semi) successful IVF treatment in the past, they want to continue with the same drugs and the same dosages that I had before.

Fair enough.

I get on the phone and wield my rusty Swedish only to find that I am still flexible enough to tell a nice woman on the phone that I need my medical records sent to me. That I live in England and will continue IVF treatment here. That the inexorable dreams of being a mother don't just end when you cross water, that the yearning comes with you.

She asks for my personal number (like a social security number) and finds my name.

"Helen?" she asks (in Swedish).

"That's me." I reply (also in Swedish), moving a notebook around the desk.

"Ah, I see here that you still have four embryos in frozen storage."

And this I know. I think of them often, actually. Those four fertilized eggs that hover halfway between light and dark, between substance and nothing. Four eggs that were taken out of me and fertilized with my X Partner Unit's sperm, four tiny bits of icicle that wait, in the darkened silence, for an answer.

"I know." I reply.

"But you and Partner Unit will not use them?" I am asked. "They will be destroyed the end of this year if you don't."

"He's my ex, actually. We've divorced."

"I see. So you can't use them anyway." she replies firmly. "Swedish law. Should a couple split, then neither partner has the right to the embryos. They must be destroyed."

Oh.

I didn't know that.

I give her my details, and she promises to mail me my records. As she hangs up, she says, "And I'll give the order for your four frozen embryos to be destroyed now. Thank you and goodbye!"

And I hold the phone in my hand for a long while, and I just sit there.

I don't know why and I don't know how, but a huge part of my heart feels open and bleeding as I sit there and try to figure out why. I had never intended to have those babies-I know my ex wouldn't want that, I know Angus wouldn't want that, and I don't think I would want that. Once my ex and I had split, I had never intended to have those four babies.

But for some reason, I mourn them terribly.

I mourn the children I never had, the ones I almost had. I mourn the mother I didn't get to be to them. It seems like such a fucking waste-I am so desperate to be a mother and there are four little peas just waiting for a pod.

I think about them. Four tiny embroys just aching to become something more. My IVF chances of conceiving are about 35%, so at least one of those had the chance to become something I could hold in my arms. But because of a divorce, because of changes in circumstances, because the heart shifts on its own axis and because of Swedish law, those four embryos are bound for the incinerator.

Maybe I am burning up my own future.

The one embryo that could've become a baby...I think about her. In my mind, it's a her, and she's got sholder-length curly brown hair. She has a sash on her dress that just can't stay tied, and her knees are wobbly but strong. I see her whiz passed me in a grassy green garden, and as I stand on the side of the lawn watching her I am so full of love that it is physically painful.

But I can't see her face. She won't hold still long enough, and I haven't earned it. I can't touch her. I can see grass stains on her elbows and that scar on her knee she got when she fell off her bicycle on the driveway, but I can't see her face. She's the baby I never got to have and I don't even know what she looks like.

Maybe (please oh please oh please) there will be more babies. There will be more tiny embryos hanging in suspense, conceived in clinics and created by love. There will be more that meet the 35% odds, more that I will get to hold and love and look into their Angus-like eyes and know them at once.

But there are four that I'll never know. Four that were a part of me and then they weren't. Four that will never know how soft Maggie's fur is, what raindrops sound like, or what butterscotch tastes like. Four that will never hold their little hands up to mine and marvel at how large my hands are, while I gaze in awe at the pads of their tiny fingerprints. Four that will never know that all I like to do is hug.

It's just another day to the clinic. Babies are born, babies are created, eggs are rejected. They think nothing of this but I see these four embryos as the result of two months of hormone therapy and thousands of hours of plea bargaining to gods I never knew were listening.

Last night I lit a candle as I cried goodbye to them.

Someone's going to drop their test tube in an incinerator, and I'm not even going to be there to sing a lullaby to them as they get caught up in the flames.

-H.

PS-any pro-life/pro-choice/religion/abortion-related comments will be deleted. This isn't about that.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 07:21 AM | Comments (23) | Add Comment
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