We'll Never Have Paris

By April Hoss
@aprilhoss

Looking back I should have quit on the spot. Right there on the Starbucks patio in the middle of the afternoon. It should have gone something like, You mean to tell me I have to cancel my trip? Well then I quit. I’ve replayed that conversation, the right way to have that conversation, dozens of times in the last eight years.

But no matter how well I pull off the nonchalant exit, whether the veiled threat or the casual shove of my chair away from the table, nothing changes. The travel agent still reads my email. The trip still gets cancelled. We don’t go to Paris.

And what a romantic gesture it had been. Paris, my bucket list destination. Paris, a country which has long captured the imagination of romantics and creatives. How easily I succumbed to its moody siren call. My husband knew this about me. So after not one, but two miscarriages, a two year riot of heartache and bloody jeans, he planned a trip. Not a babymoon. A trip. A balm. What could the Arc de Triomphe on vespas, sidewalk cafes and the Louvre offer two disillusioned lovers? We intended to find out.

Trouble was I worked. I was in my second year at a job I didn’t love, but with the one-two punch of medical training and a mortgage, one I needed. Despite my lukewarm feelings, I’d done my best by my employers and clients. Rearranged my schedule to better suit the needs of the families I served. Drove two-hour commutes. Lots of yeses, sures, no problems. You betcha. I worked with a laptop over a heating pad during miscarriage number one. Number two didn’t require surgery so I handled it privately and didn’t ask for any time off. They owed me Paris. If you’d have asked me then, maybe everyone did.

In the minutes before the meeting with my boss, I’d sat in my car, conspicuously clean, not a car seat in sight, and read reviews of two Paris hotels. Did we want to get a cheap room and use it for essentials, or spend more and make the stay part of the experience? Decisions, decisions. More so, distractions, distractions. How can you be momentarily stung by the presence of a pregnant woman when you’re kissing under the Eiffel Tower?

The moment arrived. I sat before my boss. Nerves brought tremors to my fingers. There are few jobs where a sudden, two-week vacation is a small ask. But, that was one of the selling points of this gig. I was free to arrange my schedule according to what worked for me and the students. I could stack all my meetings at the beginning of the month, turn in my paperwork, answer any SOS emails that came through (both the cheap and the pricey hotel offered free internet). I would Cinderella this thing. I’d get all my chores done. I would go to the ball.

My boss said no.

She was nice about it. She said she understood. She said it sounded lovely. But what if a student had an academic crisis? What if one of these homeschool families became enticed by the offerings of a private school? They needed me. Paris didn’t lose any magic in June, after all. Medical residency cares about no such magic though. It was now, and if not never, at least not until very far from now. “Well, you are going to lose me.” That’s what I should have said. Or, “You know who really needs me, is you.” I should have called her bluff. All of those unused sick days, the endless you betchas. The bill had come due.

I said I understood. I certainly understood we needed my income. In hindsight the chances of them terminating me were slim to none, but do you know the chances of having a miscarriage on the same August day for two consecutive years? Chances were no longer something I took.

We cancelled the trip. I’d become well acquainted with disappointment.

We didn’t go to Paris. And now that we have four children, I’m told we never will.

If we telescope back two years, to a strange ritual, we’ll find the genesis for the failed Parisian escape. Lots of ceremonies and traditions surrounded my husband’s graduation from medical school but on this particular evening of baccalaureate, students who’d become parents during the medical school tenure were honored. Medical students, along with their spouse and children, took the stage, and were presented with a small silver baby cup.

We’d been purposeful in our silver cup avoidance. We didn’t want kids during medical school. I look back at that time now and marvel at my ignorance of all that is required to care for and nurture a tiny human life. I feel a compulsion toward apology; I want to explain to all my friends who’d become mothers before me that I should have offered to hold their baby so that they could eat at the bbq; I should have distracted their toddlers with play so they could at least finish a conversation. Ten years ago, I didn’t know anything about kids. Except that I didn’t want one.

The men and women on stage though, they seemed happy. Delighted. They beamed and jostled their restless babies with what seemed like pleasure. When everyone told them (and I know everyone is no large exaggeration) to wait to board the baby train until after medical school, they bought a ticket. And they were glad. I took them all in.

Not one of them stopped us after the ceremony and said way to go. Not one of them asked for the mic to announce that parenthood at this stage had been a loveable, if not huge, mistake. That there really was no good reason to become parents in such a trying time. You out there, you childless couples, you’re onto something. Not one.

What we had experienced as good judgment, they had found to be joy. We thought we’d taken the path of least resistance. Could it be we’d just taken the path of least?

We decided that weekend. Rashly? After all pomp was over and all the family had gone back home, in a living room reeking of optimism and naiveté, we decided to have a baby.

A case could be made we gave up Paris right then. Willingly. Two months later something I wanted much more would be taken by force. A year later, the same cruel robbery.

By the time Paris got pulled away from us, at a nondescript Starbucks in the valley, we had little left to take. I’d celebrated my husband’s graduation from medical school as a brunette who was beginning to frustrate at the strain in her jeans. I nodded at this clandestine meeting a blond, everything fading, scarcely over my high school weight.

The body keeps the score they say. I’d counter with a planner in my fist. Calendars do the heartbreaking best. Write down a due date and try to scratch it out. Write Paris with a flourish across a whole week in the spring. Try to cover it with Sharpie.

 Ernest Hemingway called Paris A Moveable Feast. I for one had lost my appetite.

For the curious, this all took place in late winter of 2013. The boy destined to be our eldest child was a baby in the womb of a teenager spending her final months of pregnancy at the high school where my husband and I met. I’ll never tire off his story.

Ridley’s arrival seemed to wrench open a door that now refuses to be a shut. My friend Hayley once put it, speaking of children after struggle, “once they start coming, they don’t stop.” I have found this to be true. Kajsa was born in 2015. Caleb on my half-birthday two years after that. Scarlett, our first winter baby, in 2019. The sideways glances are directed at me again. Last week I held up a wine glass at a party, as if to quietly announce nothing. Not pregnant. But everyone seems to think it’s about that time.

No one suspects we’re going to Paris.

Oh, not this year. Or the next. Or foreseeably in the few that follow that. I couldn’t say the exact year. I think we’ll shoot for spring again. Perhaps May and celebrate our anniversary while we’re there.

The miscarriages, now up to three, could have turned us on each other. But when I think of them now two images come to mind. The heartbeat of our second baby on the tiny screen. The first and only time anyone would see that person alive. And the sight of my husband rushing into the emergency room station where I slumped during the first miscarriage, quietly bleeding out. I’d been triaged incorrectly. He’d run several blocks from a hospital down the street after piecing together the clerical error that was killing me. He quite literally saved my life.

I want to go to Paris with the man who saved my life.

The cancellation and the ensuing bitterness could have put me off on the whole idea. Swiftly having four children dismantle my life could have put me off a lot of ideas.

It all served to strengthen my resolve. We’re going.

To be sure, a certain version of us will never go. Twenty-something me, shattered heart and flawless skin, she lost her chance. Kid free us didn’t make it there. We won’t taste the city in our youth.

A better version is getting on the plane. Weathered hand in weathered hand, four texts to four kids: about to take off, let you know when we land. Any mystery I maintained through the early years of marriage was laid bare in so many delivery rooms, and yet I’ll sit by a man undeterred in desiring me. In pursuing me. Who still wants to take me to Paris. I’ll walk the fabled streets with a man I knew as a boy, eyes that saw each of our babies before mine except one, shoulders that carried our family on the days I could only crawl.

Our joints could ache, our reading glasses smudge, and our sensible shoes give out after a day touring the city. I imagine there will be little left about us the stranger sees as beautiful. Travel before kids, while you have the chance. We didn’t. They’ll see what the fire took. I’ll marvel at the phoenix.

Mom and Dad are going to Paris in a decade or so. They’re going to show all those young lovers how it’s done.