By Katie Ha
@thelifesovalley

It’s early December in Northern California, and there are Mission figs popping up unseasonably on our tiny tree. This patch of garden has been our safe haven amidst the chaos of 2020: my husband and I have taken video calls for work here, away from the boisterousness of our small children inside. We have spent hours playing with them in this space, shooting their birthday photos early in the pandemic, and watching the resident blue jays grow their family as spring transitioned to summer. 

Now, the fig leaves have yellowed, mostly fallen to the ground, except at the tip top where the new fruit has appeared, plump and about ready to be picked. But it’s out of reach. The extendable picker we use for the neighboring 50-year-old orange tree would destroy the figs. So, for now, I’ll watch them change color as I tend to myself, which has increasingly been a challenge these past few months.

We’re in our tenth month of pandemic life, and overall, we have fared well. The county where we live has been under restrictions the majority of this time, but my husband and I have maintained our jobs, both in “essential” categories, and we have a comfortable home to work from. Our kids have had few disruptions to their routine with their daycare safely open. We are incredibly far from our family—the deepest pain we have felt after uncelebrated memorials of loved ones now departed and illnesses that have merely been acknowledged from so far away. Our social lives have all but vanished, as have most of our friends in their mass exodus from the expensive, wildfire-ridden Bay Area. Otherwise, the truth is that before the pandemic, we were exhausted, racing around from work to daycare to workouts to birthday parties to volunteer events to ... to ... to ... I don’t know what, chasing a sort of fulfillment we probably couldn’t have defined.

At some point this summer there was a shift. We had started frequenting local beaches every weekend, something we only did occasionally before. But with our days now filled with video calls, my husband and I craved disconnection and nature. Our kids played for hours in the sand and waves. We started ignoring the clock to stay away longer. In time, our 4, 5, and 6am workouts disappeared, that hustle replaced with meditation and my husband and four-year old bringing me coffee in bed at 7am. 

While the world raged around us like it never had in our lifetime, we started to relax and enjoy exclusive family time on the weekends. We celebrated our 40th birthdays in creative, indulgent ways, just the four of us. 

And then I found out I was pregnant.

After more than ten years of trying and failing with no medical explanation, we were blessed with two healthy children through IVF. We never cared about gender, just healthy babies. And we got them. One of each. “The perfect pair.”  

Our family was overjoyed with our news, but I was in shock. I started telling people way earlier in this pregnancy than I had in the past in order to help me process the news and to feel less lonely in the pandemic. I knew firsthand how quickly, silently, and even violently babies can leave the world; the fear of loss can be crippling, but after such a challenging year, I decide to embrace the vulnerability and focus on the hope and joy that new life can bring. I thought I was strong enough to share our news this time.

Repeat ultrasounds and blood panels bolstered my confidence: this baby was really going to make it. People said, “2021 is looking up!” or, “There IS hope in the new year.” I set up the app that tracks the baby’s growth, comparing it to fruit every week as it was growing, tracking the changes in my body— though with this pregnancy, after two full-term babies, the changes came sooner than the app was programmed to predict.

This joyful surprise wasn’t quite enough to beg the question: Why did my body pop out an egg good enough to be fertilized in the last month of my 30s? And why didn’t that happen three, five, or ten years earlier? Why had I spent my 30th birthday, exactly a decade ago, bleeding in an emergency room? Nobody knows. And in the end, it doesn’t really matter; it turns out this egg wasn’t actually good enough.

Today, when they remove our baby from my body, I’ll take all the drugs to numb me. All the drugs I avoided when birthing our live babies—pump them in. There’s no need to feel this tiny being fall out of me and he can no longer be protected anyway.

I’m one of the lucky ones: I have had five days of knowing what happened inside of me—that this baby, against genetic odds, grew and grew for ten weeks and four days until his heart stopped beating. I have had five days of stillness to contemplate his life; there has been nothing “missed” about this miscarriage. Our baby left as quietly as he came, just as much of a shock even to my doctor, who during the last ultrasound took a deep breath and a pause—a change from her peppy bedside manner—to tell me how deeply sorry she was that this baby was gone and how she really thought this pregnancy would stick. 

Why didn’t it? Nobody knows. Sure, we’ll get a reason eventually, full of words like mitotic, trisomy, double or triple, or God forbid, normal, but these words won’t really answer the question. This baby will have already met his fate when they pluck him from me.

Our last trip to the beach was last Sunday—nine days ago. We went to a new part of our favorite stretch of sand in Santa Cruz. A photographer met us, capturing sunset photos of our children in their element, holding hands and racing each other in the surf. She also captured one single photo of the five of us, a treasure: a silhouette against an orange backdrop in a world our baby will never know.

Perhaps the weight of hope for a better year was just too much for such a tiny body. 

According to the now deleted app, our baby would have been the size of a fig. He arrived late in his mother’s season, high in the sky, unreachable, and not nearly ready for us. Like any fig, we will never see him blossom. And today, as we hold our children close, we say goodbye.

Guest essay written by Katie Ha. Katie is an educator and mom of two in the San Francisco Bay Area who runs on coffee, what ifs, fresh air, and sunshine. Her kids like to destroy spaces as much as she loves transforming them. She also loves her husband’s patience, books, and healthy doses of sarcasm. You can connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, or her blog.