Something Physical
Nina Romano
My psychic grandmother believed in dreams and Sicilian customs, so I grew up placing importance on them. I awoke on an Easter Sunday and felt a quickening and remembered my dream. I was entering my sixth month of pregnancy, and had slept soundly except for a kick and the dream, which took place in my Grandpa's basement workshop of his old Dyker Heights home. Where I remembered a window, I now saw a door. I saw it plainly, even passed through it to make sure; I stuck my head outside and looked around to see the cut tree trunk I used to stand on near Grandpa's hydrangea bushes. Even in the dream, I puzzled over the door.
I lived in Rome. So I phoned my mother in the States to wish her a happy Easter and tell her what I’d dreamt.
She said to me, “Before you were born, there was a door where you remember the window.” How did I know? Did I know encased in my mother's womb? I’d never heard about the door. Ever. Mom assured me it was never discussed. When I played in Grandpa's workroom, there was no trace or outline of a door.
The next day, Pasquetta, or Little Easter, was an Italian holiday. I walked my gray, cotton-puff poodle Napoleon, returning home with a strong urge to urinate. At noon I felt intense pressure cramps in my vagina and lower abdomen. My husband worked at the Cavalieri Hilton minutes from our home on Via Alberto Cadlolo. I called to tell him I had severe pains. He must have run the whole way.
Minutes later we drove past the Vatican wall to Salvador Mundi Hospital. I walked into Admitting and was wheeled to Maternity. The midwife, a German nun, said my doctor, an ex-Army physician, was advised of my condition and was on his way.
“Rome traffic is bedlam,” I said, but I’d be fine. She told me I was having contractions, but I contradicted her. No, just strong pressure pains. When I coughed, I felt as though my period had started, or I had to wee. Trying to suppress my coughing from nervous tension and spring allergies, I all but stuffed the pillow in my mouth.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I'm trying not to cough. When I do, I wet myself.”
She said, “Your water broke.”
All of a sudden I was drowning in the realization that my labor had begun. The doctor arrived wearing a green sweatshirt and jeans. The stethoscope hopscotching across my abdomen felt cold, but no colder than my sinking heart when I saw the doctor shake his head. No heartbeat.
“But only yesterday,” I said, my voice pleading.
“When something’s physically wrong in nature, it rights itself. The fetus is expelling itself. You’re fully dilated. It’ll be a natural birth—”
“—Except my baby’s dead. I’ll never have another one.”
“Sure you will,” he said. “Make a date for next year. Right here. Same time.”
I thought about my girlfriend Nelsa whose baby had calcified inside her; she almost died of peritonitis. She’d said, “They took my baby piece by chiseled piece.” What consolation to know my stillborn child’s passage into the world would be natural.
I miscarried a baby boy. My doctor assured me losing a first child is common.
“Not for me.” I looked at the crucifix on the wall.
“Wait and see, you'll have another baby,” he said.
“I won't.”
“Everyone says that, but you will.”
I had waited, hoped, prayed and done everything humanly possible to conceive this child I was losing. It took thousands of dollars, novena prayers, hysterical fights with my husband, bouts of depression over suspicions of his infidelity, and the raw exposure of soul and body to a baker’s dozen doctors using me as a pet Guinea pig.
A nurse wheeled me into Labor and Delivery. Did I want to be awake? If I was going to have my baby, yes. But why would I now? I looked at the clock: 7:25. April 23. I spoke to God, confessed sorrow for my sins. I thought of my parents and husband, how much I loved them, and closed my eyes.
I’ve regretted that decision. After I came to, I asked the midwife what they had done with my baby. Had he been christened and buried? She assured me. Christened what? Buried where? I never had the courage to ask.
The day after I was released from the hospital, my mother called. I heard her voice and choked, “Oh, Ma, I lost the baby.”
She said to me, “My darling girl. I dreamt about you and woke up Monday morning calling your name. I knew something was wrong. I wanted to call; Aunt Jay told me not to worry, but Daddy told me to call. I’ll put him on.”
“Hello, you old geezer,” I said, but he couldn’t talk to me; his voice was gravelly and tearful. He passed the phone back to Mom.
My mother reminded me of an old Sicilian custom. If you’re pregnant, never be seen in a place of prominence. Don’t be a bridesmaid, never hold a child for Baptism. Unlucky. Although we’re religious, old superstitions root deeply. I was Godmother for my nephew Jon, and had held him at his Baptism a few months earlier. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was expecting.
After trying for three years to conceive naturally, I began a one-woman crusade to get pregnant. It had taken me six years of every kind of treatment for infertility that existed short of in-vitro, and when that came around I was considered too much of a risk because of my age. I took the prescription Sequenz, a birth-control pill, for months. This contraceptive renders the body more fertile following medication. Then came exercises for a retroverted uterus to right itself in order to become pregnant.
Next followed three salpingographic analyses. The mere name sends transverse shivers through me. It’s a method of shooting dye through the Fallopian tubes in order to ascertain openness. Once the dye is inserted, an X-ray is taken. The first time I had this done I wasn’t warned it would be painful; I assumed it was a radiograph. I wasn’t given anything to calm me. No pain killers. When I exited the clinic near Piazza Giouchi Delfici, I vomited. Convulsing with pain, I drove the corkscrew Via della Cammilluccia to the top of Monte Mario, parked illegally on the sidewalk like any true Roman, and entered Lo Sport Bar where I had a shot of Fernet Branca. The herbal drink has restoring properties if it doesn’t gag and kill you first. My other two experiences having my tubes forced open were equally impressive.
For months, I’d received a series of hormone injections during ovulation. How does a woman know she’s ovulating? Without getting out of bed to go to the bathroom or brush her teeth, she measures her basal temperature anally every morning of every month for years and records it. Doesn’t sound like such a difficult thing to do, but I can guarantee it inhibits your sex life, especially when the sex becomes a forced issue for the three days: before, on and after ovulation. Command performances crimped spontaneity to the max, and strained my marriage. The guilt involved in missing one of these possible miracle days was astounding.
At the end of the lunar cycle, when cramps or staining indicated a new menstrual cycle, I was devastated and depressed, wondering if I’d ever stop crying, or ever again want to have sex for the sheer fun of it, instead of doing it in the most favorable position to conceive on the most opportune days. I’d already given up smoking, but wine was another biggie to be avoided—counter-productive and an inhibitor. I stopped drinking.
I failed to become a mother and failed to produce an heir for my husband, an only child. I no longer celebrated the changing seasons. Autumn and winter didn't matter, but spring and summer brought tortuous sightings of maternal love in every Roman park, street and thoroughfare. Mothers and mothers-in-waiting were abundant as cats in Piazza Argentina.
Then a new problem arose for me. All of a sudden I started passing tremendous blood clots during my periods, and the flow afterward whooshed like the flooded Tiber River after heavy rains. On my way to New York to visit my folks, I decided that since I had to have a “dilatation and curettage,” or “D&C,” I’d have it done at St. Claire’s Hospital. However, the operation, or scraping as it’s commonly known, was performed at the wrong time of month, and when I got back to Rome with two of my former students as house guests, I began hemorrhaging. The awful part about not being able to staunch the flow of vaginal bleeding for me echoed through my brain in a single name: Patty. My cousin had hemorrhaged to death a few years earlier, after a third pregnancy, when her uterine wall collapsed. These things don’t just happen in novels, Patty’s doctor had told her inconsolable mother; they’re common. I recalled the helpless terror, my strength no match for hers, as my Godmother bashed and beat her head against the cement wall of Brooklyn’s Victory Memorial Hospital.
Another difficulty developed Sunday in the heart of the night, I became lightheaded with the loss of body fluid, and felt my life ebbing away. We had no phone to call a doctor. My husband rushed to the third floor and woke our neighbor, but her husband, Doctor Calderaro, was on emergency calls. The shops in the nearby Piazzale Medaglie D’Oro were closed. My husband drove to the Hilton Hotel, phoned my gynecologist-of-the-moment, and got the name of a medicine made from a small, deadly serpent. He called his mother, told her to dress, picked her up and continued to an all- night pharmacy. He purchased, over the counter, without a prescription, both the medication and the syringes. Only in Italy. My mother-in-law administered the shot to me when they arrived home just before dawn.
I had been artificially inseminated with my husband’s sperm for six months, and was on the medication Dufaston for several more months. When these methods failed, I traveled to the overcrowded Terme di Salsamaggiore for a two week cure of thermal baths and daily vaginal irrigations with natural spring waters through a glass tube. These douches were not private, but administered by workers, who made conversation while hosing in liquid that seeped out into a ceramic bowl. A degree of modesty returned only when I sank my body into the mud bath or the scalding hot sulfurous water bath that followed.
Holed up in a small hotel in walking distance from the Terme, I knew no one, spoke to no one, took my meals in silence like a nun. Each night I drank a digestivo called Amaro Averna, its dark bitterness a reflection of my soul. After dinner, I started writing a novel and I read Roots. Every night at bedtime, sustenance, in the form of a long distance phone call from my husband, infused my will to face it again the next day.
My last attempt at conceiving was to visit Dr. De Watteville, Sofia Loren’s famous gynecologist and an infertility specialist in Geneva. After months of scheduling, I finally arrived in Switzerland. Two things happened. My period, due the following week, presented itself unexpectedly early. Stuck in Geneva for a week with the orderly Swiss, I subdued urges to rant, rave and smash. At the week’s end, when I was able to have a gynecological examination, the doctor contracted measles.
For years, I’d pitted my mortal strength and will against God’s to obtain something physically impossible for my body. God launched a scepter that lodged in the spokes of every wheel I turned advancing toward motherhood. Although I won a few skirmishes, I lost the war.
Would I do it again? If I knew for certain I’d carry the infant to term and have the baby, most assuredly yes—but never, never in exchange for the Karmic child I have today. He is a son so much like his father, so much like me, yet not a drop of our blood courses through his veins. I’ve learned at high price that carrying an infant in the womb doesn’t make a mother—but caring for him as I did, through his first febrile convulsions, does.
I guess you could call my motherhood tenancy vicarious because I substituted for the genuine article, experiencing the role of another. I fit all three definitions of this word. I have substituted my son’s birth mother’s role throughout his life. I carried this child, now grown to manhood, in the womb of another, holding my breath till he was born and handed over to me when he was thirteen days old. I may be just a “Secondhand Rose” mother, but when I told my son I’d help him find her, and when I asked him, standing at the kitchen sink, tears falling into soapy water, if he ever wanted to look for her, he answered, “No, Mom, you’re my mother. You’re the only one I’ve ever had or want.”
Well, then, I’ll take vicarious over something physical, even blood ties, anytime.
About the Author
Nina Romano earned an M.A. from Adelphi University and an M. F. A. in Creative Writing from Florida International University. Her short fiction and poetry appear in The Rome Daily American; The Chrysalis Reader; Whiskey Island; Gulf Stream Magazine; Grain; Voices in Italian Americana; Vox; Chiron Review; Irrepressible Appetites; Roads Literary Magazine, Night Train, A Little Poetry, and GULFSTREAM!NG, and will soon appear in The Northville Review. Excerpts from her novel-in-progress, The Secret Language of Women, appear in Dimsum: Asia's Literary Journal, and also in Driftwood. Romano’s debut poetry collection, Cooking Lessons, was published in June 2007 by Rock Press, and was submitted for a Pulitzer Prize. Her new collection, Coffeehouse Meditations, will be published in 2010 by Kitsune Books. Nina Romano has lived in Rome, Italy, for twenty years and is fluent in Italian and Spanish.
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