julie patterson
nesting
Contrary to popular belief, birds do not have a strong sense of smell and thus will not abandon their young if you touch them (Audubon).
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A year before I met my husband, I found a dead robin hatchling sprawled out on the sidewalk next to my front porch. More accurately, my black Lab found it as we returned from our evening walk with our neighbor and her two dogs. Without a word exchanged between us, Kara and I yanked back the leashes.
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Robins have a high mortality rate, with up to 80% of the young dying each year (Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife).
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“What do I do with it?” I asked quietly.
Although I’d grown up in the country and seen my fair share of dead wildlife, I was aware that my childhood protocol of simply leaving it to whatever natural predatory or decomposition process Mother Nature intended was less appropriate in my urban home.
Kara answered by handing me her dogs’ leashes, opening the gate to my backyard, and retrieving the broom and dustpan from the garden shed. I watched her scoop the featherless bird from the concrete and slip it into an unused plastic dog poop bag from her pocket.
I looked up at the robin’s nest tucked into the elbow of the downspout that ran along the corner of the house. I expected to see the mother robin watching us, but I couldn’t quite see her, just the top of her head bobbing quickly. The loud cacophonous squawks of at least three other hatchlings clearly demanded her attention.
I teared up, but not exactly because of the baby bird. I thought of my own family—my brother who’d been dead seven years by then, my sister and I pressing on in our own ways, my dad silent in his thoughts, and my mom forever changed. But I was aware, too, that this moment—unfolding in slow motion—said something of my friendship with Kara. It mirrored the evening just a handful of weeks earlier when I’d gone to her house, removed her dead cat from the doorway to her spare bedroom, and called a dozen animal clinics until we found one that was still open. I’d driven her there, the beloved cat in a box on her lap, as another friend sobbed quietly in the backseat.
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Anthropologist Barbara J. King, author of How Animals Grieve, explains that in clear cases of grief, “we should observe prolonged signs of altered behavior in the survivor.” (qtd in Audubon)
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The robins never returned after that brood grew and left the nest. Even though they’d nested in the elbow of that gutter both summers that I’d owned the house. Even though another neighbor told me that robins had nested in that exact same spot every spring for the entire 33 years she’d lived next door. And even though I dutifully removed the old nest and stockpiled materials nearby for a new one.
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Two years after I met my husband, I had a miscarriage. We were cognitively prepared for one—my age, medical history, and family history suggesting it was more probability than possibility. But when I got pregnant on the second attempt and my doctor said, “See, you were worried about infertility for no reason,” I believed her, even though I’d learned from my sister that the ability to get pregnant was in no way correlated to the ability to stay pregnant.
When I began cramping and spotting on a Sunday afternoon just shy of ten weeks and the doctor-on-call said, “I doubt it’s a miscarriage this late in the trimester,” I believed her, too.
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Bleeding isn't always a sign that something is wrong. In fact, 1 in 5 pregnant women, or 20 percent, will experience some spotting during pregnancy, and most go on to have perfectly healthy pregnancies and babies. (“What to Expect When You’re Expecting”)
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The doctor had told me to call the office first thing Monday morning. “They’ll squeeze you in for an ultrasound, just to confirm that everything’s okay.”
She’d encouraged me to go about my day as planned, no need to restrict activity, so I continued hand scrubbing the floors of my old house—the one the robins had abandoned—getting it ready for the “for sale” sign that was to be pounded into the front lawn later that week. The bleeding and cramping stopped by dinnertime.
The next morning, as my husband was making breakfast before the ultrasound appointment, I felt the urge to go to the bathroom. On the toilet, something felt different. I steeled myself to look, afraid of seeing a baby. But the doctor had said I might pass clots, too, and that’s what I saw in the water below. A blood clot. Nothing that looked like the pink tissue I’d read about online the day before. Nothing that looked like the embryo images I’d seen in health textbooks.
Still, a haunting feeling kept me from studying that clot with a scientific eye. “I might still be pregnant,” I told myself, my hand hovering above the flush handle, wanting so badly to believe.
Even if it was more than a blood clot, I was supposed to flush it, right? That’s what I’d heard about—though not from anyone in particular—a friend of a friend perhaps, or overheard during mom’s women-only card club night in high school, or maybe in a melodrama on a women’s cable network channel?
Maybe I should have asked my husband what to do, though oddly enough, that was the idea most quickly flushed of mind. It felt somehow inappropriate to call him into the bathroom, to ask him to look in the toilet I’d just peed in and examine the blood clot I’d passed.
It felt inappropriate not to know if I’d just had a miscarriage.
I didn’t want to know. I closed my eyes and pushed the cold metal handle. Then I quickly turned my head, afraid to see the clot differently, to know for certain what I already suspected.
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Your intuition is never stronger than during pregnancy. (US News & World Report)
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Within a few hours, my intuition was confirmed. Because my husband and I had each told our supervisors at work as well as a handful of friends and family members about the pregnancy, we now had the awkward necessity of sharing news of the miscarriage.
Flowers, phone calls, texts, and cards trickled in, all appropriately brief, “I’m so sorry.” Save for two: the especially loving handwritten note from the acclaimed author I was studying with in grad school—the one who knew exactly what to say—and the words of a friend who didn't. The friend who’d gifted us a Christian devotional keepsake book for our wedding—the family who sends the most religious personalized greeting card each Christmas and proclaims their faith on a bumper sticker on the family minivan—said to my husband, “Yeah, you told everyone way too soon.”
He didn’t even pad it with a “That sucks, man.”
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“I had fingerprints at 9 weeks.” (ProLife Across America)
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Why was I supposed to keep my pregnancy a secret? What’s so magical about week 12 that makes it okay to finally speak up? Blood tests—not just an over-the-counter drugstore kit—had already confirmed that I was, indeed, pregnant. I’d already heard a heartbeat in the doctor’s office.
Life begins at conception, but grief isn’t allowed, compassion isn’t available, till after 12 weeks?
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8-10 weeks: Every organ is present. Taste buds are forming...4,000 of the 4,500 structures in the adult body are now present...Thumb sucking may occur...The baby can feel pain. (ProLife Across America)
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Seven years, two kids, and a new toilet later, I still think about that blood clot, uncertain what it really looked like, curious if beneath the scarlet blanket it actually resembled the robin hatchling that Kara scraped from the sidewalk.
My dreams are still frequently interrupted by the sound of a flushing toilet. Everything goes black and then I see one or more robin hatchlings rushing through drain pipes on top of the water, like a scene from an animated movie. I still startle awake and wonder if that’s what I did to my first baby. Did it arrive at the sewage treatment plant intact, or was it split apart en route? Did it end up in the combined stormwater sewer overflow, on the banks of the creek that runs alongside our street? Was it eaten by wildlife there?
I wish a billboard campaign had told me it was normal, befitting even, to fish the dispelled fetus from the toilet. That it was okay to touch it, to examine it. That we could have taken it in a sandwich bag to the doctor’s appointment or to the hospital and asked for it to be cremated.
Or that, even though it is technically illegal in most areas, we could have buried it in a special place in our backyard.
Works Cited
Chatman, Maria. “The Best Thing No One Tells You About How Pregnancy Affects Your Body” US News & World Report. January 23, 2018. https://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/articles/2018-01-23/the-best-thing-no-one-tells-you-about-how-pregnancy-affects-your-body
Cudmore, Becca. “Do Birds Grieve?” Audubon. July 28, 2015. https://www.audubon.org/news/do-birds-grieve
Griffin, Catherine. “What to Do With a Baby Bird.” Audubon. June 18, 2012. https://www.audubon.org/news/what-do-baby-bird
Link, Russell. “Living with Wildlife: Robins.” Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife. 2005. https://wdfw.wa.gov/living/robins.pdf
Murkoff, Heidi and Mazel, Sharon. What to Expect Digital. 2010-2018. Web. https://www.whattoexpect.com Accessed July 2018
“Baby Development Facts.” ProLife Across America. 2017. Web. https://prolifeacrossamerica.org/baby-developmental-facts/ Accessed July 2018
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JULIE PATTERSON IS A WRITER SPECIALIZING IN MEMOIR AND ESSAY IN BETWEEN FREELANCE MARKETING ASSIGNMENTS AND LOADS OF LAUNDRY. SHE HAS AN MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING FROM LESLEY UNIVERSITY AND HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN GRAVEL, THE SAME, CLEANING UP GLITTER, AND THE JUGGLER. VISIT THIS MIDWESTERNER ONLINE AT JULIEPATTERSON-WRITER.COM.