Inconceivable (20 page)

September 25, 2009: Mary Kate visiting her mommy in the hospital the day after Logan was born.

September 25, 2009: Our family of six, if only for a few minutes.

September 25, 2009: Loving on our precious baby Logan before he left to go home with Paul and Shannon Morell.

September 25, 2009: Peace. Our one and only snuggle in the hospital.

I knew she was feeling cheated, and I understood why. I was the wrong person to ask for sympathy, though.

SEAN

We were flooded with support from the moment we told people our news. In addition to Marty, my closest high school friends, Craig Bruning, Greg Periatt, and Matt Dzierwa, had been fiercely loyal through the years. I knew they would be there. We had been friends for over twenty-five years and lived through the highs and lows of life supporting each other. They, along with my friends Dan, Steve, and Tony, formed an immediate support system for me. The calls kept coming that night and throughout the weekend. On Sunday my brother Kevin stopped by without notice. Kevin had been out of town and missed our family meeting. His wife JoAnn had filled him in, and on his way back into town he came straight to our house. As we reviewed the details of the situation with him, I let a call from my uncle Bob go to voice mail. Uncle Bob, who was my father’s business partner, was quite emotional. When I listened to his voice-mail message, I heard him sobbing, with a few words mixed in. I would be sitting down with the partners of Savage & Associates, Dan, Tim, Phil, and Mark, the next day. The shock wave was spreading, and the initial support was gratifying.

Then soon, our phone quit ringing. The invitations to join other families at their houses for dinner or a backyard barbecue dried up. Gradually it dawned on us that, despite the fact that our friends’ hearts were open to us and we were certainly in their prayers, no one knew quite what to say. Maybe our friends were frightened of
saying the wrong thing. How were they to know what we were feeling on any particular day?

I understood that hesitation. I never knew where Carolyn would be emotionally when I got a call from her or when I got home. I might find her happy because the baby was very active, or I might find her deep in sorrow for the very same reason. Still, the fact that many of our friends kept to themselves hurt. On the other hand, I am not sure there were many events to which we would have accepted invitations. Part of the problem was that, while others were distancing themselves, we were also withdrawing. We were sick of people’s sympathetic looks and their stares.

Carolyn was having tough weeks physically too. The “morning” sickness hit her almost every night, and she was on anti-nausea medication that made her sleepy. She was resting a great deal and had low energy when she was awake. Many days she was crabby and down, depleted. Did we want to show this face to the world? Self-pity is not our game, especially in public. Did we privately feel bad for ourselves? Yes. Do people really want to hear someone else cry about their situation? No. So while we had decided that it was time to share our secret with the world, it turned out that our world was not quite ready to jump into the fire with us—and we weren’t quite ready to invite them.

As a result, we decided to change our Sunday routine. Even though St. Joe’s has five masses each weekend, we had always attended the same one every week. By May, Carolyn and I were attending church separately, and we did not sit in our normal spots. On Sunday mornings, while the boys and I slept late, Carolyn slipped out of bed at 6:45. She and Mary Kate attended 7:30 mass seated in the cry room, the soundproof room the church maintained for parents with noisy babies. Most of the regulars at that early morning mass were senior citizens. Carolyn was isolated and unnoticed.

Around 9:30, I’d get the boys up and out the door for 10:30 mass. We would leave the house just in time to arrive when mass
began. Catholic churches have “unassigned” assigned seating. The Savages’ spot in our church was north side, front row, seats 1–5, for 10:30 mass. There the boys would open the doors for the assisted-living parishioners who left after communion. Another reason we chose that spot was to make sure the kids paid attention. No room for screwing around in the front row. Not only was God watching, but the priest was as well.

Arriving as late as we did, the boys and I now stood at the back, leaning up against the wall, and we bolted as soon as mass was over so I could get back and help Carolyn with Mary Kate and avoid awkward post-mass conversations. An unintended result of this new routine was that we fell off most of our friends’ radar. We weren’t around for those moments afterward when families spontaneously agreed to get together for cookouts or made plans for the upcoming week.

Our withdrawal from church, however, was about more than just our discomfort being around others. Deep down, I was concerned about how the Catholic Church would react to our situation. Father Cardone, our pastor Father Dennis Metzger, and our very close family friend Father Richard Wurzel were there when we needed them, but how the hierarchy of the Church was going to treat us was an unknown, and my gut was telling me it wasn’t going to be good. I was angry at the thought that at the end of this my church probably would not be there to lift us up, so I moved from sitting right up front to leaning up against the back wall. What a rebel!

All of this change unmoored me. As a result, nighttime quickly became my enemy. During periods of enormous stress, I don’t sleep well. Twelve years ago, when Ryan came home from the hospital, he slept in a small crib next to our bed hooked to a breathing monitor. I regularly woke up in a panic believing that he was in our bed and I had rolled on top of him. This crisis brought back my crazy sleep patterns. I often woke up to the sound of Carolyn’s panicked voice.

“Sean! Sean! What are you doing?”

I would find myself standing in a part of our bedroom far away from the bed. Back in bed, I’d drift to sleep, only to return to a nightmare about losing a baby. I’d wake up with sweat dripping down my forehead. Gradually, I found that I was starting my work-day at 4:00
A.M
. Better for me to live a nightmare than dream one.

The other layer of this problem was how to talk to people who didn’t know. Once we disclosed our situation and Carolyn started wearing maternity clothes, even strangers congratulated the lucky mom. We didn’t know how to respond. We had no idea how much these strangers or acquaintances knew. We also were unsure how much the story was getting distorted by being passed down the grapevine. We felt uneasy telling a partial truth in front of an audience that included people who knew the full story. As a result, Carolyn felt that all eyes were on her everywhere she went, particularly at the park, where her pregnancy was a prominent subject of conversation among the mothers.

“Wow. You’re having another one?” one woman said to Carolyn while we were at the swings with MK, who was quite petite for her age. “You’re going to have your hands full!”

I could see Carolyn mentally running through the criteria for deciding whether to explain. Did she know this person on a first-name basis? Would she see her again after the baby was born and gone? In this case, the answer was yes to both questions, so Carolyn proceeded with what she called her “bombshell in a nutshell.”

“Well, it’s not what you think,” Carolyn said. The woman looked stricken, as if she’d just committed one of the world’s most feared faux pas—insinuating that a woman is pregnant when she is really not!

“I am pregnant, but you see, Mary Kate was an IVF baby, and when we did her IVF cycle we froze the embryos we didn’t use. We went back to our doctor this past February to try to transfer our own embryos that had been frozen, but he made a mistake and
put the wrong embryos inside of me. I am pregnant with the wrong baby and will lose him upon delivery.”

Then she paused.

“Don’t worry. We are doing okay. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

The woman was so shaken that Carolyn ended up consoling her through the shock and then accepting her condolences. It was encounters like this one that just made it easier to stay home.

The other thing that surprised us was how well the secret stayed contained among our friends. I had assumed that within a few weeks of revealing the information the story would have made its way to the press and we’d be fielding calls from reporters. As we got further into the month of May, we breathed a sigh of relief and felt like we’d been blessed. Just in case, Carolyn and I spent an afternoon working on a statement to release requesting that reporters respect our privacy.

But we knew there was one event we couldn’t miss: Festirama, the annual parish festival that begins Friday evening and ends Sunday evening. The church rents carnival rides and puts out a large food spread, erects a gambling tent, and sells beer for the adults. Carolyn and I always worked the fast-food tent for four hours Saturday evening, and I worked the basketball shooting game on Friday. Normally, I’m grinning from ear to ear when I take my shift at the basketball shoot, joking around and telling stories. This year I felt like hiding, and in fact I did hide in a way—behind a fake smile. Yet I knew I had to fulfill my obligation to the church. In normal times I enjoyed giving my time to the church, and even though we were hurting, I felt strongly that we needed to be there.

Upon arriving that Friday evening, the boys scattered as far as they could from Mom and Dad as quickly as possible. Carolyn and I couldn’t walk ten feet without seeing someone we knew. We were acutely aware of the unanswerable question echoing in our heads,
What do they know?

Carolyn eventually accompanied one of her close friends to the
fast-food tent to sit down and talk at a table. I decided to keep circulating. As I walked around with Mary Kate in a stroller, I ran into Mike, a good buddy of mine from high school. I wasn’t in regular touch with him, so he was not one of those we had invited to the meeting to tell our friends our news. “Mike! How are you doing? How’s the family?” I asked, genuinely happy to run into him. I looked carefully at the expression on his face, trying to determine whether he knew about our troubles.

“Great! We’re all doing just great!” he said. “I saw Drew and Ryan just a few minutes ago. Amazing how much they’ve grown. Where’s Carolyn? I haven’t seen her tonight. How’s everyone doing?”

I was listening like a lawyer at a deposition for that slight change in tone that would let me know that he was holding something back. If he knew, the inflection in the question “How are you doing?” would be knowing, even a little somber. I couldn’t hear a hint of that. But it suddenly didn’t feel right to let it slide with someone I had known for so long. At some point, probably even that weekend, he would be in a conversation in which it would come up. If I let it go and didn’t tell him our news, he might feel slighted. So, to escape the glare of the flashing neon lights and the chaos of the kids running around, I pulled him aside. It was awkward for both of us. I tried to calculate how many more people I would need to explain this to.

The stress got to me, so I spent less time at Festirama that year than I ever have, as did Carolyn. One can feel awkward only for so long before needing to seek shelter from it.