Schrödinger’s Box -The Toast

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“You know,” Alisha says, “you’re being a little too healthy about this.” Slouched in a coffee-shop armchair, she’s a belly with a head and limbs stuck on as afterthoughts. A kick ripples the stripes of her t-shirt, and her face locks into a grimace.

I rattle an ice cube into my mouth and crunch it. The brick in my throat matches the brick in my lower abdomen. I gulp a couple of times before I can swallow the ice shards. “I’m OK,” I say, my tongue thick with cold. “I’m having a baby or I’m having a miscarriage. You know?”

“Yeah, but…”

“It’s fine.” I slurp loudly at my straw. “I can deal, once I know what’s happening.”


Being six weeks pregnant doesn’t feel like anything. Or it feels like a sinus infection that trails waves of dizziness and gagging. Or it feels like the day after a 24-hour bug, the appetite capricious, the body heavy but functional. It feels like an elaborate lie incorporating the objects at hand a la Keyser Soze, a dream that folds the alarm clock into its narrative. It feels like an unspeakable fetish: scrutinizing toilet paper for blood, recoiling from my own grossness. Until there’s blood. Then, it feels like terror.


I somehow keep my voice level when I tell my husband about the blood.

“What does that mean?” Park asks, carefully calm. “Could this be completely normal?”

Afraid I’ve run out of vocal control, I nod.

“Is there anything we can do about it if it’s not?”

I shake my head. Swallow hard. “The nurse said to call if there was any bleeding. I’ll call as soon as they open.”

“OK, good. Let’s get some sleep, then. It’ll be all right either way.” He folds his arms around me, his beard prickling my hairline, and rubs between my shoulder blades. “I promise, we’ll be OK.”

In bed, Park picks up the cheap copy of The Hobbit he bought when the spine of his 1965 edition disintegrated. He began reading it to me the day of the positive test. He wants our child to have Tolkien in its bones. That first happy evening, the sweetness of our new ritual was almost too much to bear. “Do you want me to read a chapter tonight, or should we skip it?”

”Skip it.”

This is the last time he asks about the book.

After he falls asleep with the lamp on, I look up every index entry on “bleeding,” “spotting,” and “miscarriage” in the patronizing, alarmist, riveting pregnancy book I bought on Amazon. Then I carry the book into the spare room and shove it spine-in into the corner of a little-used bookshelf.


After a long time on hold with a 90-second loop of aggressively smooth jazz, I am told to go to a walk-in lab to be tested for hCG, the pregnancy hormone. During the next ten days, Kanye West becomes my blood-test ritual. The drive to the lab is exactly the length of two plays of “Monster.” I shout along in my car, stiff and stilted. The strut, the rat-a-tat of consonants, the casual misogyny–I’m hard, sharp, I don’t give a fuck. I boast along with Kanye:

Have you ever had sex with a pharaoh?
I put the pussy in a sarcophagus.

In the lab’s waiting room, I grip my phone and catalog the other patients. On my second visit, it’s mostly older people with swollen hands, canes propped beside their chairs, cracked black purses with fat straps. One woman about my age tries to corral a little boy before giving up and letting him play with the water cooler. I glance at her stomach, but her sweatshirt puffs out, obscuring it. I blink hard, pinch the skin of my thigh between two fingernails, tell myself, Stop crying. Half these people probably have cancer. Stop it.

According to the phone app I downloaded the day of my positive test, today my baby is the size of a “sweet pea.” It means simply “pea”—vegetable, not flower. Gestation is only described in edible terms: seeds to berries to stone fruits to melons. The roundness burgeoning, the juice pooling, the sweetness deepening. I delete the app. The next day, I reinstall it.


After calling the OB/GYN clinic for the results of three blood tests, I can sing along with their hold music, all but the soprano-sax squeal I always mistake for the beep of an answering machine. I wonder what the nurse, Julie, looks like and if her voice would sound so warm and kind if I didn’t associate it with deliverance from endlessly repeating smooth jazz.

“The good news,” Julie tells me, “is that your hCG level is high enough that we can schedule you for an ultrasound to see what’s going on.”

She leaves the bad news unspoken: If the level were unambiguously OK, they wouldn’t bother with an ultrasound.


The discovery that I can’t stand the smell or sight or thought of Chef Boyardee ravioli launches a dangerous burst of hope. I talk myself out of it, but I keep sticking my head into the kitchen and inhaling, just to feel my stomach lurch.


The stone-faced ultrasound tech dents my abdomen so deep I can feel my desperately full bladder change shape.

“What do you see?”

“I’m not allowed to tell you.” She scowls at the screen, which faces away from Park and me.

I regroup, ask brightly, “Do pregnant women ever pee on your table?” Park laughs.

“No.” She swipes at me with a paper towel, missing half the gel. The waistband of my skirt oozes sideways when I pull it up.

The transvaginal ultrasound wand is a smooth cylinder, but inside me it has sharp, distinct corners. Park holds my hand as the tech digs and pries. I lay my free arm across my breasts, which might or might not be less sore than a day earlier. I trace my eyes along the right angles of the waffle-weave wallpaper that resembles Triscuits.

He leans down to kiss my forehead. “Are you OK?”

“I’m OK.”


By the time I call for the results of my second ultrasound, I’ve developed a fight-or-flight response to the hold music. Soprano sax starts my heart hammering. Julie, whose kind, warm voice I now resent, tells me that the ultrasounds—like the series of blood tests showing a glacial increase of hCG, like every halfhearted twinge of nausea that could be allergies or imagination or anxiety—offer no firm answers. There’s a gestational sac. There might or might not be anything happening inside it. My potential baby is simultaneously alive and dead, like Schrödinger’s cat. That makes me the box the cat is in. The double entendre pleases me in a bitter way.

Like Kanye says: put the pussy in a sarcophagus. And, it occurs to me, vice versa.


“I can’t believe you’re still waiting,” Alisha says, deftly assembling a syringe. “It’s been weeks, hasn’t it? That’s so cruel.” She glances up: “Do you mind if I do this here?”

“Sure.” I peel the paper off my muffin and watch her draw insulin from a clear bulb, then casually slip the needle into the pale flesh above her elbow. “Wow. That looks like fun.”

Alisha zips the pouch and stows it in her purse.. “I don’t know how I can stand much more of this.” She massages one side of her belly, her face intent on some internal signal. “I’m miserable. I can’t do this anymore.”

While I’ve been chanting “I’m a motherfucking monster!” on the way to tests and ultrasounds, she’s landed in the hospital again and again—gestational diabetes, anemia, preterm labor, medical bills to be paid on what she calls “the ‘every month until the end of time’ plan.” There’s no room to resent her. Well, not much.

“Pregnancy is a bag of dicks, huh?” I say.

She grins. “God, yes.”


Physics doesn’t allow for a happy ending for Schrödinger’s cat—for the box’s lid to be lifted off; for the cat to clamber out, shaking its tufted ears, and curl into a sun-gilded disc on the floor of the lab. The death ray in the box either has fired already or is about to.

After three weeks of limbo, I go for one last ultrasound. Park has a seminar paper to write, and I tell him I don’t mind going alone. We both know that if there were good news, we’d have gotten it already. My breasts aren’t sore anymore.

I blast “Monster” on repeat on the way to the imaging center. I don’t have any jokes to make at the stone-faced tech, who softens enough to ask whether I had a nice weekend. I don’t answer.

The tech sends me to the OB/GYN clinic, where I’ve only been once before. During my annual exam the previous fall, I told the doctor we’d been trying to conceive for three months, and she said, “I see you’re 31. Do you want a prescription for fertility drugs?” She is why I asked to work with a midwife instead of an obstetrician. Today, I finally meet that midwife, whose name I’ve had to give at check-in desks six times. She is gray-haired and direct and apparently willing to answer my questions all day if that’s what I need. For the first time, I can imagine receiving obstetric care while not suppressing tears of dread.

I arrive home with two prescriptions: one for Cytotec, which is four pills you drip water onto and then shove as far as you can into your sarcophagus, and one for painkillers. I decide not to use the painkillers, but when the cramps really get going, I change my mind.

I lie on my back on the futon in a hydrocodone haze, waiting for the tiny, empty sac that’s caused such disproportionate trouble to release its hold on my insides. The pain is hard and sharp with merciless corners, but around it I am softening. I want to say something profound to Park as he eats pizza and tries to focus on the paper that’s due in twelve hours. Instead, my brain—limp, swaying, underwater—produces Tolkien:

There is an inn, a merry old inn,
beneath an old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill.


Nine days later, my bleeding is winding down, and Alisha goes into labor. As planned, she drops off her five-year-old son on the way to the hospital.

“What are you going to do when you meet your new sister tomorrow?” I ask him.

He grins at me, his dark eyes and round cheeks exactly Alisha’s, then, to demonstrate, hugs his teddy bear to his chest and covers it with noisy kisses.

While the brother-to-be sleeps in a ring of action figures on the futon, Park and I split a bottle of wine. Drinking feels like making up for lost time, for the weeks of ordering cranberry juice at bars and never tasting cookie dough, all the while suspecting it was for nothing.

In the morning, Alisha posts pictures on Facebook of a tiny new face–squashed, purplish, disgruntled–with an instantly familiar brow. I click through them again and again.


Early miscarriages are incredibly common. Having one doesn’t make me special or doomed or anything but modestly unlucky, as if my new car is a lemon, as if I’ve been rejected for a great apartment and the landlord is keeping the fee. It shouldn’t be more than that. It’s an inconvenience and a loss of potential.

So I can’t be sad, not consistently. It has to happen in bursts that leave me disgusted at my weakness and cataloguing worse options: miscarry later, have a stillbirth, have a sick baby, have a healthy baby who dies anyway. Lose Park, lose a parent, lose an arm. In comparison to other griefs, this is nothing.

But surely having a baby is even less remarkable than losing one. Every person who has ever existed was born. So add to the sadness of lost potential the shame of yearning for something so rudimentary, something most people blunder into.

At the moment, I think of pregnancy the way I thought about sex before I got to have it: a lightning strike, unlikely and implausible, that nonetheless hit everyone I knew. And my brief and unsuccessful pregnancy did echo the brief and unsuccessful first time I had sex: painful, scary, depressing, and (I fear) with a very long wait before a second occurrence.

Odds are, though, I’ll get pregnant again within the next year. Odds are, Park and I will have all the kids we want, and the spring of 2013 will be nothing but a bruised spot in our memories.

For now, we’re in limbo again. As I sew bee-shaped buttons on a sweater for Alisha’s month-old baby (who I still haven’t met), as I click “Like” on set after set of angelic maternity photos of Facebook friends, as I offer warm congratulations to an underemployed twenty-one-year-old whose fetus snuck by a brand-new IUD, I wonder whether my cycle will ever start back up. I wonder how exactly you make it through a process that’s so out of your control, so haphazard. Clearly, the lesson of limbo is learning to cope with uncertainty.

What a bag of dicks that truly is.

Jacqueline May's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various journals. She lives in Indiana with her husband, two cats, and no babies.

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la-animaux's avatar

la-animaux · 599 weeks ago

Truly amazing. It's so personal and familiar, but has a clinical detachment that's just so right for the topic. Fantastic.
JMP!!!!!!!!!!!
2 replies · active 599 weeks ago
Holy shit, this is an incredible piece (though an awful situation of course).
Oh darlin. Oh no. You are allowed to feel sad about this. You are. I feel sad and all I did was read it. When you want something so badly... I remember that time, when every period felt like a failure. I hope it comes good for you and you get the baby you want to have.
JMP I can't read this now but I am so sadexcited to read it because I love you forever. FOREVER. Why can't the people I love have only happy things happen to them and get everything they want exactly when they want it in life?
I have this slow, cold hatred brewing now for everyone who was distant and rude to you when you were trying to find out what was going on. Fucking medical care.

It's a beautiful piece. Thank you for writing it. And I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry for what you went through. I had a miscarriage under different circumstances (the pregnancy was very unexpected and likely would not have been continued if the miscarriage hadn't occurred), but I can still identify with a lot of these feelings. Especially the Schrodinger's Cat comparison - I remember waiting over a long weekend to find out if the pregnancy was viable, a miscarriage or ectopic, and it was the weirdest feeling of limbo. And the transvaginal ultrasound really is deceptively... pointy, isn't it? So uncomfortable.

Good luck with your future efforts, I hope you and your husband end up with a healthy, happy child!
2 replies · active 598 weeks ago
“I can deal, once I know what’s happening.” I totally get this.

This was a beautiful story. Even though miscarriages are common, Jacqueline has every right to be sad about this. I wish her luck in the future!

thesarahgirl, I had a miscarriage under the same circumstances as you, and I also had the same feelings. I knew for sure that I wasn't going to carry the pregnancy to term, though mine ended with eight straight hours of profuse vomiting and diarrhea, with severe abdominal cramping for the last few hours. Maybe it was food poisoning, or maybe it was just a weird, violent miscarriage. But even knowing that I wasn't going to have this baby, it was weird being in limbo while enduring that and while waiting around in a hospital bed all day to find out if there was still a fetus in me and if it was still alive; if I would still have to have an abortion or if my body had done it for me.
I'm hoping to get pregnant later this year, for the first time. Your piece put into words many of the anxieties I've been feeling about the process, and I was really moved by it. Thank you for sharing this story.
<33333 this is beautiful. I feel like miscarriage is one of those things that is only ever talked about in hushed tones as if it is a non-thing. But it's not and I feel so much for what you've gone through. <3333 I do hope that soon this will indeed be nothing but a bruised spot on your memory.
This was a beautiful piece JMP. So much love for you <3
This is so deeply sad and it makes me lonely inside for you. It sounds like you have a wonderful husband and good friends, but it must be so hard to feel like you're not allowed to be whatever kind of sad you need to be. I hope you have happy news and soon.
Sugar&Snails's avatar

Sugar&Snails · 599 weeks ago

I'm so sorry. I want to give you and Park many hugs.
moved to comment's avatar

moved to comment · 599 weeks ago

You know, I never cry at these things, but something about this made me cry, and it was a little bit of a sad cry and a little bit of a happy.
THIS. This, JMP. So poignant, and so familiar. The distant medical staff, probably cold out of a need to protect themselves from the pain of others, but it feels so personal, when you are vulnerable and need comforting.
I look forward to a sequel with a joyful story for you and Park!
<3 <3 <3 I am filled with sympathy for you and appreciation for how well-written this is. I especially love all of the little details; they work perfectly to immerse me into your story and make me feel (a shadow of) your emotions.
Oh this was so beautiful written, JMP. Thank you for sharing & making me teary-eyed at work. So many <3s for you.
This is so lovely and eloquent. Thank you for your honesty, your vulnerability, and your humor. I'm so sorry.
Alisha K.'s avatar

Alisha K. · 599 weeks ago

I love you. I thought you should know.
2 replies · active 599 weeks ago
<3

Sorry I took so long to meet your baby.
Yeah, this: "I talk myself out of it, but I keep sticking my head into the kitchen and inhaling, just to feel my stomach lurch"
Thank you particularly for saying out loud this particular thing about trying to get pregnant or being pregnant or miscarrying. The delight in the test and retest thing, even when the result is unpleasant or not what you want or not what you were hoping for. The body becomes a site of all sorts of interior control experiments - you both trust it and don't believe it at all. But thank you, also, for saying all of this out loud. This is a truly epic piece of writing, and it reminds me why it's important for women (everybody! but also women) to write out loud and think and talk about their bodies sometimes.
Thank you for talking about this! It's so important to know how this experience impacts women - and how common it is. (Yes, me too, my sister, my mother, my friends...) The positive test is not the end of the story.
This is the best essay on miscarriage I've ever read. I didn't want to keep reading because I wasn't ready for the inevitable. Thank you for writing it and I'll hope that everything you want comes true for you.
This is beautiful. I'm sorry for your loss, but thank you for telling your story. <3
This is one of my new fears. My husband and I are trying to get pregnant (third month is a charm, right? fingers crossed), and I have always had these nightmares in which I'm pregnant and then suddenly I'm uncertain - did I imagine it? And then suddenly I'm not pregnant. I'm terrified of not getting pregnant, of getting pregnant and having a miscarriage, of any number of things.

Every time my husband says, "If we have kids," instead of, "When we have kids," I want to punch him in the face.

I love this piece by the way, sorry to make it all about me. I definitely teared up. I know you will have the family you want someday.
You've written a beautiful thing here. My second pregnancy ended after about 10 weeks; the ob/gyn that I'd liked so much with my first child never even spoke to me face to face when things started going south. She never told me what to expect. (Now, there's a book for you, "What to Expect When You're Not Expecting Any More.) When the flood came, and my husband packed me up and took me to the ER, the nurse there was the first kind medical professional I'd seen in a while. He kept telling me how terribly often it happens, reassuring me that it wasn't because of anything I'd done.

I feel strange mourning the loss of the one that never was, since we were unreasonably, wildly lucky and got pregnant again just five months later. I found a different doctor, because I never wanted to see the first one again. And at 41 I had my little boy, who would never have been if the other had stayed. Thank you for putting this into words.
SUPER GOOD!
JMP, this was beautiful and gut-wrenching. Pregnancy truly is a bag of dicks, no matter how long it lasts, and I can't imagine enduring it with any more grace than you did. So many internet hugs coming your way.
So beautiful. The ruminations on "put the pussy in a sarcophagus" were brilliant. Wow. Wow. Wow.
This is just beautiful, JMP, in that horrible bare way that these things are. I hate that feeling of limbo, and I hate being 'sensible' even though it's the only way and the best way I know how to deal with these things - being calm because you can't change anything, when really you want to throw things and set things on fire because it's NOT FAIR.
Oh, this was beautiful and thank you. As I mentioned on the Cocktail thread, I'm in the middle of a miscarriage right this goddamned second, and I needed to read this today. The awful limbo of being Schroedinger's Uterus is the worst part, but that closing thought about what kind of sad you can be is exactly right.

I'm sorry you went through this, Ms May, but I'm so glad you wrote about it.
2 replies · active 599 weeks ago
Madge, oh man, all the hugs for you. I'm so glad to have had some help to offer.

It will get better, albeit slowly. I promise.
Wonderfully written. Your first OB sounds like she was ALSO a bag of dicks.

And can the ultrasound tech really not tell you what they see? That is awful.
This was so beautifully written. I feel like each day there's yet another piece on here that I am just not ready to close in my browser. I leave them open until something out of my control closes those tabs because I just can't do it.
This was so sad and yet so beautiful at the same time. Thank you for sharing, JMP.
This was amazingly written, a beautiful melancholy. I'm sorry for your loss--and the stupid medical difficulties you had to go through to experience it. Thank you for sharing.
This was incredibly beautiful, thank you for sharing something so personal, and that is so similar to the experiences of so many of my friends.
Minx Whatmore's avatar

Minx Whatmore · 598 weeks ago

Oh Jacqueline. This helped me so much. Thank you. Learning to cope with uncertainty. Yes. I just got back from yet another inspection of a rental property... All I want is to live in the same house as my boyfriend, both our places are too small for two of us, I've been looking for a month and can't find anything suitable. It is stressing me the fuck out. I worry that pregnancy would be like this for me too and it helps to read about someone else's strong/crying/passionate/ambivalent/mixed feelings about it all.
This was beautiful, thank you so much for writing it.
Ahhhhhh this was a lovely piece and I am 8 weeks pregnant right now after having a miscarriage at 7 weeks in March and everything is so scary, isn't it? I feel you, girl. I am pregnant or I'm having a miscarriage, you know? So on point. Every time I don't feel nauseous or tired I think I'm miscarrying and I have to call my husband and force him to talk to me about something positive. They say positive thinking helps. Does it? I don't know. Thanks for writing this piece, though, seriously. I went to a prenatal yoga class on the day of this pregnancy when I lost it last time and I told everyone and they were all just so uncomfortable and I was confused. It is so common! I wish people would be more willing to talk about it. You are doing your part with this piece. Best of luck going forward. Keep having sex. That's the fun part, right? That's what they say.
Wonderfully moving essay.

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