Things they don’t tell you about miscarriage in the 2nd trimester
You will be transported in an emergency vehicle, your fiancé in the front seat as the spirit within you dies.
You will be admitted to the maternity ward. Your miscarriage will be treated a labor. You will push out a creature that cannot breathe. You will deliver a body you cannot take home.
You will write Mother on paperwork at the hospital and at the funeral home where you will pick out an urn for the baby that could not live.
Your body will take the necessary two weeks to stop bleeding, just as if you had delivered a living child. You will pass pieces of your placenta. You will produce milk like other mothers, but there will be no crying baby to latch.
You will pay attention to every stroller you see and make notes of the one you would have added to your registry if you had completed it. You will notice strollers the way some people notice cars and track its specs. You will decide on the stroller you want though it will no longer be for the baby you were carrying.
You will still need to pay for the genetic testing that told you the baby’s sex. The ambulance ride to the emergency room. The ER and delivery ward hospital fees will all arrive in your mailbox, and you will pay for the death you ushered into the world.
You will cry on your due date. And on Mother’s Day. And on a random Tuesday afternoon when you stumble across the ultrasound with the word Baby! written on the envelope while cleaning. You will cry on many Tuesday afternoons.
You will quietly thank God that you did not bleed out and die on one of the scariest days of your life, that you were not arrested—in Trump’s America—for a spontaneous abortion.
A piece of you will die with your angel baby. You will leave an offering at the mouth of the ocean. You will love your fiancé, your soon-to-be husband, more than you have ever loved anyone.
You will replay the memory of holding your small, red fetus. The baby that could not survive. You will give her a name and send her to be with your grandmother on the other side.
Spirit Child, 2025
I am not a painter. But a month after I lost the pregnancy, I returned to Nigeria with my family for the first time since my parents left in 1997. On our way back to the airport in Lagos after a week of finally seeing how and where my parents grew up and loving on my family, in the dark hours of the early morning, I saw a crowd of heads in a bus driving in front of us. Something about seeing their backs driving off into a new day moved me. I drew the image in my journal and a child appeared. So, I tried to paint them to life.
A few days after I lost the pregnancy, I dressed myself in a haze of grief, packed my journal, and went to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Uptown Charlotte to see something, anything. There, I discovered Clare E. Rojas and her exhibit “Past the Present”. For a few hours, I suspended my own surreality and lived in hers. I met ARTWORK and located myself right at the edge of woods: stripped, barren, and searching for a rainbow—for possibility refracted into infinite realities where multiple truths could coexist.
When I first got pregnant, I was overcome with anxiety about whether I had what it would take to be a mother and if I was ready for the sacrifice it would require. I met a friend—a mother—who I admired at the Pauline Tea Bar and we talked for over an hour about motherhood.
At Pauline’s, you pick out a teacup and the barista brings out a teapot for you.
I wasn’t even close to showing at this time. But, this was the teapot I received. I took it as a positive sign. And yet.
Isle of Palms, 2024
A few days after we lost the baby, we drove down to the ocean. I cried, I picked up shells, I wrote a letter to the baby we lost. I honor her today and every day. And I thank her for making me a mother when she did.