Nobody Knows
Prose, on how the empty rooms in my home shine a flashlight into the heaviest spaces inside my heart.
Nobody knows that we’ve talked about this bathroom renovation for more than a year. We wanted a bigger shower. We wanted to modernize the look and feel. We wanted it to be more aesthetically pleasing AND more functional.
Nobody knows that it was put on the pivotal list of home projects back in September, and not just because I fell getting out of the shower and blew out my knee.
It wasn’t just bumped up in priority on the project list because it’s where I ruptured my ACL, or because it’s where I tore all of the ligaments and muscles surrounding my knee cap including the meniscus underneath it, or because I am finally just now after five months able to walk mostly without a limp (but not without pain).
Nobody knows that it was moved up on the project list when the shower started leaking, again, and a constant trickle of water found its way out of the bathroom and down through the floor, resulting in a steady stream of droplets coming out of the ceiling in my husbands downstairs office.
That’s when we said it was time.
But even when it’s time, the project still has to be put into motion.
The quotes received.
The contractors picked.
The decisions made.
The finances sorted.
The materials chosen.
All of this felt exciting and brand new.
Heated floors!
New, clean, beautiful white tiles!
A shower doubled in size!
And then a date on the calendar.
2/11/25
Just 10 days before my hysterectomy.
Now if this was just about the inconvenience of recovering from major surgery in a house still under construction, you’d find me much cooler than a cucumber. Adjusting expectations, planning around situations, these are things I’m somewhat capable of doing now.
And, this will be my fifth major surgery since September of 2022, in a span of just about 2.5 years. I know what to do. I know how to do it.
But nobody knows that it’s not just about recovering from major surgery with construction workers in my home in my master bathroom, a room I’ll have no access to.
It’s about the timing.
It’s about what happened in that bathroom.
If you’ve read enough of my posts, maybe you’ve figured it out. If you read the poem I wrote earlier, you’ll know.
That bathroom, with it’s obnoxious oversized tub and outdated fixtures, with the shower glass door that never slammed all the way shut, with the frigid tiles on the vast empty floor - it’s where I delivered the twins.
It’s where I watched Noah’s heart stop beating.
It’s where I put them down, on the ledge surrounding the bathtub, before I started screaming.
It’s where I held them, and photographed them, the only moments and memories I ever got with them before they had to be taken away.
Yesterday, our construction workers demolished the bathroom,
Right down to the studs.
The tiles are gone
The tub is gone
Everything is gone.
The visual, physical proof that once reminded me every day of the babies -
Gone.
Next Friday, in 9 days, my uterus will be removed.
Nobody knows that this choice is not elective.
Nobody knows that this choice is one my body has forced me into making.
One my heart may never accept.
One my brain feels so torn upon.
Nobody knows that if I got the proverbial Hail Mary I’ve so desperately been begging the universe for, the chances of a baby surviving in my body, in this current, present day version of my body are small, very small. And the chances of my surviving a pregnancy to term, or even to pre-term neonatal survival, well, they’re also not great.
Nobody knows that after a year of crushing depression and nearly four and a half years of heartache and compounding traumas, this weekend my husband told me that he finally, finally saw his wife again, The woman I was when we got married, almost 9 years ago. That woman has been missing for a long time, and he flat out told me he refused to lose her again.
I don’t want him to lose her again.
I won’t let him lose her again.
I don’t want to lose her again, either.
So in 9 days time, I’ll lay on a cold operating table with a thin sheet covering my upper and lower body, and ill breathe in and out and in and out while the anesthesiologist holds the mask over my face, and when I wake up, I’ll {hopefully} have three incisions and two ovaries remaining - no more uterus, no more cervix, no more lone fallopian tube. No more bleeding. No more agonizing monthly pain. No more what if’s…
And my recovery plan, in the midst of the master bathroom renovation?
It was to set up in our guest room.
The room in our home that stood bare and empty for nearly two years after we moved in. The room with the newly carpeted floor and freshly painted walls, an empty closet for an empty space - one that we knew for sure we would turn into a nursery when the timing was right. When we were ready. When IVF was finally successful again.
Nobody knows that almost the entire time that room was empty, I kept the door closed. I couldn’t bring myself to look inside. I couldn’t think about the babies that were missing. The embryos in the freezer or the babies that died inside of my body.
Nobody knows that through my first trimester with the twins, I mentally plotted out how all the furniture we’d need would be arranged in that somewhat small size of a room.
Nobody knows that through my first trimester with the twins, I thought this would be perfect - that they’d share a room until they were big enough to graduate from cribs, and then we’d separate them.
Nobody knew that when I lost the twins, I continued to assume that that room was still meant to be a nursery - that it would just take more time.
The time is up now, friends.
The “guest room” has now, for the last two years, held a bed, a dresser, two nightstands, three lamps, an oversized chair with a matching ottoman, a wall mounted mirror and six pieces of art, and it has been filled by some of our favorite people, both before and after it was complete.
The hardest part for me? Watching life emerge from that room every day - it made my heart ache in an invisible way. Sometimes it was a visitor for just one night, sometimes it was for weeks at a time; all times, it pained me in a way I couldn’t express.
It’s anger. It’s jealousy. It’s feeling like if the babies couldn’t have it, nobody should have it. I know thats not rational. I know that makes no sense. I know we were never going to live in a house with an empty room forever. But I wasn’t ready to give up.
I mean, I’m still not ready to give up.
But that doesn’t matter anymore.
Nobody knows about this, because I’ve never said it out loud.
I’ve never admitted it, to anyone.
That room haunts me.
It hurts my soul.
And now I will spend a week in there, mostly alone, with snacks, and medication and a borrowed tv, with the pain of recovering from abdominal surgery and the haunting, echoing silence in the walls. The harshest reminder that this was not a c-section. That this was not to prepare my body to grow another baby. That there will never be the growing of another baby inside of my body again.
And I will cry.
I will cry, but I will not let my sweet girl see.
I will cry, but I will not let it consume me.
I will cry, but those tears will at some point reach an end.
And then I will get up. Slowly. Cautiously.
I’ll unpack my necessities back into my bedroom nightstand and I’ll put the borrowed TV back in the basement. I’ll go back to freelance writing and graduate school classes and picking up my living daughter from school. I’ll take her to gymnastics and to dance class and I’ll put her to bed at night, spending a little extra time breathing her in, reminding myself what a sheer miracle she is.
And Ill heal. Slowly. From the inside out.
From the depths of despair and pain, from the moments of loneliness and loss and grief and destruction, I’ll come back again.
I’ll come back again.
I’ll be back again.
