Blue Womb

For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

You may have heard this short story before. Though there is no proof Hemingway actually wrote it, it is a beautiful and tragic short story and honestly if you have experienced the loss of a little one there is probably no more that needs to be said. I imagine a brand new, scuff free pair of white baby shoes with tiny laces in a box, stuffed with crisp tissue paper. I can smell the leather and feel the cardboard box. Though many might see this story as a tragic story of a small babies death, if you have ever spent any time in a fertility clinic or made the mistake of buying a baby item before you carried a baby to term this sentence carries much more weight that the 25 innocent letters that made up this complete tale.

When Awsumb was about 3 or 4 he began to realize something was different about our family. Other families had babies and more babies. Ours did not. To this day he tells me on a regular basis how "lonely he is" and asks for a brother. After all these years I think he has come to accept our reality, but when he was little he was demanding answers. I simply explained to him that my body just didn’t work correctly and that HE was OUR miracle baby.

One day, out of no where Awsumb asked me, “Mom is your womb blue?” I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. “No, I don’t think so?” I replied. “Well, maybe that’s the problem,” Awsumb said. And the conversation ended there.

A few weeks later I went to check on Awsumb before I went to bed. I usually find him in asleep, covered in books and stuffies. This night I found him in bed with his children’s encyclopedia. Ya know, with all those pastel colored pictures and simple statements describing our bodies. The book was open to a page featuring a side view of a baby in a mother’s womb. To represent the amniotic fluid the space was colored blue. When I lifted the book I realized the spine of the book had been broken to turn automatically to this page. It was obvious that this was the reason little Dr. Awsumb had diagnosed my infertility to be “Lack of a Blue Womb.”

Awsumb’s diagnoses is wrong.
My woom is empty and very blue.