Tatiana Johnson-Boria (she/her) is the author of Nocturne in Joy (2023), winner of the 2024 Julia Ward Howe Book Prize in poetry. She's an educator, artist, and facilitator who uses her writing practice to dismantle racism, reckon with trauma, and cultivate healing. She's an award-winning writer who has received fellowships from Tin House, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The MacDowell Residency, and others. Tatiana completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College and teaches at Emerson College, GrubStreet, and others. Find her work in or forthcoming at The Academy of American Poets, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review Online, among others. She's represented by Lauren Scovel at Laura Gross Literary.
Notes on Conception
I thought I needed to be something else for you to stay. Less cavernous. Less unwell. Less reeling from my childhood. Less inhibited. I thought it would be impossible for you to exist inside of me. Who am I to ask for another to grow from me? What makes me any sort of fertile root?
Once there was nothing but a desire for someone to love something else, alive. This is another way to say I had a mother once. Or another way to say I have some semblance of a mother.
I believed I was good enough for this. As she believed she was. We believed we were capable and responsible and loving enough for what we drew in our own minds. What makes that possible? What makes it possible that you have a beating heart, that beats faster than the one I carry? How are you so far ahead yet so unborn?
There is a beginning and growing I wish upon you. There is a life that is yours alone.
You cannot exist without the ending before you.
Your grandmother laughs the first time I tell her I am pregnant. The conversation happens over the phone. “Really?! Really?” She’s in disbelief. “Wow, wow, wow.” She says and laughs some more.
The laughter settles in me while my body changes. I have headaches and can’t get out of bed. I feel an exhaustion that I’ve never felt before. I spend way too much time on the bathroom floor, trying to survive the nausea. Is this what it felt like for my mother?
There are no pictures of my mother pregnant. Sometimes it feels as if I am not real. What was spoken before I knew any semblance of her language? Before truly understanding the cadence of my own voice, the restlessness in hers. What must it have felt like to be one with her? Intertwined and without escape.
After I share the news about the pregnancy, she stops calling for weeks. This pause of us connecting is familiar, yet I still ache from it.
I find myself bleeding the morning before teaching a writing class. This is when someone else takes over, a different version of me emerges and teaches the entire three-hour class, knowing something is terribly wrong.
After the class, your father and I drive to the emergency room. He doesn’t want to believe something is wrong, he is upbeat and positive. “I read online that sometimes bleeding happens…what kind of bleeding is it? Is it a lot? Is it spotting?” He’s earnest and innocent. He wants to be right. Something in me knows that he isn’t.
It’s a Saturday afternoon, and the drive to the hospital is smooth and fast. I stare at each red light we encounter, willing it to change. I am powerless and I know it. When we arrive at the emergency room, we wait in a short line, it moves quickly.
“What brings you in?” the front desk nurse asks. “I’m pregnant, but I’ve been bleeding,” I say, afraid of what’s coming out of my mouth.
The nurse checks us in. The emergency room is filled with masked people. A young white family with a toddler, an ice pack pressed against their forehead. A woman trying to negotiate being seen with the nurse at the front desk. Us, holding our breath, waiting to be called. When we’re called, we wait in a small room with another nurse.
“Congratulations!” she says. “Bleeding happens sometimes, they’ll figure out what is going on. You’ll be okay.”
I don’t believe her. Like your father, I know that she too, is wrong. She takes my vitals and tells me and your dad to wait to be called. It’s loud in the waiting room and the time moves slowly. We wait for almost two hours.
“We’re going to do an ultrasound,” the vitals nurse says. “Sometimes we don’t see anything on an ultrasound because you’re still early, but don’t worry.” She’s so certain and I don’t know why. We walk to the ultrasound.
I lay back on the table while the technician slathers jelly on my stomach. “I’m just going to press a bit, just let me know if anything is uncomfortable,” she says. We sit in silence as the technician moves the ultrasound wand across my abdomen. “We may need to do an internal ultrasound as well, but the doctor will let us know,” the technician says.
I sigh. I’ve experienced this before when my primary care physician was worried that I had fibroids. I dread the experience. We wait some more. She returns five minutes later. “Okay, let’s do the internal ultrasound. Is that okay?” she says. I nod yes.
She readies another ultrasound wand with lubricant. “Okay, do I have your permission to insert this wand for the internal ultrasound?” She is so formal in her asking. I nod yes.
I try to think about anything else while she moves the wand around capturing images. It’s over in what feels like a few moments. She leaves the room again. I get dressed. We move to another room. We wait some more. Soon the doctor arrives.
“Okay, we aren’t seeing anything on the ultrasound…but that happens sometimes this early.” My heart sinks.
“Let’s do some bloodwork today to check your HCG levels, if they increase then things are okay. If not, then the pregnancy is no longer viable.”
I know my womb is empty. That the baby that was there, left before I even got to see it for the first time. No one says you’re no longer pregnant. Everyone is so careful with their words, yet I know there’s a truth no one is saying. I get the blood test, and my HCG levels are concerning. “Come back in two days for another test,” the doctor says.
We leave.
In the days following my HCG levels continue to drop while my body continues to bleed. I lay on the bathroom floor wailing until I can’t speak anymore. I don’t think then about having to tell my mother. I don’t want to believe it.
There are mysteries in my body. Everyone pretends it's normal and I can’t. There are pregnancies that didn’t continue. I want to scream that there is a pain inside me even when this same pain exists for others. I want someone to know I bled something away.
There may never be a birth.
And what of me then?
I tell your grandmother the news over the phone, more than a month after the miscarriage. “Oh, no, no suh” she says. Then she’s silent. I am too. “What happened?” she asks. She’s concerned.
“I don’t know… they don’t know,” I tell her. Deep down I know this must somehow be my fault.
“Okay,” she says. More silence. “I’ll call you back later. Bye.”
She hangs up the phone.
When I first became pregnant, I knew that I could not be happy. There was no reason not to, but most of the things that I strive for are difficult. Arduous. Seemingly undeserved.
My mother once said she felt amazing when I was growing inside of her. It’s the only story I have of her pregnancy with me. It feels like a myth.
When I grew you and the others, I felt untrusting of my body.
When I became pregnant again, this time with you, I wanted to be happy. I wanted to exist in a joy of having never lost.
Everyone journals, yet my language for you and the ones before you is different. It rejects prose, it rejects reflection, it rejects the parts of me that try to harness it, that try to write it down.
Carrying you has transformed my tongue. There is nothing and everything to say. It is a secret yet a thing I want to scream. Your presence in my body is a restraining impulse. I push out words and they aren’t the right ones.
In the bath, I forget that my body aches, but I can feel you inside of me swimming. Pushing against the womb, reminding me you’re still there.
I don’t want to admit that I have been depressed today. I don’t want to admit that my happiness is just as intangible as when there’s no baby inside of me.
I can’t eat or drink anything because the nausea is consuming. I spend my mornings lying on the couch until the last possible second before a work meeting. I’m grateful to work in a way that lets me log onto a computer and not leave the house. Only one person at work knows I’m pregnant, and she is understanding.
Sometimes I lay on the couch in the afternoons as well. The fatigue hits my body at inconvenient times. I can fall asleep instantly, the whole thing is compulsory.
One afternoon after sleeping, I notice a white light floating above me. I know it’s them, the ones before you. The glowing light hovers and floats away from me. I must be going crazy. I don’t look away from it. My eyes follow it as it keeps gliding across the room. I’m home alone. Its presence feels familiar. I vow to keep this moment to myself, but I’m telling you because maybe you saw it too. You were with me; you were inside of me. We experienced it together. The light flew to the door and out of the window. I never saw it again.
I should think of them more. It feels easier not to because you are forming. Do they know I’ve stopped thinking of them? Have I stopped? Or have I just been thinking more of other things?
When I find myself trapped in sadness about the things I’ve lost or the things that have left me, it’s strange to know that you might feel it too. You are closer to me than any person might ever be. I am afraid you’re already knowing me before I’ve begun to know you.
We drive to see you, to see if you’re still there. It’s August and we are hoping your heart is beating. I try not to think of how empty my womb might be, yet I believe you are there. I don’t know why.
On the ultrasound, a moving line shows your heartbeat. It’s 143 RPM. We get a picture, and you are a small amorphous shape in a larger black circle. You are alive. We’re in disbelief.
Your dad drives us to work. He leaves the parking lot as the AC finally blows cool air. I look to his face and notice it changes. I tell him to pull over.
We park in an empty spot and he turns off the car before crying. I watch him cover his face. “I can’t believe it,” he says. He can’t believe you’re alive. I’m still processing but watching him weep reminds me of the way your presence can wring us from the inside out, even when you are still forming.
Your father stops and stares ahead, a smile grows on his face. I look out the window. There’s a playground with toddlers running around. I want to believe that you’ll be like one of them someday, running with endless energy. Something makes it hard for me to conjure this image. I smile anyway.
“That’s going to be us,” I say.
Your father looks at me, he holds my hand.
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