The Ghost of Marie Elizabeth
I don’t know if this story is about the ghost of Marie Elizabeth or a ghost of me. My ghost.
I’m a ghost?
No, but I’ve generated a number of “I-want-to-be” ghosts.
I want to be a novelist.
I want to be a journalist specializing in bioethics.
I want to be a backpacker.
I want to be a world traveler, a fluent speaker of multiple languages, a bookstore owner.
The things I never became.
Some ghosts follow me daily; others only show up occasionally. Some boo, “Yooooou could still become me!” Some howl at the moon, waking me in the wee hours.
Is there any sense in which Marie Elizabeth ever existed?
Does Boo Radley exist? You likely know who he is. He may have a greater sense of personhood to you than does the neighbor whose face is familiar, to whom you’ve made a quick ‘hello,’ but you don’t know her name.
Marie Elizabeth is the daughter I never had. No, I didn’t miscarry her nor was she stillborn. She was never conceived.
The middle-names of my two sisters make up her name. Marie is also her paternal great-grandmother’s name.
Is it Marie Elizabeth’s ghost that sometimes haunts the stairs? Or is it the ghost of me as the mother of Marie Elizabeth, she who was never conceived.
“I tried,” I tell her ghost. Lord knows, I tried.
And I don’t mean the fun part.
No, I mean the fertility drugs with their crushing mood swings. The monthly trips to the clinic for painful, intrauterine inseminations. The worry the doctor may have picked the wrong vial of semen from storage, that short dark man’s instead of that from my tall, pale husband.
It’s not that I long to have children who share my genes. I was already blessed with a son who did. I wanted to have two or three children. I didn’t want my son to bear the loneliness of being an only child.
Adoption wasn’t an option. I had good health insurance for fertility and birthing. I didn’t have funds for adoption expenses. Perhaps more significantly, I lacked the moral fortitude for the home inspections, the grilling, the endless forms, and the anxious waiting that accompanies the adoption process.
My heart ached for my dear friend who went through all that. Her first adoption attempt ended in heartbreak, a nursery left empty. Happily, she later adopted two girls. But oh that pain, raising a baby, loving it, but knowing for months that her birth mother could change her mind until the adoption was final.
No, I wasn’t built for that.
In the early days, after we quit fertility therapy, I’d hear Marie Elizabeth insisting that she deserved to exist. “I WANT TO BE!”
I know. I’m kooky.
I could have ended up with three boys.
I imagined I would have been a better mother to Marie Elizabeth than to my son, not because we’d have our gender in common, but because I could use what I’d learned from raising him. All that worry with the first one, when everything is terrifying from how to hold him to how to prevent the blankets smothering him and the cold wind chilling him.
All that knowledge gained but unable to put it to good use.
Marie Elizabeth yowls, “I was waiting in the wings. I would have done great things. I would have loved you.”
She doesn’t come around that often these days. But since I write these words at the age of 64, my childbearing days long behind me, obviously Marie Elizabeth still whisps past a sunlit window from time to time. And I grieve, a loss for what never was.
Marie Elizabeth. M.E. Me?
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PHOTO CREDITS:
Ghost Photos_frompasttofuture on Unsplash
Anatomical drawings and thank you picture from The Library of Congress
