Those who can't…

Last Monday I put on make-up, wore a new dress, put my daughter’s charm necklace around my neck, and returned to being Mrs. Howard full-time. By Tuesday I was doing some of my best crowd-work with my rowdy seventh grade boys, easily picking back up on the student relationships we started building last year when they were in sixth grade. I even stayed late and worked on EL paperwork. Wednesday was eventful from the moment I walked through the door and a co-worker told me the local high-school had been put on lockdown due to a weapon on campus (everything ended up being ok). And Thursday passed relatively well despite having a day of the tummy rumbles (I can’t figure out a graceful way to say “IBS flare”).

By Friday afternoon I was still keeping a smile for my students and enthusiastically reading my copy of “Silenzio, Bruno!: When in Doubt, Shout It Out!” that is typically a crowd favorite when I do my BOY lesson on growth mindset. Still, I found myself backing out of the carpool area as my co-workers lingered to laugh and talk, trying to be unseen as I headed to my car because I felt it- that pull that I’m not fine and that I had reached my limit of human interaction. I made it out of the school parking lot before crying.

Because underneath everything I am still a childless mother grieving a baby I can’t have, on the ninth day of a two-months’ late period because my body is still a mess, and I wore a skirt to work on a valuable jeans day because I can barely fit into my pair of comfy jeans that now show all the evidence of the post-pregnancy body that I hate and have little energy to restore. One of my new students asked, “Mrs. Howard, why does your skirt not match your Selma t-shirt?” Kid, if you only knew.

I don’t know how to do this. This thing of returning to my life from before. Before I was pregnant, before I ever heard of Trisomy-18, before being forced to say goodbye to my daughter, before I was put through months of anxiety and stress of trying to do what was best for everybody involved when there was no way to do so. All the time I was fighting with decisions so I could live with myself when I didn’t feel like living at all if I couldn’t keep my baby. A baby that I had fallen in love with on an ultrasound screen as she performed flips, minutes before the doctor came back to us with the phrase, “cystic hygroma with septations”.

It took all of me to keep afloat in an ocean that had no mercy for my child and it rebaptized me into someone that I never thought I would be. This is the person that returned to work for the new school year. She has grief brain that gets confused too easily and can go blank if pressed for a simple answer. She is indecisive because of a decision that broke her and then separated her from who she was. She gets sucked back into a memory of the doctor’s consultation room where she was surrounded by wet tissues as she tries not to sob, all because a PD instructor somehow said the same thing her doctor did at that awful appointment where she found out just how badly Trisomy 18 had ravaged her child’s body. She dreads family nights at school because there are babies there. She goes home and depending on the day, may be found back in her bed, paralyzed with grief, unable to move until her husband finds her and helps her back to the land of the living.

That’s who I am now- a mix of my trauma and grief with someone I once was. The me that went into last school year had never burst the capillaries in her forehead from crying too hard and too often. She didn’t have to come up with an age-appropriate strategy to explain to her students that she came back to them as a mother of barely a whisper of ashes in a bag, because students always ask if she has children. She had never felt like a grenade of sadness and pain lobbed into the middle of her entire family. She never found herself haunting her own home because she couldn’t go to sleep until she was bone tired and her brain felt empty enough not to think. She would never have guessed that while her co-workers were enjoying their teacher appreciation week party, she would be balled up on the couch in some of the worst pain of her life because nothing about her pregnancy, including the end of it, could go according to normal.

The triggers are everywhere, and many are unexpected. Yesterday, I grabbed my testing bin only to find the testing agenda someone left in there is from the Reading EOG on May 9, 2025. The same date on the locket I wear around my neck. The day my pregnancy ended. The day I walked out of the hospital with a pair of devastatingly small footprints wearing a complimentary hospital gown and paperscrubs because I went into labor on the way to my evacuation procedure and my water broke. It soaked my clothes as they wheeled me out of the admittance office to rush me back to pre-op. Why did that leftover agenda have to be in MY testing bin? Its schedule mocking me with its mundane day of testing and normalcy that I should have experienced and didn’t. It’s nobody’s fault that it’s in there, just like the Trisomy 18 was nobody’s fault. It’s presence was an anomaly, just like my daughter’s illness. There is so much bitter anger in me at times and no one to blame and no one to take it out on. How do you pursue restitution with a genetic disorder?

I get told I’m brave and strong, but nothing about this feels like an achievement. It feels like being stuck in the cabin of a plane going down and you have no choice but to crash with it and accept your fate. My fate was to survive, so now I live. For now I go back to work out of obligation and work ethic, because what I really want to do is stay home with what little I have of my baby. I still strive to excel at my work, but it’s almost like muscle memory of what I’m supposed to do. My parents taught me that when you go to work that you go above and beyond, so that’s what I do.

I don’t want my grief to become selfish when I could be helping people, so I work around the obstacles, the memories, and the school year I wanted but am never going to get. I was supposed to open my classroom for the year, then peace out for her due date with a “So long suckers!!!” as I took my maternity leave only to return in time for winter break for two more weeks home with her. What was supposed to be her first Halloween, her first Thanksgiving, her first Christmas are now looming reminders that I’ll spend them with numerous “what could have beens?” to ponder. I have to fight the bitterness that her due date is later this month, but now I’m worrying about deadlines for paperwork and lesson plans and everything else the beginning of the school year requires instead.

A couple of weeks ago we received the beginning of year pep talk. And then I went straight to my classroom, turned the light off, locked the door, and sat on the floor where I couldn’t be seen and cried. While I believed our school would have the best year yet and we could reach the goals we have been striving for for so long, I knew this could never be my best school year ever. I held my head in my hands and asked myself how I was going to do this and then repeated over and over that I just wanted my baby.

So what now? How do I be Mrs. Howard (or just Howard if you are a colleague) again? I feel so far away from her. I allowed myself to be just Katie for months because that’s all I had left in me to be. In some ways I don’t want to be Mrs. Howard at all. Am I Howard 2.0? Part emotional train wreck, part reluctant perseverance? How is it that I can be so worried about elfing things up at work, while at times feeling like saying, “elf it all!”, because something way worse has already happened to me than getting a teacher version of my name written on the board? For the moment, I’m allowing myself time to figure it out. I’m letting routine and a sense of responsibility carry me along until some spark in me reignites. As far as having the best school year ever, it will never be my best, but I can make it the best for others. I can also make the best of what I have in front of me, and for now, that is the best I can do.