In this life I’ve been privileged to be surrounded by women who are older and wiser than I, and who carry a formidable strength grown out of pain. Furthermore, as I’ve grown, I’ve found myself in conversations where I’m welcomed into their losses that, incidentally, always took place around the dining table. I’ve sipped my tea as I listened to my mother’s birth stories (I was the first of two C-section babies) and her experience of postpartum depression, I’ve washed dishes while my boyfriend’s mother, in her ever joyful, soft tones, shares about her miscarriages, how her son was a miracle child, her youngest, her baby boy. And I’d sat at the table when I heard the news of my aunt’s lost child, how we didn’t tell my grandmother, how they’re now expecting another, how they’ve named it their “Little Joy.” How we each pray, with our fingers crossed, against all possible complications.
Eleanor Kedney’s Twelve Days From Transfer, a courageous collection of poems, honors all these conversations. Kedney expertly navigates the complex nature of motherhood and the infertility journey set against a wider backdrop of society’s expectations for women. It is a book of despair, grief, jealousy, and anger, but also one of joy, gentleness, empathy, and the long, winding road to healing.
My heart broke upon reading the first several poems, embroiled in deep pain, caught in the middle of endless trips to the infertility clinics and failed IVF procedures:
At twelve days, the body flushes
hope. The nurse said,
You don’t have to worry about the embryos.
I think of the flash river near my house,
a leaf sprout carried downstream.
Hours later it’s sand.
The experience is lonely, and full of shame at each failure, with an added layer of questioning the validity of that pain. Kedney offers various anecdotes of comparing those who have lost children with those whose children never existed. What “counts” as being a mother? What “counts” as loss? “An article proclaims heaven / is populated by the souls of embryos, / conceived, unknown, lost / in menstrual flow, not mourned,” she writes. “But ours were six gray moons on a screen.”
As the yearning for a biological child sets the backdrop of the work, the poems eddy up and down in waves of romanticizing children and family on one hand, and being confronted by the painful realities others experience, of miscarriages, estrangement and so on. At times, a nagging whisper seems to prod the back of these poems, as if to justify that it’s better not to have children, as if trying to convince someone, or perhaps, oneself. Yet, despite the genuine empathy for these other women’s anecdotes, there is a sense of still being haunted by the loss of what never was:
My husband is my family.
Kids are too much of a struggle.
Kids cost too much.
We don’t feel anything is missing from our lives.
I don’t want my body to change.
I prefer child-free to childless,
have it printed on my coffee mug...
...In the dream, a different bedtime story. The moon’s pull.
An old woman’s shrill call,
You’re not prayerful enough.//
Slogged awake by the dog’s cold nose,
my unarmed feet dangle off the bed.
Yet, inevitably, the light floods in. The author bounces back and forth between her life at home and the life of her adoptive children in India; parent-child bonds forged by choice, rather than blood. Though the ache of remaining childless persists, the presence of a new daughter and son is a testament to finding an indescribable joy that may not have been possible without earlier loss. I could not help but be moved at the happiness Kedney describes when her son lifts up her first grandchild. “I’ve never believed in perfection, but I saw him perfectly: I wound his life forward—his good deeds remaking the world. I couldn’t stop saying, He’s perfect.”
Another thing I enjoyed was how rich this book was in nature and biology; not simply the daunting medical terms that illustrate the endless slew of doctors, treatments, and clinics, but an extended metaphor of nature as the body, the family, lineage—a literal family tree. It’s a refreshing change from the overused trope in literature of ‘woman-as-chalice,’ as ‘vessel.’ As something empty that needs to be filled. The trajectory of Twelve Days follows that of a garden, from deadness to growth. The book’s opening poems are desolate; “The palm tree stems are broken, / the leaves brown, / and the silence, oh, the silence.” In “The Womb is Shaped Like An Inverted Pear,” even the colors are dull and bleak:
Me looking for myself.
Wave rising on an ultrasound,
black, gray, white
dull view dense flesh
as pear:
what I never thought of
let me see.
As the poems move forward, we see hope in the coming spring, in green things that start to sprout. We see healing. The shame that envelopes, as dirt, can gradually be turned into peace, turning a rich soil that prepares us for the future. Having started with pears, it was only fitting that the book ended with pears, and this time there is color, light, and warmth: “We took the dead and damaged limbs, / knowing the unsung trees might not fruit that year, / but with our work they might the next.”
An unsung strength lies in those words... Perhaps what is most important is how this book teaches us that the process to arrive there, in contrast to the opening, is not a steady incline. There remain struggles with identity, with that original question of what “counts” as being a mother... Worries of not measuring up, not qualifying. The poems never stop grappling with this but learn to be kind to themselves. The thing I admire most about Kedney is being brave enough not to show her strength, but her failings, her bitterness, her anger, her jealousy. This isn’t a journey one just conquers and ‘gets over.’ Feelings resurface, pain ebbs and flows. If anything, Twelve Days comforts us with this: that healing isn’t linear. And that’s quite alright.
It is impossible to go through all the layers Kedney peels back about motherhood and womanhood in all their capacities; I will leave that for you to wade through and discover on your own, hopefully with the same awe as I did. Her work reaches its arms out to fellow women, giving them permission to bask in each of their grief. We’re allowed to scream, cry, wail, and be angry. We’re allowed to throw fits and feel life is not fair. This isn’t something we must willingly swallow, quietly accept. This is something we’re allowed to go down fighting for and with.
Though I am still far from marriage and children, I found this book an unshrinking critique on the ways we women are viewed in society; the things we are told we need to be, need to do, need to feel... “Women who didn’t know we were trying / told me my clock was ticking, / I was selfish, I’d be sorry, / you’ll want them later, / motherhood is the best joy in life.” Not only is the social commentary needed more than ever, the book offers a departure from all these prescriptive expectations. Not an infertile body, not a medical statistic, not childless, but human. What starts off as a lonely journey ends with a community, brought closer together by loss, using their hands to work a garden together, creating things that warm the heart, that nurture the body. “Inside, / there was lentil soup and warm bread, a long table.” We need each other as women, to continue this long tradition of sharing grief at the table. In a world where we must fight on to not be seen just for our bodies, Kedney’s work is both a war cry and a song of comfort—an incredible gift.